The Morning Brew

I don’t know – you wait ages for a release candidate and then three come along in a week(IE, Hyper V Server, ASP.NET MVC)! My reading list was absolutely huge this morning with all the talk about these, so today’s edition is a little larger than usual, and has a special section dedicated to ASP.NET MVC

Software

• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available – ScottGu gives his usual screen shot rich and detailed release announcement for the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate release, with a look at the improved tooling support, along with details of enhancements to the view, form post support, Unit Testing, Cross Site Request Forgery Protection, File Handling, and Ajax support – See further down today’s edition for a special ASP.NET MVC section.
• MEF Preview #4 Released – Krzysztof Cwalina announces the release of Preview 4 of the Managed Extensibility Framework. It looks like this project is coming to an end as they are now finalising the API
• NCover 3 RC1 is now available – The NCover team have also reached release candidate status on their new Version 3 project, offering a few new features and a number of bugfixes over the previous beta release.

Information

• Fluent NHibernate: Auto mapping and base-classes – James Gregory is continuing his series on Fluent NHibernate at quite a pace. This post talks about auto mapping and how this works with base classes, Introduction to static reflection talks about some of the reflection magic that makes Fluent NHibernate work, and I think you mean a many-to-one sir which explores a common ORM problem of people using the wrong type of mapping for object relations.
• Guidelines for Method Overloading – Dave Donaldson shares some best practices for overloading methods, looking at how you should structure your overloads, and how they should work
• Encryption Algorithm Roundup – Beau Monday gives a nice roundup of the common encryption algorithms, details of their type, strength and if they have been defeated along with a little bit about the history of each.
• Validation Application Block – Unit Test Validation Logic – Steve Michelotti talks about testing the rules used by the Validation Application block, and how when testing you should have separate tests for each thing you are testing, and by that he means each rule you are testing.
• Recursion made simple – ‘himanshuleo’ explores recursion in C#, looking at the different ways of achieving it providing code snippets along the way in this Code Project article
• What’s Wrong With This Code? (#21) – K. Scott Allen continues his ‘What’s wrong with this code?’ series with two closure related questions, one in C# the other in Javascript / jQuery
• Tales from High Memory Scenarios: Part 1 – Sasha Goldshtein talks about cache memory usage, garbage collection and how having lots of memory can mean that these things don’t occur when you might want them to.
• ASP.NET MVC options for consolidating HTML – Jimmy Bogard looks at the options for handling common HTML that needs to be included in a lot of places, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of Master Pages, Partials, Partial Requests / SubControllers, and extending HTMLHelper to solve this problem.

ASP.NET MVC RC1

• ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate Now Available – (Duplicated from Software Section above) – ScottGu gives his usual screen shot rich and detailed release announcement for the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate release, with a look at the improved tooling support, along with details of enhancements to the view, form post support, Unit Testing, Cross Site Request Forgery Protection, File Handling, and Ajax support
• ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate – Phil Haack gives his announcement of the ASP.NET MVC release candidate, including a short review of some of the key features of the release.
• Controls Collection Cannot Be Modified Issue with ASP.NET MVC RC1 – Phil Haack highlights a known issue with the newly released ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate, and also provides a workaround for this problem.
• ASP.net MVC RC1 – ViewData.Model becomes Model – Ben Hall has a short series of posts on the new ASP.NET MVC beta release, looking at the new Model property of the page, how you can remove the code behind files from your ASPX pages and upgrading from a project from the Beta to the RC1
• Free screencast on ASP.NET MVC – Fritz Onion shares a screencast on introducing ASP.NET MVC – given the ASP.NET MVC RC 1 release yesterday its unfortunate that Fritz doesn’t say which version the screen cast is for

Community

• DDD South West – Saturday 23rd May, 2009 – Steve Sanderson highlights DDD South West, a DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper UK community event to be held in Taunton in South west England. Session submissions are now open for this event, so if you are interested in speaking at an event get submitting your session abstracts

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Software

• General availability for the Windows 7 Beta to end – The Windows 7 beta download period has been extended to February 10th, so if you haven’t already grabbed the beta release you still have a couple of weeks.
• Pragmatic Internet Explorer 8 (RC1) Testing – The rumours were true, and Internet Explorer 8 RC1 has now been released to the wild. Available in over 25 languages this release is aimed at getting final wide spread testing of what may actually become the final release. As usual, Virtual Machines are available for testing purposes, or you can actually install it on your own machine.
• Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta Released – The Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 Beta has been released on the Download Center, bringing with it a number of new features such as Fail Over Clustering, live migrations and support for larger hardware.
• Fast Reflection Library – Jeffrey Zhao shares a reflection helper library aiming to help improve performance of reflection operations used by things like Object Relation Mappers

