The Morning Brew

Software

• SharpDevelop 3.0 Final – Christoph Wille announces the final release of Sharp Develop 3.0, which has been 18 months (and 4 pre-releases) in the making. With support for F#, IronPython, FxCop, new refactoring support, and much much more this is sure to be a great environment for anyone on a budget.
• Small Basic : Microsoft Small Basic v0.3 is here – ‘vijayeg’ announces the latest release of Small Basic, the simple BASIC programming language implementation from Microsoft. This release contains a number of performance improvements and bug fixes

Information

• Back to Basics: 32-bit and 64-bit confusion around x86 and x64 and the .NET Framework and CLR – Scott Hanselman addresses the complexities (an simplicities in certain cases) of using x64, looking at a number of the common problems you tend to encounter when getting your .NET code running on x64.
• Parallel Programming in .Net 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010: BlockingCollection<T> – Paul Jackson explores one of the new .NET 4.0 parallel programming types, the BlockingCollection, which is a completely new type in .NET 4.0 allowing code to block until the collection is in a certain state
• New Release: patterns & practices WCF Security Guide – J.D. Meier announces the release of a new Patterns and Practices guideance document about authentication and authorisation in WCF services.
• Using an Existing ASP.Net Web Application as a Windows Azure Web Role – Jim Nakashima looks into what is involved in taking an existing ASP.NET application and making it run on the Azure Platform
• An Intro to Barrier – J Olson introduces one of the other new .NET 4.0 concurrency types, the Barrier, which allows all threads to gather at a point and then continue together
• LINQ and The Matrix – Introducing MLinq – Bart De Smet returns with a look at MLinq a means of performing Matrix multiplication using Linq Expression Trees
• Writing your first Visual Studio Language Service – Ben Morrison explores the Irony Compiler Construction Key and Visual Studio Language services showing a construction of a sample language service
• Memory Leaks Demo & Detection in .NET Application – Bill Li explores one of the common causes of memory leaks in .NET applications, the event subscription which prevents an object going out of scope
• One of these languages is not like the others – Part 1 – Enforcement of Abstract Implementation – Rick Minerich starts a new series comparing a number of common .NET languages, and how they implement the same things. This part looks at abstract implementations.
• A breaking change between versions of ASP.NET AJAX – Dave Ward looks at a change that was made in ASP.NET Ajax between .NET 2 and .NET 3.5, and explains some of the reasoning behind the change
• ASP.Net Caching Is Too Easy – Scott Watermasysk talks about how having a very easy to use cache can be a bad thing as people tend towards overuse.

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Software

• TestDriven.Net 2.19: Release Notes – Jamie Cansdale shares the Release nots for Test Driven.NET’s v2.19 release, with NUnit 2.5 beta 2 support, along with a number of fixes and improvements to the platforms supported.

Information

• Domain Driven Design: A Step by Step Guide – Casey Charlton begins a series of posts on Domain Driven Design and starts out with a look at one of the key concepts, that of having a Ubiquitous Language with which to discuss the domain
• Hanselman List of Podcasts for .NET Programmers – Scott Hanselman shares a comprehensive list of podcasts that will be of interest to programmers – there are a few on there I’d not come across before so well worth a look.
• Domain Driven Design: Learning – Artur Trosin is also looking into Domain Driven Design, and in this post discusses some of the key concepts and provides a number of links to more detailed resources about specific parts of the subject.
• Mocks vs. Stubs – James Kovacs attempts to de-mystify the differences between mock objects and stub objects, illustrating his example with some code.
• Cost? – Greg Young explores the cost of implementing Command Query Segregation in terms of the time to create all the messages, looking at how these costs could be recouped or limited.
• The cost of messaging – Ayende follows up on Greg Young’s discussion of messaging costs , with a look at his standard proof of concept of user login
• JavaScript, 5 ways to call a function – Sergio Pereira shows no less than 5 different ways to call a function in JavaScript, highlighting some of the common bugs that can occur in the different ways and formulating 4 rules for calling functions in JS along the way
• Recent Bootcamp Materials: Visual Studio.NET 2008 Tips, Tricks, and Toys – ‘G’ shares a comprehensive list of Free tools and add-ins for developers which were featured in G’s recent presentation
• The Art of Debugging – A Developer’s Best Friend – Lesson 11 – SQL Server Stored Procedures – Bruno Terkaly continues his excelent series on debugging techniques with a look at Stored Procedure Debugging, Debugging Javascript In Web Pages and Debugging VBScript
• Quickly Setting Up And Using NHibernate’s Second Level Cache – Davy Brion explores the setup and use of the Second Level Cache in NHibernate, showing how you can apply it globally, or b more specific about the entities to cache
• Handling of large byte arrays – ‘bauemeise’ looks at a few different ways of allocating large byte arrays, and the differences in performance of these techniques
• CommonServiceLocator for MEF, a service is a service – Glenn Block announces the completion of his implementation of the CommonServiceLocator adapter for the MEF

