The Morning Brew

Software

• TestApi v.0.2 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the latest release of TestApi, a set of standalone libraries that make it easier for WPF developers to test their applications. This release brings with it a number of new features along with samples for xUnit and NUnit.
• Windows 7 Release Candidate Update – Windows 7 Team announce to the world that the Windows 7 RC will be made available to MSDN subscribers on 30th April , and to the general public on 5th May.

Information

• The Case for Multiple DBs in Multi Tenancy situations – Anne Epstein looks at unsing multiple databases for multitenancy applications, over putting all clients in the one database and using a column to mark the owner of the data in each table.
• There is no right way – Chris Brandsma comments on and links to the recent discussion between Ayende and Greg Young regarding the repository pattern
• 6 Tips for ASP.NET MVC Model Binding – K. Scott Allen shares 6 good tips for working with the ASP.NET MVC Model Binding functionality covering both best practices and technical features
• You should NOT use ASP.NET MVC if. . . – Jeffrey Palermo takes an alternative stance to all the ‘You should use ASP.NET MVC’ posts by looking at why you shouldn’t move to ASP.NET MVC
• Using Obscure Windows COM APIs in .NET – Jeff Moser takes a look at getting access to some of the more obscure and interesting Windows COM APIs from his .NET code
• SPRING.NET + iBATIS.NET With ASP.NET MVC – Part 1 – ‘moonhyuk’ starts a series of posts about using the ASP.NET MVC with a slightly less mainstream set of tools, notably iBatis instead of NHibernate / Linq to SQL, and Spring.NET instead of Castle Windsor.
• No bandwidth MSDN: Reflector – James Newton-King suggests that using reflector on the .NET framework often provides enough information for you to get on without MSDN documentation, along with some other useful side effects.
• Redgate is doing it again- A metric ton-load of free eBooks (and their suite of tools too) is just a quick reg away – Greg Duncan highlights the latest Free E-Book offerings from RedGate.
• Functional C# – Forward Functional Composition – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Composition in Functional C# with a look at Forward partial application, and continues with Functional C# – Reverse Functional Composition exploring the other direction
• Suteki Shop is now a sample application on the official MVC Framework site – Congratulations to Mike Hadlow on having his Suteki Shop ASP.NET MVC application accepted as a sample on the Official ASP.NET website.
• Live Data Binding using ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 4 – Iftekharul Anam explores one of the new ASP.NET Ajax features. I recently saw this demonstrated, and it looks like a great innovation.

Community

• Have You Seen the Linked .NET User Group? – Chris Bowen highlights a very active .NET focused Linked In group which has been organising a number of online events recently. Worth checking out.

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Software

• Show me the memory: Tool for visualizing virtual memory usage and GC heap usage. – Tess Ferrandez shares a quick and simple version of a tool that one of her colleagues created for internal use, which allows you to visualise the memory allocations in the GC Heap and Virtual Memory

Information

• Code Injection With CCI – Part 2 – Jason Bock continues his series looking into using the Common Compiler Infrastructure to inject aspects into an assembly, in this part exploring the supporting framework code which is required to do the outer part of the process
• How we do MVC – Jimmy Bogard shares a number of views on ASP.NET MVC based upon his 9 months working with it on a production project. Hopefully this list will be expanded into a series of posts going into more detail on each in the near future – real world influenced best practices at work
• Scripting ASP.NET MVC Views Stored In The Database – Phil Haack shares some thoughts and a prototype of the ability to make your ASP.NET MVC views be stored in the database, and allow your users to customise the views to their purposes, using scripting and markup.
• ASP.NET MVC View Location and Performance Issue – Kazi Manzur Rashid digs into the the implementation of View Location in ASP.NET MVC and looks at the performance characteristics of the implementation
• ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!) – Scott Hanselman highlights the wonderful error management provided by the ELMAH project, allowing you to track errors in your application with full details. This is good stuff, and I agree with Scott that something like this being baked into the framework would be really good.
• LINQ to Objects – Debugging – Bart De Smet shares some useful techniques to help debugging Linq queries
• Enhance your ASP.NET Membership-based website by adding Identity Provider capabilities – ‘Vibro’ explores the idea of implementing the Geneva Identity Provider functionality in a standard ASP.NET Membership powered site,allowing you to take advantage of single sign in and claims based authentication. Vibro also provides an introduction to the ASP.NET Membership functionality in the article ‘Create a Minimal ASP.NET Membership Website (that will come in useful in another post)‘
• Repository is Dead: Long Live Repository – Greg Young and Oren Eini (Ayende) are having an interesting discussion about the Repository Pattern. This piece is Greg’s reply to Ayende’s first comments, and Ayende follows up with a reply to Greg in ‘Night of the living Repositories‘
• Functional C# – Composing Through Partial Application – Matthew Podwysocki looks at Functional C# again, with a lookat using partial application in C# to achieve Composition.

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Today’s post is a milestone of sorts – one third of the way to the magical 1000 post mark!

Software

• VSDB 2008 GDR R2 Released or DataDude for 2008 GDR++ RTM’ed or Latest and coolest version of Data Dude now available – Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of DataDude which seems to include a significant number of bugfixes along with a few enhancements

Information

• Stubs: Comparison with other mocking frameworks – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux compares the lightweight mocking library, Stubs, with some of the others that are available, talking about how and why it is different, and looking at the performance of the Stubs mocks.
• Code Injection With CCI – Part 1 – Jason Bock looks into the use of the Common Compiler Infrastructure to inject code into an assembly
• Challenges of Multi-Tenant, Enterprise ASP.NET Applications – Travis Illig talks about some of the challenges surrounding creating good Multi-Tenant large scale applications
• Test Code Is Just Code – Ian Cartwright talks about a number of Anti-patterns which can make dealing with Test Code much more difficult
• Dynamic base classes in C# 4 – Chris Burrows looks into an interesting use of the new Dynamic functionality in C#4 to provide base classes based on dynamic types.
• NHibernate Tidbit – using <set/> without referencing Iesi.Collections – Ayende shares a useful NHibernate 2 Tip which allows you to remove a dependency on the Isei Collections library when working with NHibernate
• I Spose I’ll Just Say It: You Should Learn MVC – Rob Conery links to and responds to a number of recent post on ‘if you should learn ASP.NET MVC’
• Running Asp.Net websites outside of IIS – Ritesh Ramesh provides a means of running ASP.NET applications without using IIS with a simple application that implements a web server for ASP.NET in this Code Project article
• Life and Times of an ASP.NET MVC Controller – K. Scott Allen highlights his latest MSDN magazine article exploring how ASP.NET MVC controllers work
• Thread Pool Engine in MS CLR 4, and Work-Stealing scheduling algorithm – Haytham El-Fadeel talks about the changes to the Thread Pool in .NET 4 and looks at the Work Stealing algorithm which is used to schedule the work across worker threads
• Silverlight Animation Part II: Sprites – Charlie Calvert continues his series on Silverlight animation with a look at Sprites

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