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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Thank goodness its Friday – the first week back after a long holiday is always harder work than it should be – now quite looking forward to the weekend.

Software

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta… Ohh and Windows 7 too… – I think everyone knows about Windows 7 beta being released today (and if you didn’t you do now), however this post also talks about Windows 2008 Server R2 Beta being made available to everyone (not just MSDN Subscribers) today too.
• Firebug 1.3 Final Release – Firebug, the firefox users tool of choice for DOM inspection, JavaScript debugging and network monitoring in the browser has finally reached its 1.3 stable release for FireFox 3 users.
• A Professional HTML Rendrer you will use – Jose M. Menendez Poó shares a very useful looking library which renders HTML to GDI+ graphics and controls. Based strongly round the CSS2 and HTML4.01 specifications this library looks like it could be very useful for rendering HTML Content – none of the examples show it rendering a standard web page, so I wonder how well it copes with something that complex.

Information

• Printing Microsoft Tags – Microsoft announced some new technology (and the MSDN blogs a buzzing with it today) – essentially 3D barcodes for transmitting URLs, vCards, text and telephone numbers. There are clients for a large range of mobile devices, and also a site for creating the tag images.
• Hanselminutes Podcast 145 – SOLID Principles with Uncle Bob – Robert C. Martin – Scott Hanselman’s latest podcast covers the SOLID principles which have been featured here in articles a number of time, I’m looking forward to listening to this one. There is also a comment on this post that is worth checking out (2nd one by Gates VP), there may be others later.
• ASP.NET MVC – Think Before You Bind – Justin Etheredge looks at the model binding in ASP.NET MVC, and how, if you are not careful, this can introduce security and validation problems. Justin moves on to look at alternative ways of achieving this functionality in a safer manner.
• Want the source code and unit tests for the managed Silverlight 2 controls included in System.Windows.dll, System.Windows.Controls.dll, and System.Windows.Controls.Data.dll? Here you go… – Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of full source code and unit tests for the managed Silverlight 2 controls
• Project Euler 89: Converting to and from Roman Numerals – Samuel Jack has been exploring the Project Euler problems in Functional C#, and in this instalment looks at parsing and creating Roman Numerals
• RulesEngine – Martin Fowler introduces the concept of a RulesEngine, and looks at whether you should employ one in your applications.
• Creating database connections with Unity – Stuart Leeks looks at creating database connections to the right database and injecting them into your classes using Unity IOC. This article illustrates a number of the IOC features of Unity nicely.
• XML Comments: filterpriority – Scott Dorman explores the meaning of an undocumented XML Documentation tag which is used throughout the BCL source
• Processes in .NET Part 3 – Interfacing With Simple Console Programs by Example, Tesseract OCR – Rick Minerich continues his series looking at processes in .NET with a look at interacting with Googles Tesseract OCR, a console application from your own .NET code.
• Code is Always Sacred – Jason Bock argues that all code should be good code, and that it is not acceptable to have sample code in books, blogs or presentations which include bad coding practices such as not disposing streams, bad variable names, catch blocks which do nothing, etc/

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Following my 2008 in review post a number of influential .NET bloggers have been promoting the Morning Brew, and the overall result has been a 60% increase in subscribers and a significant increase in web page impressions. I’d like to thank those bloggers for their enthusiasm for The Morning Brew, and also to say a quick ‘hello’ to all the new readers and to remind you all that I’m very open to suggestions about The Morning Brew, and also for suggestions for content – as long as its good, timely and .NET related there is a good chance it will go in.

Software

• Information on Downloading and Installing Windows 7 Beta – Windows 7 beta can be obtained currently from the MSDN and Technet downloads if you are a subscriber, however Windows 7 goes into a much more public beta tomorrow at 3pm (EST?) with a publicly available download of an ISO image.
• DevHawk – IronPython Nightly Builds – Harry Pierson is offering un-official nightly builds of IronPython on his Azure powered nightly builds site. Harry follows up this post with some technical details of how the nightly build site works
• IE8 Windows Update Blocker Toolkit Released – Greg Duncan highlights the tools that will allow you to prevent Internet Explorer 8 from being installed via Windows update
• Oxite – Release: Oxite.2009.1.5 – The Team behind Oxite, the ASP.NET MVC CMS that came under a lot of fire from the developer community before Christmas, have released an update, which fixes a number of bugs, adds skinning support and also has substantial Code Clean up based on the community feedback.

Information

• AutoWiring in StructureMap 2.5+ – Jeremy D. Miller is continuing with the documentation for Structure Map, his IOC/DI project. In this extract, he examines an anti patter of IOC container use and looks at the Auto Wiring functionality provided in Structure Map.
• C# and Currying – Looking into Performance – Saveen Reddy continues his series on Currying in C# with a look at the performance of a number of different currying techniques.
• Parallelising Loops in .NET 4 – Daniel Moth looks at how easily you can parallelise loops in .NET 4.0 without having to change much code and keeping the code looking similar.
• You don’t have to use query expressions to use LINQ – Jon Skeet reminds us that we don’t have to use the query expression syntactic sugar for all Linq queries – for simple queries the ‘dot notation’ method is clearer and more concise.
• IoC libraries compared – Chris Brandsma talks about IOC libraries, and looks at how they all handle constructor injection, the area where there is most commonality in functionality, but different ways of achieving it.
• My Take On Variable Length Lists in ASP.NET MVC – Justin looks in to the problem of variable length lists in ASP.NET MVC which has been addressed by a number of others, and comes up with a nice solution.
• Introduction to NHibernate, Part 3 – Ian Cooper continues his series on getting started with NHibernate with a look at mapping relationships between classes in sets, lists and the other collection types.

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