The Morning Brew

I had a very enjoyable night at the Thoughtworks Manchester Geek Night last night, where Jim Webber gave a very interesting and entertaining presentation on Web Based integration using HTTP based services as the middleware.

Software

• MonoDevelop 2.0 Beta 1 – Miguel de Icaza gives a detailed run through of what is new in MonoDevelop 2.0’s first beta release. From the screenshots included its looking like a very nice IDE, and I especially look forward to some of the improvements they have planned for Windows users
• Announcing FsCheck 0.5 – Kurt Schelfthout announces the latest update to FsCheck, the F# port of QuickCheck, the Haskell automatic specification based testing tool
• StyleCop for ReSharper is Feature Complete. RC (refresh) Released. – Howard van Rooijen announces a new release of the StyleCop Plugin for Resharper. This release brings it to parity with StyleCop 4.3 and marks a significant milestone in the project.

Information

• Is a Crisp a Value Object? – Dylan Beattie gives a really nice explaination of the concept of a value object vs an entity, just (amongst other things) Crisps as an analogy
• CLR Team Blog : Why catch(Exception)/empty catch is bad – Andrew Pardoe, of the CLR team at Microsoft talks about why catching exceptions with empty catch blocks can be problematic, especially when it leaves the program in a corrupted state, and talks about a forthcoming VS2010 feature in this area.
• Parallel Programming with .NET : Getting random numbers in a thread-safe way – ‘toub’ explores some of the problems you can have when generating Random Numbers in multi-threaded applications, and looks at better ways of doing this.
• The Oxite Architecture: Good, Bad, and Meh Part 1 – Mike “Sampy” Sampson, who works on the Oxite project talks about some of the design changes that have taken place in the project, and gives some background on the development style and practices. This part talks about the use of Unity as a DI Container, and
• The Oxite Architecture: Good, Bad, and Meh Part 2 – Part 2 explores action filters with attributes.
• Soft-deletes are bad, m’kay? – Frans Bouma talks about Soft Deletes, where instead of deleting records, they are marked with a ‘Deleted’ status, and hidden from view. Frans continues with a suggestion of an alternative implementation, wher you move deleted records into an archive catalog.
• "Inappropriate Intimacy" points to the bleeding out of your domain logic – Ian Cooper talks about how having classes that know too much about each others internals violates the law of demeter and can lead to your domain logic getting fragmented and placed into places it shouldn’t be.
• Stubs and application scaffolding – Louis Salin talks about stubs, and how they can help simplify your development by providing solutions to complex problems you don’t yet need to solve, allowing you to get on with that other bits.
• Application logging – yes it is important – Ryan Ternier gives some good advice for logging within your application, suggesting that writing everything out to disk all the time is unnecessary, just logging exceptions doesn’t give enough information, and much more.
• Microsoft Press : Wait: more free e-books in February! – The Microsoft Press Blog highlights 2 other free titles that are availble this month in e-book format.

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