The Morning Brew

Firefox took a dislike to the number of tabs I needed to make the Brew this morning, with random slow downs every time I tried to highlight any text, which made for slow progress.

Software

• IronPython 2.0.1 – Harry Pierson announces the release of IronPython 2.0.1 which increases the performance of the implementation significantly, with increases on benchmarks between 4% and 11.5%
• Fluent NHibernate binary drops – Chad Myers announces the release of Binaries for Fluent NHibernate, making it much easier to get up and running with Fluent NHibernate (now that you don’t have to build it your self.

Information

• The Functional Language Gateway Drug – Phil Haack considers how as he writes more LINQ based code, he is increasingly embracing Functional Programming techniques
• Visual Studio 2008 Debugging – Advanced Tricks – Scott Dorman has a great series of posts on Visual Studio Debugging, this particular post is about some of the more advanced debugging tricks, His February index page gives access to the others covering multi -threaded debugging, Tracepoints, watches and breakpoints
• The basic syntax of F# – classes, interfaces, and members – Brian McNamara continues his exploration of F# with a look into the syntax for working with and creating classes, interfaces, members and looks at how inheritance works in F#
• DDD: Entities and Value Objects – Casey Charlton continues his Domain Driven Design series with a look a one of the core fundamentals of DDD, the differences between Entities and Value objects. Casey continues with DDD: Where is the Code? Another Brief Interlude explaining why there has not been much code in the series yet, and wraps up the weekend with an announcement of an e-book version of the series which will be populated as the posts are made to the blog.
• Fun with Folds – Matthew Podwysocki continues his functional programming expedition with a look at folds in both Haskell and F#
• Getting data from a REST service using C# – Derik Whittaker shares some code for working with REST services, looking at getting data from services in this post, and following up with a look at
• Posting data to a REST service using C# – posting data back to a REST based service
• Performance Rules Of Thumb – Davy Brion shares some simple rules for performance considerations – common sense stuff mostly, but often wrth seeing formalised.
• The open closed principle – Gabriel Schenker continues his excellent series on the SOLID principles with a look at the Open Closed Principle
• Simple AOP: introduction to AOP
  – Andre Loker exploes the concepts of AOP in this nice introductory post on the subject. He follows up with a look at using Dynamic Proxies to achieve some AOP like call interception functionality at runtime.
• Coding: Assertions in constructors – Mark Needham considers the need for assertions to catch null references passed into constructors, and questions if this is a good idea
• Application Architecture Videos – J.D. Meier provides links to a great collection of Videos from the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide team
• Validation in a DDD world – Jimmy Bogard considers where we should put validation in our DDD based applications

Community

• Next Europe VAN – 25th February 2009 – Colin Jack announces the date for the next European Virtual Alt.Net event, which sees Seb Lambla talk about his OpenRasta Framework
• Web Based Integration – ThoughtWorks Manchester GeekNights – A reminder that the next Thought Works GeekNight to be held in Manchester is happening this Thursday, where Dr Jim Webber will be talking on Integration in a Web Based world, exploring REST based services for middleware solutions

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Had a great evening at the Liverpool Twestival last night, hopefully the 185+ events around the world yesterday raised lots of money for the charity Charity: Water.

Software

• Released WatiN 2.0 CTP3 – The WatiN (Web Application Testing in dotNet) team announce the release of their 3rd CTP of Version 2.0

