The Morning Brew

Software

• xVal – a validation framework for ASP.NET MVC – Steve Sanderson announces xVal, a validation framework for ASP.NET MVC which aims to bring together serverside and client side validation, follow ASP.NET MVC conventions and provide choice on the implementation of the client side validation.
• Ora, The Region Alternative – Greg Duncan highlights a Visual studio 2008 add-in which provides a tree view of the current class divided into the various regions of code that many of us put in manually using #region statements.

Information

• There is never a collection of Value Objects – Matt Hinze talks about how there can never really be a collection of value objects in the strict DDD sense, as you would be unable to manage the collection due to the lack of identity of each value type.
• Fluent NHibernate: Auto Mapping Introduction – James Gregory has a great series of posts on using Fluent NHibernate and the conventions that it uses to enable auto mapping. This first part is an introduction, and James follows up with part 2 on Auto Mapping Conventions, part 3 on Auto Mapping Type Conventions and finally part 4 on Auto Mapping Entity Conventions
• The Problems with NHibernate – An interesting discussion of the percieved problems with NHibernate from the beginner / intermediate developers point of view – I have to say I thoroughly agree about the documentation, especially as there seems to be a lack of documentation for NHibernate 2.0 anywhere.
• A simple SGML Parser and Visitor pattern loveliness – Sacha Barber shows how reflection can make the Visitor Pattern a little simpler, and illustrates using an example of an simple SGML parser in this Code Project article.
• C# Trivia – What? No Overflow? – Justin Etheredge looks at the place where arithmetic overflow should occur, and how the default behaviour is not quick what you may expect.
• Refactoring a Switch statement – Chris Brandsma looks at refactoring switch statements, giving some best practice rules for the use of switch, and illustrates a nice refactoring from a switch to a dictionary.
• Asynchronous Fire and Forget With Lambdas – Phil Haack explores how Fire and Forget methods got easier with later versions of the .NET Framework. I also like the AOP suggestion of how to achieve Fire and Forget in the first comments to this post.
• Horrible grotty hack: returning an anonymous type instance – Jon Skeet shows an interesting technique which allows an anonymous type to be returned from a method and then worked with, but suggests that you wouldn’t want to do this in your production code
• Introduction to the Stubs Framework – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux gives a quick introduction to the Stubs Framework which is available as a part of PEX.
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 6 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Functional Programming and F# and Haskell with a look at monadic abstractions which allow us to refactor code with side-effects into pure functions.
• Lessons learned from the NUnit code base – Patrick Smacchia explores the NUnit code base with NDepend, showing how the code is structured and how its evolving

Community

• F# Programming Contest, by Kean at AutoDesk – Don Syme highlights a contest being run by AutoDesk (of AutoCad fame) where you can win a copy of Don’s excelent book ‘Expert F#’ by submitting some F# which performs some task in one of AutoDesk’s products.

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