Information

• Video: ASP.NET MVC – Show me the code! – Steve Sanderson shares the video footage from his Developer Developer Developer 7 talk on ASP.NET MVC – I attended this session and throughly enjoyed it, and these videos give a great idea of how this type of event actually is to attend.
• Framework Design Guidelines: Avoiding custom delegates – Brad Abrams continues his series sharing some of the wisdom in the Framework Design Guidelines book – this post discusses why you should use Func<> and Action<> delegates where ever possible over defining your own.
• Javascript Array Fun – Rick Strahl looks back at a bug in some JavaScript and reminds us that Arrays in JavaScript can be a little different to how you might be expecting.
• Ignoring Testing can be Explained, but Never Excused – Chris Missal looks at a number of reasons often given as to why ‘automated testing is mandatory’ is not a common policy in our industry. Interesting reading, and a number of good comments on this post.
• Captcha cracking in JavaScript with Canvas and neural nets – Ajaxian highlights some of the incredible stuff that people are achieving with Javascript – defeating Captcha’s using Javascript, the HTML 5 canvas and some OCR techniques.
• When is a postback not a postback? – Just because it looks like a post back and tastes like a post back doesn’t mean it actually is a post back, Barry Dorrans explains why
• How do you know your tests are good? – Laila Bougria looks at how Test Driven Development can give you better certainty that your tests are good.
• CodePlex 2008 – A Year in Review – Sara Ford looks back at how 2008 treated the CodePlex site, looking at visitor number, top projects, and features introduced
• Back To Basics: Reference Counting Garbage Collection – Abhinaba Basu continues his series on Garbage Collection with a look at reference counting techniques for keeping track of objects in scope.
• Enterprise Library 5.0 kick-off! Spend your $100 wisely! – The Enterprise Library Team are getting ready to start working on Version 5, and are looking to the community to get suggestions for what to include using the virtual $100 method to allow you to show preference for features.

Community

• SQLBits Session voting – Simon Sabin announces that the session voting for the SQLBits 4 conference to be held in Manchester, UK on 28th March 2009 is now open. This is where you as an attendee get to shape the conference you will be going to. Simon also notes that 4 of these sessions will be streamed live – excellent news for those who might not be able to make it in person.

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Software

• Ora – Home – Ora is a Visual Studio 2008 add-in which gives a nice overview of the code document currently loaded, grouping together properties, methods, etc with custom ordering and making navigation much easier

Information

• MVC Storefront Part 26: Finis – Rob Conery wraps up his MVC Storefront screen cast series after 26 excellent episodes. In this edition Rob gathers together some loose ends, and talks about the future of the storefront codebase.
• DDD & Many to Many Object Relational Mapping – Udi Dahan takes a look at the complexities of Many To Many Mappings using ORM technology from an architectural / DDD standpoint.
• Convention over Configuration in MSDN Magazine – Jeremy D. Miller highlights his latest MSDN Magazine article on convention over configuration, and also highlights David Laribee’s piece on ‘An Introduction to Domain Driven Design’
• New Poll: What’s Keeping You From Using NHibernate? – Davy Brion is interested in finding out why people aren’t using NHibernate, so if you are one of these people, go add a comment to his post letting him know why.
• Total View Validation – Sacha Barber explores cross business object validation for WPF applications in this Code Project article.
• Using Reflection to load unreferenced assemblies at runtime in C# – Jacob Jordan gives a nice summary of using Reflection to dynamically load and inspect assemblies with a view to providing a plug-in / Add-on architecture
• Designing LINQ operators – Jon Skeet explores some of the features you should consider when designing your LINQ operators.
• jQuery Playground from Google – A neat online tool from Google which allows you to experiment with a number of common libraries (such as JQuery, MooTools, Dojo, etc) along with a range of Google API’s right in your browser
• PLINQ – Daniel Moth talks about PLINQ, showing how easy it is to use, and explaining a little about how it actually works
• My thoughts about IRepository<T> – Laila Bougria talks about Generic repositories, what the DDD view is according to the Evans book, and what the DRY (Don’t repeat your self) and SRP (Single responsibility principle) would suggest you should do.
• Quick update – Steve Sanderson give an update on xVal, his validation framework, including news of an xVals provider from the Validation Aspects project, along with some roadmap of where the project is going.
• Null Considered…Harmful? Awful? Annoying? – Jason Bock explores the idea that Nulls might be a bad thing due to their annoyance level and the amount of code you have to write to defend against them. I have to agree a little with this – I wish there was some way of saying ‘This return will *NEVER* be null’ so you can make the IDE tell you you don’t need null checking on that object.
• NHibernate and Future Queries and Part 2 – Davy Brion looks at the new Future Query functionality that will be available in NHibernate 2.1

Community

• Free Webinar – Increase Productivity with .NET and LINQ – Dan Wahlin is giving a free web cast on 5th February 1pm EST covering the productivity improvements that LINQ technologies can bring, with a look at LINQ to Objects, LINQ to SQL, LINQ to XML and LINQ to Entities.
• DDD and deployment challenges: this Tuesday – Gojko Adzic is delivering a session on DDD with distributed systems at Skills Matter (London) tomorrow (Tuesday). The session is free, however you do have to pre-register in order to get in.
• Party with Palermo – March 1, 2009 – RSVP Now – Jeffrey Palermo announces his Party With Palermo event for the Alt.Net / MVP Summit 2009. For the price of one business card you get free food, drink and swag, along with the opportunity to network with like minded folks.

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