The Morning Brew

Software

• S#arp Architecture Beta 1.0 now available! – Billy McCafferty announces the bet release of this S#arp Architecture project, based on and integrating Castle Windsor, NHibernate, JSON,NET, Fluent NHibernate, NHibernate Validator, and many others into a full application framework, along with a load of documentation.

Information

• ASP Dynamic Data Preview – More ways to exploit ADO.NET Data Services for fun and profit – Scott Hanselman takes a look into some of the new features of the ASP.NET Dynamic Data 4.0 Preview 2 release showing how the framework gives your lots of functionality out of the box
• EnumHelper – Getting a Friendly Description from an Enum – Grant Barrington looks at how you can give your Enum values a textual description with an attribute and helper method.
• IRepository<T>: one size does not fit all – Richard Dingwall looks into repositories, looking at four different styles of repository implementation.
• Writing Unit Tests That People Can Read – Eric Lee talks about unit testing, and examines a number of the current trends in the field – AAA (Arrainge Act Assert) mocks, BDD (Behaviour Driven Design) and Specifications
• Back to basics: Why use garbage collection – Abhinaba Basu looks at why we have Garbage collection, and what can go wrong when you don’t have managed GC.
• Castle ActiveRecord and Linq – Ryan Schreiber shares the binary fruits of his labours building Castle Active Record with the latest NHibernate and NHibernate.Linq to add Linq support to Active Record.
• F# vs C# vs Java: Functional Collection Parameters – Mark Needham explores three of the common functional programming collection operations in three languages, Map, Reduce and Filter, comparing the implementation in F# with taht in C# and Java
• Named Format Strings – ‘roboto’ provides his take on the Named Format String topic started (most recently) by Phil Haack. Roboto provides his own implementation, which from his benchmarks seems to be the fastest.
• Exception Concepts for Business Applications. – Adriaan Davel talks about the use and handling of exceptions in Business Applications in this CodeProject article. Adriaan looks at what you can do with exceptions (handling and logging) and also breaks the types of exceptions your business tier may throw down into common types of exception
• UI Patterns for WPF – Christopher Bennage begins a series looking at UI patterns, starting out with some background on why we want patterns, and taking a quick look at Model-View-Presenter and autonomous view.

Community

• Virtual TechDays – Microsoft are running three days of Virtual Technology events in mid February, with two tracks on the first day (one developer one IT Pro) and 5 on teh second and third (3 Dev, 2 IT) with a wide range of topics this looks like it will be well worth checking out. The event runs 10am – 5pm (GMT+5:30).

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Today’s edition is a bumper one with the .NET community having had a busy blogging and software publishing weekend.

Software

• NHibernate.Linq Alpha Released – nhusers – NHibernate.Linq is a Linq implementation for NHibernate 2.0.1 GA users. This initial release is using the NHibernate Criteria API under the covers, however the plan is to move away from this in the future. The alpha version query support is limited and is missing group joins and subqueries in select clauses.
• ASP.NET Session Monitor 1.0 Released to MSDN Code Gallery – Colby Africa announces the release of a tool to help inspect and monitor the contents of SQL Server backed ASP.NET Session information, which grew out of some real debugging requirements from the past.
• Prism V2 – Drop 9 Now Available – The 9th development release of Prism means that they are getting very close to their mid-February final release. This release focuses on the documentation and also a re-skinning of the sample application
• PostSharp – Announcing PostSharp 1.0 SP1 – The PostSharp team announce the release of Service Pack 1 for PostSharp 1.0, fixing a number of issues in the 1.0 release and adding some significant performance improvements.
• NUnit 2.5 Beta 2 – NUnit 2.5 moves on to its second beta release which now supports Theories, updates to the assertation helper, support for difference CLR versions and some changes the the GUI runner.

