The Morning Brew

Software

• ADO.NET Data Services v1.5 CTP1 — Now Available for Download – The ADO.NET Data Services Team announce the release of their first Community Technology Preview of ADO.NET Data Services 1.5. This release is not for production use, and will install side by side with the previous production release.
• Cumulative update package 4 for SQL Server 2008 – Microsoft announce the latest collection of security and bug fix patches for Microsoft SQL Server 2008, containing fixes for all parts of the MSSQL Server product range.
• ASP.NET – Release: ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 4 – This one is a few days old but I somehow managed to miss it. This is the latest preview of the future of ASP.NET AJAX and this particular release introduces changes to further support ADO.NET Data Services along with a number of other changes
• It’s a T4 kind of day – Free (reg-ware) T4 Editor from tangible (with UML-Style modeling tools added for flavor) – Greg Duncan highlights a free product which brings some nice editing functionality to T4 templating with intelli-sense, code completion, syntax highlighting in a number of languages along with diagram based generation, this looks like a useful tool to be aware of
• Your favorite .NET and Java tools – Fabrice Marguerie highlights two useful looking sites, one for .NET Devs and the other for Java which contains detailed listings of tools available for each environment, along with useful searching and rating features

Information

• DDD and repositories. Without nHibernate but with lazy loading – Peter van Ooijen looks at implementing DDD style repositories with lazy load but without using NHibernate (or another ORM product)
• Programmatic WebControls – Variations of design – Andrew Rea looks at the implementation of a number of the common types of web control, exploring container, templated and databound controls
• Functional .NET- Laziness Becomes You – Matthew Podwysocki looks at Lazy Evaluation and how this fits in with the Functional Programming way of doing things
• Continuous Integration 101 – Davy Brion outlines the rules when it comes to working in a Continuous Integration Environment
• Signs That Your JavaScript Skills Need Updating – K. Scott Allen highlights a few things that might indicate that you are no longer doing your Javascript in the recommended way now that the language has evolved significantly and the linrary support has improved
• KeyTable: Instant keyboard navigation in a table – Ajaxian highlights some nice work by Allan Jardine to provide keyboard navigation around a table using Javascript
• Coding: Make it obvious – Mark Needham talks about the importance of making the code you write be obvious to anyone reading it. This means using good naming, recognisable patterns and good use of the underlying API.
• Online/Offline Network Detection with the .NET Framework – The team behing System.Net talks about some fo the useful pieces of functionality in the API that lets you detect when the machine your code is running on has changed IP Address
• Introduction to test-doubles – Laila Bougria explores the how and why of test-doubles explaining how they make your testing better, and also looks at the types of test double available.

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I think we’ve entered the lull before the Mix09 storm as content was a little thin on the ground this morning. I’m anticipating some very busy days ahead though as the conference and announcements kick off.

Information

• How .NET Regular Expressions Really Work – Jeff Moser digs down into the framework to see how regular expressions really work, explring over 14000 lines of .NET source code along the way
• Unicode in regular expressions – Jimmy Bogard explores two technologies that on their own have been known to make developers quake with fear, highlighting some very nice functionality that makes it very easy to have your regular expressions support unicode cultures.
• Breaking Liskov – Jon Skeet talks about the recent award of the Turing Award to Barbara Liskov, and explores that most famous principle the Liskov substitution principle
• How I Learned to Program Manage an Agile Team after 6 years of Waterfall – Sara Ford talks about her recent experiences of getting used to working with and managing a team using agile principles.
• Practicing patterns : linq and the dry principle – Erwin van der Valk explores how you can avoid violating the DRY principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself) when writing LINQ queries and how the language give far better techniques than you had available in TSQL
• && vs & and | vs || – What’s the difference? – Dave explores the difference between these similar looking operators in this back to basics post.
• Designing a document database: Remote API & Public API – Ayende continues his series of posts about designing a document database with a look at the type of interface he will use for the API

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Quite a software heavy edition today, with some interesting releases and betas.

Software

• NHibernate 2.1.0 on the road – Fabio Maulo announces the release fo the first alpha of NHibernate 2.1, which brings NHibernate to the level of Java Hibernate 3.2.6. See Davy Brion’s upgrading guide linked in the Information section for details of the significant new feature, the ability to choose your proxy implementation.
• S#arp Architecture 1.0 RC 2 Released! – Billy McCafferty announces the second Release Candidate of S#arp Architecture, his architectural framework for developing ASP.NET MVC applications with NHibernate and other best practices
• ReSharper 4.5 Beta Released – JetBrains announce the beta release of ReSharper 4.5, which brings with it considerable performance improvements along with solution wide warnings and suggestions, better support for naming conventions, and many other features and refinements
• StyleCop update 4.3.1.3 is released – The Microsoft StyleCop team announce version 4.3.1.3 which is mostly a bug fix release, however it does add a few new features for ignoring code generated code and including documentation from elsewhere.
• StyleCop for ReSharper – Release: Release Candidate – Refresh (0.0.14317.000) – Howard van Rooijen releases an updated Resharper add-in for the new StyleCop build.
• WCF REST Starter Kit Preview 2 is on CodePlex – Aaron Skonnard announces the release of Preview 2 of the WCF Rest Starter Kit adding further client side features for consuming WCF and 3rd party REST services and some more minor server side changes
• CruiseControl.NET 1.4.3 Released – Dave Cameron announces the release of version 1.4.3 of ThoughtWork’s CruiseControl.NET, with loads of new improvements this one looks worth an upgrade.

Information

• Upgrading To NHibernate 2.1 – Davy Brion looks at the the additional configuration requirement of NHibernate 2.1 over version 2.0, the ability (and requirement) for you to specify which proxy implementation you want, allowing you to choose what library to take dependency on.
• An improvement on SessionFactory Initialization – Tuna Toksoz looks at the startup time of the NHibernate SessionFactory, and looks at what can be done to improve the performance in this area.
• NHibernate performance with Ayende, David Penton, and Ben Scheirman – The Herding Code podcast listens in on a late night debate on NHibernate peformance, and publishes the discussion – I’ve not yet listened to this, but certainly am looking forward to it
• Validation of NHibernate Entities – Marek Blotny talks about the Validation of entities which back onto NHibernate, and talks about the role of the HBM file, database and how Fluent NHibernate and the NHibernate Validator can help.
• Beginning Mocking With Moq 3 – Part 3 – Justin Etheredge continues his series on mocking with Moq V3 with a look at providing return values from mocked methods
• Analyzing the code base of CruiseControl.NET – Patrick Smacchia uses NDepend to examine the structure and form of CruiseControl .NET
• Functional Programming in .NET – Adding Extensibility – Matthew Podwysocki looks at how closures can provide extensibility when applying functional programming techniques to other languages
• If you cannot do a source pull and compile you are doing it wrong! – Derik Whittaker talks about the importance of being able to pull source code out of Version Control and to be able to easily do a build without having to set up lots of things to support that build
• How to shorten ASP.NET automatically generated control IDs. – ‘jeff chin xyz’ looks at how you can shorten ASP.NET automatically generated IDs by providing a new means of generating them
• ASP.NET 4.0 Client ID Feature. – Continuing on a theme, Saki Sachin has an article looking at the new ASP.NET 4.0 feature allowing you to specifiy the client side IDs yourself
• Can we declare programming in Xml to be dead yet? – Jeremy D. Miller asks if we can finally kill off the XML programming trend where by lots of programming was reduced to programming in the XML configuration file
• Microsoft Velocity : Q&A – Rob Chartier posts up his questions about the Velocity distributed cache and the answers provided by the Velocity team

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