January 2009

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #265

Posted by on 15 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • How do you know your code works? – Chad Myers explores the four types of additional code he writes (above and beyond the actual production code), and talks a little about each type.
    • The Story of the Lazy-Loading Lunchbox – Dylan Beattie explores a number of software development concepts using analogies with his life as a child and his school lunchbox and rucksack. Excellent reading, and some novel explanations of interesting concepts.
  • A new breed of magic strings in ASP.NET MVC – Jimmy Bogard identifies the heavy use of Anonymous Types in ASP.NET MVC as an instance of ‘magic strings’, and looks at alternatives to this.
  • Automatic vs Explicit Properties – Eric Lippert explores a readers concerns about automatic properties and using them inside the implementing class rather than using the private backing fields.
  • Monitoring HTTP Output with Fiddler in .NET HTTP Clients and WCF Proxies – Rick Strahl shows how you can use Fiddler, the HTTP proxy for developers, to capture output and input from .NET code (both HTP client and WCF client code)
  • Avoid object initializers & the using statement – Ayende highlights a problem with using object initialisers with the using statement, and how an exception in any of the properties being set will cause the object to not be disposed correctly.
  • Named Formats Redux – Phil Haack follows up his recent post on Named Format String replacements with two reader submitted solutions to the problem.
  • Windows Azure – Breaking It Down – Justin Etheredge shares his intial thoughts, based on a few days experimentation, on Azure and the Live, .NET and SQL Services
  • Behavior-Driven Development with NBehave – Dmitri Nesteruk explores Behaviour Driven Development using NBehave and MUnit illustrated with a simple bank account example.
  • Using PostSharp without installing via the MSI – Scott Wojan briefly outlines the steps required to get PostSharp working without actually installing it, allowing you to make your projects more portable and reduce the dependency of having to install the framework.
  • Astonishment Principles and Framework Behavior – K. Scott Allen illustrates the Principle of Least Surprise with a before and after example using the .NET XML functionality and the new XML API based on XElement.

Community

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The Morning Brew #264

Posted by on 14 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Selenium: New Selenium Releases Today – The team behind Selenium, the web application browser testing framework announce the second beta release of version 1.0. A final release will be made once the documentation is up to date.

Information

  • In search of Wild Repository – Mike Hadlow explores a few different implementations of the Repository in the wild (open source software) with a look to identifying common and best practices in their implementation and interfaces.
  • How would the CLR Be Different? – Matthew Podwysocki explores the question ‘given what you know now, what would you have done differently if you were constructing the CLR?’
  • Open Generic Types in StructureMap – Jeremy D. Miller demonstrates how StructureMap supports Open Generic Types with an illustrating real world example.
  • Hardcoding Considered Harmful – or is it? – Jeffrey Palermo talks about the (bad?) practice of hard coding values in your code, and asks if this is really a bad thing
  • Making the Entity Framework Fit Your Domain – Part 2 – Justin Etheredge continues his series on fitting the Entity Framework into your real domain model. In this part Justin looks at how he actually got the domain model working with EF and explores some of the interfaces and code he needed to provide.
  • Custom Configuration Sections for Lazy Coders – John Whitmire constructs an increasingly feature rich custom configuration section handler including read write access to the config
  • Not more excuses of missing indexes with Activity Monitor in SQL Server 2008 – Bill Ramos give a visual tour of the new Activity Monitor in SQL Server 2008. This looks like it is really good, offering suggestions for indexes and making it much easier to identify bad queries.
  • How to Copy an Assembly From the GAC to the File System – John W Powell looks at three ways you can actually obtain the real DLL of the libraries in the GAC, working around the Windows Explorer special view you get for the c:\windows\assembly directory.
  • Timeout Workaround – Andrew Conrad of the Astoria Team talks about the recommended work around for a bug in the ADO.NET Data Services which should help you avoid problems when the actual issue gets fixed.
  • XAML guidelines part 3 – Jaime Rodriguez shares his XAML guidelines documentation which includes common and best practices and views from multiple developers. Jamie is clear that this is a work in progress so is very open to hearing suggestions of other things that should be covered.
  • Vulnerability of the Dynamic Linq – Rinat Abdullin talks about the dangers of allowing your users to run arbitrary queries (in this case Linq), and how you can help defend your application from the potential problems when you do need to to allow this.
  • Fluent NHibernate: Mapping private and protected properties – James Gregory continues his exploration of Fluent NHIbernate looking at 3 techniques for mapping to private members with details of the Pros and Cons of each method.