Information

• DDD: The Generic Repository – Greg Young looks at the generic repository and questions its direct use, suggesting an alternative use where the generic repository is housed inside a custom repository to avoid having generic functionality exposed which could allow client code to do anything they wanted. Mike Hadlow has also been continuing his exploration of repositories with a look at whatEric Evans has to say about the repository
• Why Oslo is Important – Dan Vanderboom explores Oslo examining why people are confused about Oslo and looking at the what and why of the various components that make up Oslo.
• Limiting Code Comments Increases Maintainability – Jeffrey Palermo discusses the use of comments in code, and suggests that by limiting the need for comments (i.e. making your code more understandable and readable) your code will be more maintainable (as the comments that are there won’t go out of date and the code speaks for itself).
• The danger of commenting out code – Mark Needham is also talking about comments, but this post is about the commenting out of code, and how it is a bad practice when you have any level of version control involved.
• Abstracting Request State – Davy Brion talks about the danger of using threadstatic storage for request scoped objects in ASP.NET and looks at providing an alternative abstraction to support storage of request scoped objects for ASP.NET and WCF code.
• Language Envy – String Interpolation – Sergio Pereira is envious of the support for combining string literals and variables in other languages, and suggests some possible equivalent C# syntax for the future. Some suggestions ensue in the comments to the post.
• How big is a string in .NET? – Jason Crease examines the size of the string data type and also explores the behaviour of strings and the stringbuilder class.
• Building Scalable Databases: Pros and Cons of Various Database Sharding Schemes – Dare Obasanjo looks at sharding techniques in the database and how it can be achieved and what the effect on your data access code is.
• Mono vs. .NET Framework: Public API Compatibility – Patrick Smacchia uses NDepend to analyse the level of compatibility between Mono 2.0 and .NET 3.5 SP1, detailing the areas of the framework that are not well supported.
• How to unit test this code? – Scott Dorman asks how he can unit test code that tests Operating System and Hardware types. Some interesting comments associated with this post
• An Illustrated Guide to Git on Windows – The Git version control system has become increasingly popular in recent months, and this nice step by step guide to getting it working on Windows with the GUI is a really nice introduction to the Git system.
• Gotchas: Migration from IIS6 + SQL 2005 (32-bit) to IIS7 + SQL 2008 (64-bit) – J Kealey shares some of the problems and solutions involved in migration from 32bit IIS6 to 64bit IIS 7, and moving from MS SQL 2005 32bit to MS SQL 2008 64bit
• Microsoft .NET Services Whitepapers by Pluralsight – Aaron Skonnard announces 4 white papers from Pluralsight on the .NET Services which are a part of the Azure Services Platform, covering introductory topics for developers,access control, the service bus and the workflow service.

Community

• The recordings of the Virtual ALT.NET Meetings are online – Jeremy D. Miller highlights the availability of recordings of the Virtual ALT.NET meetings and the newly formed Google Group for the events. The recordings are fantastic news for me – being in the UK the time of the events is completely unsuitable (3am!) for me to be able to attend.
• MSDN Poll: What type of software development work are you currently doing? – Eric Nelson is running a poll for the UK MSDN Flash Newsletter on the type of software development you are currently doing.

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I spent quite a lot of time yesterday investigating some interesting deadlocking issues in a SQL Server 2000 database – If I get the chance I may write up my findings into a blog post over the weekend.

Software

• Mono 2.2 has been released – I’m slightly late picking up on this one, but Mono 2.2 has now been released bringing with it a number of great enhancements along with a collection of bugfixes
• C# Code Header Designer 1.0 Released to MSDN Code Gallery – Colby Africa shares a tool for adding standard headers to all source files based upon a template.

Information

• Real World Apps in Days not Weeks – Scott Hanselman talks about how tools like ADO.NET Data Services (previously known as Astoria) can really help your achieve Rapid Application Development due to the features they provide. (See also Beth Massi’s Post, linked below for an example of this)
• Named Formats Pex Testimonium – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux follows on form Phil Haack’s posts on Named Formats with a look at how PEX can help with the testing of code that solves a problem like this.
• Understanding Azure Tools – The Real Starting Point – Bruno Terkaly runs through the whole process of creating a very simple web application, testing it locally and then deploying it to the Azure platform, accompanied by plenty of large and clear screenshots.
• ADO.NET Data Services – Building a WPF Client – Beth Massi walks through the creation of a client application to consume ADO.NET Data Services using WPF and VB.NET. Source download is available.
• Back To Basics: Memory allocation, a walk down the history – Abhinaba Basu talks about memory allocation, and the different ways that this has been achieved through out the ages of computing
• Evergreen but still topical: MVC vs. MVP – Dino Esposito takes a look at the differences and similarities of the Model View Controller and Model View Presenter patterns
• New jQuery release version 1.3 – Erwin shares some graphs on the performance of the new 1.3 release of jQuery – and from the looks of these the improvements are very impressive across the board
• The perils of staticly-typed languages and schema-less data stores – Jamie Thomson talks about some of the problems you can encounter with schema-less data, and explores two techniques for dealing with this type of information.
• The doctor will see you now… [WaitingRoom is a reusable synchronization object for .NET] – ‘Delay’ shares some code that implements an easy to use synchronisation object for .NET allowing an owner thread to synchronise with a number of worker threads
• Testing Your Code to Test Yourself – Chris Missal talks about how he came to the conclusion that testing your code is a good idea, and that testable code is (generally) much better code.

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