The Morning Brew

Software

• Pex 0.13 Released: Unit Tests as Inputs, Fuzzing and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, F# Beta 1 support – Nikolai Tillmann announces the latest release of Pex, which has been updated to support Visual Studio 2010 Beta1, code contracts and F# Beta 1, along with the usual bugfixes and some new features such as support for Unit tests as inputs
• Get the Windows API Code Pack for the Microsoft .NET Framework – Bruce Kyle highlights the Windows API Code Pack 0.85, the new name for what was VistaBridge which brings the newer Windows API’s into .NET for easy consumption.

Information

• Can you @bing it? – Jared Parsons highlights the announcement of Microsoft’s new search engine, called ‘Bing’, a name which looks set to replace the ‘Live’ branding
• Taming the Pex beast: Well-behaved enums, multi-dimensional arrays and booleans – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux looks at some of the problem data types for Pex, and talks about how a number of new attributes help make working with them easier
• Cross Site Scripting (XSS) – Alex Mueller gives a nice explanation of what Cross Site Scripting is, where you can be vulnerable to it and how you can prevent it
• Pattern Matching in .NET 4 – Jonathan Allen talks about pattern matching in .NET looking at the standard switch/case functionality, and showing how it can be used in a more terse way, and also takes a look at how F# handles the same
• Why Defer Loading in Entity Framework isn’t going to work – Ayende talks about why he feels that the new Defer Loading (AKA Lazy Loading) functionality of the Entity Framework is going to cause problems, comparing it to how NHibernate has implemented this functionality
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – Monster Objects – Chris Missal continues his series with a look at the ‘god’ object which contains far too much stuff, and the law of Demeter
• Partitioning in PLINQ – ‘essey’ looks at the different partitioning strategies that PLINQ uses to divide up work.
• .NET Framework Performance Survey – The CLR and Framework Perf Blog are running a survey on the level of satisfaction with Performance of the framework – if you have something to contribute on the subject go give them some feedback
• NHibernate – Executable DML – Ayende highlights a new feature recently ported into NHibernate allowing you to run updates and deletes against complex inheritance models
• Lifecycle of an open source project – Chad Myers outlines an 8 phase lifecycle that Open Source projects tend to follow which might help when trying to decide how stable/mature an OS project is
• Actors in F# – The Bounded Buffer Problem – Matthew Podwysocki continues looking at Actors in F# with a look at using the Bounded Buffer for message passing

Community

• Leeds Area SQL Server User Group Meeting – Leeds hosts the next UK SQL Server User Group event, on the 3rd June. This event includes two sessions, both with a performance slant, with Iain Kick looking at end to end performance troubleshooting and Martin Bell talking on replaying trace files.

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Software

• Selenium 1.0 released!! – Thoughtworks announce the release of Selenium their automated web application testing tool which runs over multiple platforms. The blog post doesn’t contain a link to the project, which can be found here
• Samples for the "Oslo" May CTP – The Oslo team highlight the availability of a new separate download for the samples which go with the May 2009 CTP release of Oslo
• SP2 Available for Vista and Windows 2008 – As correctly pointed out by Mark Brackett in a comment to yesterday’s post, it was Service Pack 2 for Vista that was released, so lets have another go at linking to a (different) post about this release

Information

• Improvements to NGen in .NET Framework 4 – Surupa Biswas talks about some of the changes that have been made to the .NET Native Image Generator in the new version of the framework
• Parallel Stacks- Tasks view – Daniel Moth continues exploring the new functionality of the Visual Studio 2010 Beta which relate to parallel programming
• NUnit’s Assert.That – Peter Seale talks about his dislike of the new NUnit Assert.That syntax
• The Zen of Inversion of Control – Jon Stonecash looks at the the techniques of Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control, and looks at where and why you might want to use it – samples are in VB.NET
• Exiting from Parallel Loops Early – ‘toub’ looks at how the Parallel functionality of the .NET Framework will allow you to exit from parallel loops as you can from a normal loop
• Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers in 2009 – Brad Abrams highlights a survey by Simone Chiaretta looking at how ,NET developers are using AJAX in 2009. I look forward to seeing some interesting comparisons with the same survey run in 2007
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – The Arrowhead Anti-Pattern – Chris Missal kicks off his series of posts on anti-patterns and worst practices with a look at the arrowhead anti-pattern which comes from deeply nested if/loop combinations.
• PTOM: Black-box analysis of legacy applications – Jimmy Bogard posts on the Topic Of The Month over at Los Techies, looking at how you should go about examining legacy applications from the outside

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Software

• Oslo May 2009 CTP Available Now – Chris Sells announces the release of the May 2009 CTP of ‘Oslo’, including new setup routines, and a number of improvements and unified tools, including Quadrant
• Stuck with Vista? – Martin Hinshelwood highlights the release of Windows Vista SP1 to the general public
• Windows Server 2008 SP2 – Download available – Chris Samson highlights the release of Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2
• CSLA .NET 3.6.3 beta available – Rockford Lhotka announces the beta release of hist latest edition of the CSLA .NET framework for both Windows and Silverlight. This sounds like its really close to being the final release version too.

Information

• On The Journey : From DSLs and Models to ‘Quadrant’ using ‘Oslo’ May CTP – Part I – ‘dskaufman’ starts a series exploring the new May CTP release of Oslo, In this part looking at creating the model in MSchema
• About the’Oslo’ May 2009 CTP – The Oslo Developer Center review the May 2009 CTP release of Oslo giving the detailed information of the changes in this release
• Using Microsoft AJAX Control Toolkit with Visual Studio 10 Beta 1 – The Visual Web Developer Team Blog talks about some steps needed to get the Ajax Toolkit working in Visual Studio 2010 Beta
• Managed Extensibility Framework 101 – (a) – Malisa Ncube provides a simple sample of the Managed Extensibility Framework in action
• Known Issues in Parallel Extensions to .NET 4.0 Beta1 – ‘essey’ highlights a number of know issues in the Parallel Extensions that shipped with the .NET 4.0 beta release, along with a number pf items that have been removed since the release
• The Case of the Slow Keynote Demo – Mark Russinovich shows how he used the Sysinternals tools to diagnose so strange slowdowns in an application to demoed in a keynote
• My Dot Net Developer’s tools list, and more… – Latish Sehgal shares a pretty comprehensive list of .NET Developer tools with nice descriptions and details of the licenseing
• CLR 4 Garbage Collector – Inside Background GC – Channel 9 interview Maoni Stephens and Andrew Pardoe who talks about their work on the Garbage collection in the .NET runtime.

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