Information

• DDD: There Is No Database – Casey Charlton continues his excelent Domain Driven Design series with a look at Persistance Ignorance, and further continues with DDD : Command Query Separation as an Architectural Concept – looking at another key principle of DDD.
• Organizing Software Projects – Brendan Enrick talks about the importance of organisation of the code related aspects of your software project to allow new developers to get working as soon as possible
• Help! Drowning in Expression Trees, What Now? – Bart De Smet looks at two techniques for dealing with complex Linq Expression trees
• Whatever happened to .NET ORM tool X? – Eric Nelson looks abck over 8 years of ORM in the .NET space and looks at where a number of ORM products are now
• Windows 7 Taskbar: APIs – Sasha Goldshtein explores the API for interacting with the new features of the Windows 7 Task bar, with sourcecode available on the MSDN Code gallery
• ASP.NET Wire Format for Model Binding to Arrays, Lists, Collections, Dictionaries – Scott Hanselman shares some information on that way that the data for Model Binding arrays, lists and collection is transmitted between the client and browser
• Do you wanna be the Picasso of programming? First learn the rules, and only after break them – Simone Chiaretta reminds us that its vital to get the basic rules right, and only then should you start innovating and rule breaking.
• Laws, Rules, Principles, Patterns, and Practices – Chad Myers defines 5 terms that get used a lot in Software development
• Getting a SOLID start. – Uncle Bob talks about what he considers a ‘principle’ to be, and reminds us that following rules doesn’t necessarily teach you how to do that thing well
• Null Object design pattern instead of returning null – Fabrice Marguerie looks into the use of the Null Object pattern as a return value from methods rather than returning null, considering why it is a better choice for those consuming your method.
• Creating a generic validation framework – Chris Marisic walks through the construction of a nice straightforward decoupled validation framework that makes use of generics
• Why Would I Create A Custom LINQ Operator? – K. Scott Allen looks at three reasons why you might want to create a custom Linq operator, illustrating each with examples.

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Software

• Moonlight 1.0 goes live – Miguel de Icaza announces the offical release of Moonlight 1.0, the open source SilverLight implementation, bringing Silverlight to *nix based systems. Miguel also talks about the future plans for versions 2 and 3. Scott Hanselman and ScottGu also announce the release.
• AutoMapper 0.2 released – Jimmy Bogard announces the 0.2 release of his object mapper which contains a number of significant new features(support for nullable types, more enumerable support, etc) and a few bug fixes

Information

• DDD: Bounded Contexts – Casey Charlton continues his series of posts on DDD principles with a look at the idea of a Bounded Context
• Why are thread safe collections so hard? – Jared Parsons explores what it is about collections that make them quite difficult to make threadsafe, looking at a sample collection implementation and seeing what needs to be done to make it more threadsafe
• Future<T> — Parallel Programming in .Net 4.0 – Paul Jackson continues exploring the new features of .NET 4.0 in the parallel programming arena with a look at Future<T> which allows you to kick off a routine and subsequently block when you want the value from that process if its not yet available.
• SOLID Development Principles – In Motivational Pictures – Derick Bailey shares some poster representations of the SOLID principles – my favourite is the Liskov substitution principle poster
• Step-By-Step Creating Setup for 3.5 SP1 Client Profile in VS2008 – A nice step by step guide which walks thtough the process of packaging a .NET 3.5 app into an installer which allows users to install without downloading too much stuff thanks to the .NET Client profile.
• Lightweight Test Automation Framework Source Released! – The ASP.NET QA team announce the release of the source for their lightweight test automation framework which they use to perform regression testing on ASP.NET
• Domain Model (Developing KiGG v2.0 Part 1) – Kazi Manzur Rashid talks about the KiGG projects domain model, looking at the implementation design and tests, and how good development practices were applied.
• Why ++ operator is not thread safe – Eric De Carufel looks at why the ++ operator is not threadsafe, taking a trip to the IL level to explain
• More LINQ Optimizations – K. Scott Allen suggests that we shouold optimize for reabability before optimizing for performance, as we may not need that performance
• Azure Services Training Kit – February Update – Dr. Z highlights the availability of an updated training kit for Azure Services which include 19 demo scripts, 10 presentations and 3 new hands-on labs

Community

• SQLBits Regitsration is open – Simon Sabin announces the opening of registrations for the UK based SQL Bits IV conference, which is a free event to be held in Manchester UK on March 28th. If you want to attend this conference get registering quickly as it is sure to fill up quick.

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