Humour

• Unix Time on Friday the 13th: 1234567890 – This Friday marks another of those ‘special’ times in the unix clock.

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Software

• Win 7 beta download stopping 10th Feb – A quick reminder that the extended deadline for Windows 7 beta downloads is tomorrow – if you haven’t yet grabbed a copy you’ve got a few more hours.
• Vista Bridge v1.4 Released – Now with custom controls for Common File Dialogs, BreadCrumb control and Aero Glass – Greg Duncan highlights the 1.4 release of Vista Bridge, a library that brings Vista features to your applications

Information

• The Art of Debugging – A Developer’s Best Friend- Intro – Lesson 1 – Bruno Terkaly starts a substantial series fo posts on Debugging in .NET, with a ten part series including looks at the tools available and some of the more complex debugging (involving threads and garbage collection) – see his February content page for the rest of the posts
• The basic syntax of F# – keywords and constructs – Brian McNamara gives a nice simple and quick guide to some of the common elements of F# programming, along with some links to some more detailed information
• Back to Basics: Optimizing reference counting garbage collection – Abhinaba Basu continues his garbage collection series with a look at some of the challenges the Reference Counting GC encounters.
• A little love for nhforge.org – Tobin Harris highlights some of the recent changes made to the NHForge site
• Switching IoC Container with LINQ Expressions – Sean Feldman looks at how you can combine LINQ expressions with your Inversion of Control Container to make switching implementation easier
• Visual Studio 2008 Keyboard shortcut posters – Swami K provides links to keyboard shortcut posters for Visual Studio 2008 for both C# and VB developers. These are quite old, but this is the first time I’ve seen them mentioned.
• NH2.1.0: New generators – Fabio Maulo talks (slightly disapprovingly) about the new Idenrity Generators that are included in NHibernate 2.1.0
• IoC libraries compared: Windsor Update – Chris Brandsma takes another look at Castle’s Windor Inversion of Control library, focusing in on a few of the positives about this particular library
• Take Charge of Your Security – Phil Haack examines the myth that ASP.NET WebForms gives lots more security protection that ASP.NET MVC, exploring a few common misconceptions.
• VsDoc for jQuery 1.3.1 now available – Bertrand Le Roy highlights the availability of the Visual Studio Documentation file for jQuery 1.3.1
• WPF Application Quality Guide – Kate Gregory highlights the release of the WPF Application Quality guide, a document which details getting started with WPF, best practices and advice on both developing and testing WPF apps.
• 8 ways to be a better programmer in 6 minutes. – Leon Bambrick gives 8 tips that take very little time to implement but may well help you to become a better programmer
• IPrincipal (User) ModelBinder in ASP.NET MVC for easier testing – Scott Hanselman looks at how the model binder functionality of ASP.NET MVC allows you to write methods which are more testable.
• Immutable Data Structures in C# and F# – Tomas Petricek explores Immutable data structures in F# and looks at how these can be implemented in C# using a tuple as an example.
• Quality is what I work for – Inspired by the current debate between Jeff Atwood/Joel Spolsky and the likes of Uncle Bob Martin and Ron Jeffries, Mark Needham explores what he considers to be the traits of High Quality Software

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