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The Morning Brew #263

Posted by on 13 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • StructureMap 2.5.2 is Released – Jeremy D. Miller announces the release of Structure Map 2.5.2, an update to his IOC/DI framework containing a number of new features outlined in this post. Another nice feature of this post is Jeremy looking back at the development timeline of the product so you can see the level of effort that has gone into it.
  • Beta Release of Microsoft Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – The Sandcastle blog highlights the availability of a Beta release of the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET 3.5 SP1, which contains a huge range of documentation and samples showing off a number of the new features. Available to download as an ISO image.
  • Topshelf – Dru Sellers announces his new project, based upon the MassTransit.Host project it is an extraction of the service hosting logic which provides a nice wrapper for the standard service related code, allowing you to get on with your implementation.

Information

  • Why ASP.NET Developers Should Care about Windows Azure – Stephen Walther talks about why he believes that ASP.NET Developers should care about Windows Azure, how it takes care of a number of the difficult aspects of creating high traffic / performance websites, along with a number of other uses.
  • Open XML SDK… The Basics – Ali , a Developer on the Word team, gives an overview of the ideas behind the design of the Open XML SDK, and looks at how the API relates to the XML structure.
  • More OODB Crazy Talk – Rob Conery follows up on his recent Alt.NET Podcast appearance with some more information about Object Oriented Databases, and how they can be used.
  • Introducing the ASP.NET MVC (Part 6) – The View – Nick Berardi continues sharing the latest chapter from his upcoming ASP.NET MVC book, this time introducing the View.
  • Should my repository expose IQueryable? – Mike Hadlow argues for allowing IQueryable to escape from his Repositories to allow query execution to take place elsewhere
  • A Dissertation on .NET Properties – John Rudy looks into Properties in .NET exploring their use, the different types and how they are implemented in IL.
  • WCF 101 – Creating and consuming a basic WCF Service hosted in IIS – Tess Ferrandez runs through the steps of creating a WCF service hosted in IIS, from the creation of the project, through to consuming the service from another web page, providing a nice end to end run through of what is involved.
  • TestAPI Library Usage – ‘llester’ takes a look at the test scenarios currently supported by this library of helpers to assist in the testing of WPF/Winforms applications. Features currently include the ability to compare an area of the UI to a reference image, support for simulating input, a command line parser, and UI automation helpers. The TestAPI library is available from CodePlex and is still under development.
  • An Introduction to Native Concurrency in Visual Studio 2010 – Atilla Gunal gives an overview of the architecture of the concurrency features of Visual Studio 2010/.NET 4.0
  • F#: Partial Function Application with the Function Composition Operator – Mark Needham explores Function Composition in F#, illustrating with some examples from different well known names in the F# space.

Community

  • Save The Videogame – ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights – The Manchester (UK) GeekNights organised by ThoughtWorks kick off again on Thursday 22nd January, with a talk entitled Save the Videogame, and a discussion on agile development practices for game development. These events have proved to be very interesting in the past and a great way of meeting other developers from across the North West.
  • Call For Speakers: DDD Ireland “ah go on!” – Craig Murphy highlights the opening of the call for speakers for the Developer Developer Developer Community Event to he held in Belfast on Saturday 4th April. Having attended this format of event a number of times in Reading I thoroughly recommend attending, and if you are attending why not speak at the event too!
  • GL.net – A new .NET User Group has formed in Gloucester, UK – if this is your neck of the woods, you may want to check this out – their first meeting will be occurring in February (ViaColin Angus Mackay

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