The Morning Brew

Software

• Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 4, a grab bag of goodies. – Following the more brief announcements about its release, Glenn Block gives a more detailed run down of what is new and improved, along with the breaking changes in the latest preview release of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

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• Many-to-One mapping throwing a ObjectNotFoundException, and how to resolve it – Derik Whittaker highlights a very useful feature in NHibernate (introduced in v1.2 IIRC) which helps you deal with missing entities in Many to One relationships – this is especially useful if you have to interact with a legacy database which has less than ideal referential integrity.
• Back To Basics: Mark and Sweep Garbage Collection – Abhinaba Basu continues his series on Garbage Collection with a look at the Mark and Sweep technique for identifying and removing items that are no longer required
• jQuery 1.3 Cheat Sheet – Kris Thompson shares a nice JQuery 1.3 cheat sheet containing references for all functions and properties of the Core JQuery library
• Students only – Get your hosted Windows Server for nearly NOTHING!! – FrankFi highlights an excellent offer which is a part of the DreamSpark programme for students (which entitles you to a huge amount of free software) allowing you to get a dedicated server from 1&1 at a significantly reduced rate.
• Understanding the Binder – Part 1 – Aarthi Ramamurthy of the CLR team at Microsoft talks a little about the CLR Binder which is used to identify and load assemblies when supplied with their name
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 7 – Matthew Podwysocki move back to looking at refactoring in his latest post in his series on Unit Testing in Functional Programming Languages
• VSTricks – Rory Becker highlights Scott Cate’s Blog where he has continued on from where Sara Ford left off with her visual Studio Tips series when it ended in December. A little over a year ago I was in a similar position to Scott, following on from a great series of posts by a well known name in the industry (In my case following on from the Daily Grind by Mike Gunderloy) Go Give him some support.
• True Swiss don’t like mocks! – Gabriel Schenker explores the use of Mocks and Stubs in Test Driven Development looking at the differences between the two and showing them in use.
• TDD: Test DRYness – Mark Needham talks about the Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle in unit tests, and highlights a few techniques you can use to avoid repetition.
• C# Single Instance App With Ability To Restore From System Tray (Using Mutex) – ‘devzoo’ shows two useful techniques, on using Mutex to prevent having two copies of an application open, and the other, minimising an application to the System Tray area in this Code Project article
• Cool Delegates – Petar Vucetin explores in some detail the Action, and Func delegates with code examples of them in use.
• F# and Haskell, Estranged Cousins – Rich Minerich explores the commonality between F# and Haskell, taking a trip back through their somewhat shared history to see where the similarities come from
• For vs Foreach on arrays and lists – Jon Skeet shares his benchmarks for the different types of looping around arrays, along with the code for the tests and his benchmarking framework.
• JSLint.VS – JavaScript Verifier for Visual Studio – Predrag Tomasevic shares an useful add-in for Visual studio that adds JS Lint Validation for your Javascript files inside the IDE.
• 50% off All Manning Books for DZone Members – DZone have teamed up with Manning Publications to offer 50% off any purchase from the Manning books site. You will have to be quick though, the offer runs out on 3rd February

Community

• European Virtual ALT.NET Meeting on 02/02/2009 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the first European Virtual Alt.Net Meeting, to be held on 2nd February 2009, starting 7pm GMT. Greg Young will be talking about Domain Driven Design for the event. I’ve been wanting to check these events for a while (having listened to the recordings of the US ones) and I’m really glad that the event has been scheduled at a time that is more suitable for the UK.

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Slightly later than planned, here’s today’s edition….

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• Creating a common generic and extensible NHiberate Repository – Chris Marisic shares his implementation of a Generic repository for use with NHibernate
• Hashing Algorithm Roundup – Beau Monday follows on from yesterdays encryption round up with a similar look at hashing algorithms.
• .NET Circuit Breakers – Tobin Harris looks at the concept of a Circuit Breaker in programming, and highlights the Lokad Shared Libraries which contain nice implementations of the Circuit breaker along with code for handling exceptions, retries, etc in an elegant way.
• ASP.NET 4.0: ViewStateMode…giving you more control over ViewState! – Scott Galloway, in continuation of his series of posts on ASP.NET 4.0 , explores some of the viewstate changes coming in ASP.NET 4.0
• Controlling Time – Patrick Kua looks at how you can provide time based tests with times you want by insulating your dependency on the actual time
• Parameter Order Should Be Consistent – Brendan Enrick writes about an annoyance I also discovered the other day about a lack on consistency in parameter order between some common (and related) exception constructors.
• Long division – Eric Lippert explores why when dividing an int by a long returns a long.
• Tales from High Memory Scenarios: Part 2 – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series on High memory use, looking further into the problems encountered, and talks about the use of the debugger to inspect what was going on.
• Much Ado About Monads – Maybe Edition – Matthew Podwysocki attempts to explain what Monads are and why we should care about them, exploring the origins in Haskell, and looking at implementations in F#
• Anonymous Methods, Lambdas, Confusion – Mike Taulty looks at the evolution of the language support for anonymous methods and lambda expressions, working from first principles through to the format we have available now.
• ConfigSectionHandler for Hierarchical configs – Rohit Gupta gives a (mostly code) run through of how you can easily build custom configuration section handlers to read nested config from the application configuration file.
• Annotating Code with .NET Reflector and Review Add-In – Ben Hall looks at using Reflector with a Reviewing add-in for performing code and API reviews
• ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available – The source code for the RC1 release of ASP.NET MVC is now available on the ASP.NET Codeplex site.
• User Experience Changes since Beta 2 – The Internet Explorer team talk about some of the User Interface refinements based on user feedback that went into the latest release of Internet Explorer 8 (RC1)
• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC1 and T4 Templates – Add Controller. – David Hayden looks into the new ASp.NET MVC IDE integration with T4 templating, providing nice templates for thinsg like controllers, etc
• SQL Server 2008 System Views poster is now available for download! – Aaron Bertrand highlights the availability of the SQL 2008 edition of the System Views poster which details the data contained and the relationships between the system views in the 2008 release of SQL Server

Community

• UK SQL Server User Group Event – Manchester – 5th Feb 2009 – The opening meeting of a new Manchester based SQL Server User group, with two talks, Tony Rogerson on Bits and Bobs to help the developer and DBA with TSQL and Martin Bell on Table Valued Parameters

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Problems with Ma.gnolia’s web service have delayed this mornings edition of the Morning Brew – as soon as I can build today’s edition I will post it up

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #275 – Delayed