The Morning Brew

Software

• SharpDevelop 3.1 Beta 1 – The Team over at ic#code announce the release of Beta 1 of SharpDevelop 3.1. Its been a while since I last used SharpDevelop, but this release with a fully featured profiler included is certainly something I’m going to be checking out
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and VB is Live! – Dustin Campbell shares teh news that DevExpress have released an updated CodeRush Xpress which now supports both VB.NEt and C# providing numerous refactoring and productivity improvements for developers on both platforms.
• All-In-One Code Framework : 2009-5-10 release of All-In-One Code Framework – ‘colbertz’ shares the news of the latest release of the All-in-one code framework which provides sample implementations of a vast array of Microsoft Technologies. This new release brings 16 more samples ranging from integrating with Outlook to printing from Winforms applications

Information

• The Stripper Pattern – Ayende describes why sending full rich business objects over the wire is an anti-pattern, and how you should use DTO (Data Transfer Objects) to move data across the wire.
• CoverFlow – built using Silverlight 3’s ‘Projection’ feature – Jose Fajardo looks at using one of the new Silverlight 3 features to create an elegant ‘cover flow’ animation effect
• How Do You Deal With Exceptions? – Justin responds to some email questions on exceptions, how and when he uses them and how he organises them. There seems to be a good discussion going on in the comments of this post too.
• Kona 3: Learning Behavior Driven Development (BDD) – Rob Conery resumes his Kona (formerly MVC storefront) screen cast series with a look at Behaviour Driven Development
• Open XML Format SDK 2.0: Getting Started Best Practices – Erika Ehrli shares some getting started tips for working with the Open XML SDK 2.0 for working with documents for Word 2007, Excel 2007 and Powerpoint 2007
• Axum – Ping Pong with Dataflow Networks – Matthew Podwysocki refines his previous example of Axum by improving the communication using Dataflow Networks
• Commercial Suicide – Integration at the Database Level – Jak Charlton looks at the disadvantages and difficulties of using the database as your integration point.
• Why is AppDomain.AppendPrivatePath Obsolete? – CLR Team Blog start a new series of posts looking at why they make some APIs obsolete
• Multithreading: introducing Kernel objects – Luis Abreu explores ways of controling Multi Threaded code using Kernel objects, discussing the basics in this first post, and moving on to Multithreading: the Mutex kernel object – LA.NET [EN] looking at the Mutex object in more detail

Community

• Alt.Net UK Conference 2009 – After some problems yesterday with opening the registrations for the UK Alt.Net Conference, registrations will open today at 13:00 BST

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Software

• FluentNHibernate Contrib (FNH.Contrib) Is Alive! – Derick Bailey announces the release of FluentNHibernate Contrib, a library which brings a fluent style interface to the NHibernate Criteria API. This project has been kept separate from FluentNHibernate (which has a fluent interface for the configuration of NHibernate) to avoid introducing a new changing API into the main project. The Contrib project is looking for further contributions of other related code.
• NCover v3.1 unveiled! Bad code flees! – NCover announce Version 3.1 of NCover, their first major update to the Version 3 series. This release includes a bunch of new features based on feedback from the 3.0 release, along with a few changes and bugfixes.
• New release of the Ajax Control Toolkit – Bertrand Le Roy announces a new release of the Microsoft Ajax Control Toolkit which adds three new controls, a HTML Editor control, a ComboBox, and a colo(u)r picker

Information

• Donut Hole Caching in ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack follows on from a previous post on Donut caching (caching the outside of a page), with a look at caching the inside of the page.
• TeamCity.CodeBetter Project List – Kyle Baley provides an updated list of the projects being hosted on the CodeBetter TeamCity server. Lots of great opensource .NET projects are available on there in their latest build configurations.
• The fallacy of the always-valid entity – Jeffrey Palermo talks about validation and looks at whether you should write code in your entities which prevent invalid state.
• Programming Paradigms in Test Automation – Bj Rollison gives a rundown of the different types of test automation and how they can be useful.
• How to test your multi-threaded code (part 2 of 3)? – Eric De Carufel continues his series of posts on testing multi-threaded code using CHESS with parts two and part 3 continuing the investigations started on a simple account model.
• How Rapid is Rapid? How Quick is Quick? – Kendall explores the importance of speed in logging frameworks, looking at the importance of how the file is handled and the effect of some optimisations on the reliability of logging.
• jQuery Performance Rules – Best Practices for Speeding Up jQuery – An interesting post from a while ago, looking at the various things that you can do to ensure that your jQuery code is as optimal as possible

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Software

• Announcing PostSharp 1.5 RC1 – The PostSharp team announce the release of Version 1.5 Release Candidate, building on the success of the recent CTP release this version includes bugfixes for issues reported there and the team consider this release to be meeting the quality standards of the real release.
• AutoMapper – Release: 0.3.1 Beta – Jimmy Bogard’s AutoMapper project gets another update bringing in some new features for TypeConverters, bi-directional and parent child relationships and enumerations.
• Announcing FsCheck 0.6: Dot is the new pipe – Kurt Schelfthout announces the latest release of FsCheck, an F# version of QuickCheck (from the Haskell world) which introduces a Fluent Interface for use in C# and VB.Net
• elmah 1.0 Released – elmah (or Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET) is an application wide error logger and handler for ASP.NET applications, which is very easy to install can be applied to any ASP.NET application and does not require any re-compilation of your projects. This Release is the milestone 1.0 release

Information

• Announcing the SQL Server 2008 Developer Training Kit – ‘rdoherty’ announces the release of the Developer Training Kit for SQL Server 2008, now available as a free download from MSDN. This kit comprises of presentations, demos and hands on labs and introduces new features of 2008 with a focus on creating a web app which uses these features.
• ADO.NET team blog : Sneak Preview: Model First in the Entity Framework 4.0 – Noam Ben-Ami, Program Manager for the Entity Framework provides a look another of the new features of the forthcoming V4 release.
• YUI Compressor for Visual Studio – The Lavablast Team share a useful tip for getting your JavaScript minified using the YUI Compressor from within Visual Studio.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Announced, CTP Coming This Summer – SQLDenis highlights the announcement of an R2 release of SQL Server 2008 which will bring about enhancements for higher CPU counts, soem new features in Management Studio, Visual Studio integration, and a whole host more.
• PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know – John Robbins talks at length about the purpose and uses of PDB files, looking at what the store, how you can control them, and how the debugger uses them
• Axum – Introduction and Ping Pong Example – Matthew Podwysocki takes a simple example of message passing and implements it in Erlang and Microsoft’s newly released Axum
• Actors in F# – Niklas Gustafsson follows on from Mathew’s post and looks at using Actors in F# to implement a similar example.

Community

• Alt.Net UK Conference 2009 – Update – Registrations for the UK Alt.NET conference to be held at the beginning of August will open on Thursday 14th May at 13:00, this is later than previously advised

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