The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows 7 RC Developer Essentials – Gavin Gear highlights the release of several Developer oriented items relating to the Windows 7 RC – the release of the Windows 7 RC SDK for application developers, and the release of Windows 7 RC WDK for driver developers.
• RELEASE: Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft .NET Framework (v0.85) – Nanda Lella highlights the release of the Windows API Code Pack for Microsoft.NET Framework, a source code library which provides access to the API features of Windows 7 and Vista from managed code

Information

• More ASP.NET MVC Best Practices – Maarten Balliauw continues his series of posts on ASP.NET MVC best practices with a number of tips on using model binders, managing data loading, removing logic from views, etc
• ASP.NET 4.0 Webforms Enhancements – Mike Ormond highlights some of the forthcoming features in ASP.NET 4.0 Web Forms – there are some really great features that the community has been wanting for a while in this next release.
• Do you really want moist test ? – Amey Dhoke talks about the importance of observing the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself’ principle in your tests looking at a number of the reasons in detail.
• How to test your multi-threaded code (part 1 of 3)? – Eric De Carufel looks into testing multi-threaded code using the CHESS project from Microsoft Research to test and find threading related issues. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
• Microsoft to turn .Net Micro Framework code, support over to the community – The latest casualty in the Microsoft Layoffs seems to have been the .NET Micro Framework Team, however rather than killing the project off, it looks like Microsoft will be opening up the source to both community and customers.
• Localization for scripts (JavaScript) and style sheets in ASP.NET – Michael Ulmann shares a technique for providing localised versions of JavaScript and CSS files by using an ASP.NET HttpHandler to pre-process the files in this Code Project article.
• C#: Using virtual leads to confusion? – Mark Needham looks at some code that caused confusion due to its structure, and looks at a clearer alternative.

Community

• Finding out about London .NET events – Ian Cooper highlights a very useful site listing all the known .NET events in London (UK) and beyond
• Win Your Copy: JavaScript for Programmers – Dzone are running a competition to win a copy of the book ‘JavaScript For Programmers’, all you have to do to stand a chance to win is tell them about your use of JavaScript or why you like jQuery. Closing date is 21st May

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #342

Software

• The Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) is here! – The Windows 7 Team Blog announces the public availability of the Windows 7 Release Candidate. The RC will be valid until 1st March 2010 giving you a good length of time to play with it (and also a good amount of time for Microsoft to release the final version in)
• MonoDevelop on MacOS X – Miguel de Icaza highlights the latest release of MonoDevelop for the Mac OS X. This version integrates nicely with OSX, and requires Mono 2.4 to be installed on the Mac.
• EntLibContrib – May 2009 Release and future plans – Grigori Melnik highlights the May release of EntLibContrib which will be the final release against Enterprise Library 3.1, and contains community additions and extentions. Work on the project will now focus on Enterprise Library 4.1
• Hyper-V RC Release Download Links – John Howard gathers together the Hyper-V related releases from Microsoft providing links to Windows 2008 R2 Release Candidate, Hyper-V Server RC, etc
• Common Logging 2.0 for .NET Released – Erich Eichinger talks about his recent release of the Common Logging 2.0 for the .NET platform, a common interface which provides an abstraction to a number of logging frameworks.

Information

• PTOM: Breaking Free from HttpContext – As a part of the Pablo’s Topic of the Month series, Colin Ramsay looks at separating out your dependencies on HTTPContext
• Put Your Pages and Views on Lockdown – Phil Haack looks at using some of the ASP.NET extensibility points to help implement policy about what can and can’t go into your views / ASPX files.
• Debugging NHibernate Exceptions – Derik Whittaker shares two tips for finding out more about what is going wrong when you get exceptions from NHibernate
• Iterating on an ASP.NET MVC Model Binder – K. Scott Allen takes an iterative development approach to refining custom ASP.NET MVC model binders, looking at a number of the common problems he sees with custom implementations along the way
• What goes into claims – ‘vibro’ talks about some of the terminology and theory behind claims based authentication systems like Geneva
• Using Behaviour-Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC – Part 1 – Tim Ross starts a series on Behaviour Driven Development. In this part Tim looks at the idea of stories, and introduces the automated specifications
• SerialSeb: My MVC Best Practices talk – Seb Lambla shares a recent video of his ASP.NET MVC Best Practices Talk. I recently saw this talk ‘in person’ and found it to be a useful consolidation of a large number of ASP.NET MVC related ideas
• Functionally Implementing Intersperse – Matthew Podwysocki looks into several different F# implementations of the intersperse function from Haskell, looking at how the different choices available can lead to very different implementations.
• Code Generation Should be the Nuclear Option – Justin Etheredge shares his (less than favourable) views on Code Generation, looking at the reasons he considers it to be the last resort.
• Top 5 Programmer Mistakes – Bill Tudor shares 5 general but common programmer mistakes ranging from writing too much code to programming by accident.

Community

• Manchester SQL Server User Group – 7th May – Tomorrow is the next Manchester (UK) area SQL Server User Group Meeting. This event boasts two technical sessions from Tony Rogerson on 23 years of hints and tips on SQL and using it and Chris Testa-O’Neill on Monitoring and Controlling Resources in SQL Server.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #341

I had an excellent and enjoyable weekend up in Glasgow attending the Developer Developer Developer Scotland event this weekend. Many thanks to all those involved in making it an event to be remembered.

Software

• Castle Windsor 2.0 RTM Released – Ayende shares the excellent news that the Castle Windsor Container has reached its milestone V2 release despite never having an actual v1 release.
• NUnit 2.5 Final Release – Charlie Poole announces the final release of NUnit 2.5, with considerable changes over the 2.4 versions, bring it to better parity with the other testing frameworks about.
• Pex 0.12.40430.3 : Exploration Tree View, Partial Stubs – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of Pex which fixes an installer issue, and brings with it new features in the area of Partial Stubs and an Exploration View which lets you see progress and review results more easily
• First Moonlight 2.0 Preview is Out – Miguel de Icaza announces the first preview release of Moonlight 2.0, the open source cross platform Silverlight implementation. This is a preview release, and as such is not yet feature complete, but represents great progress on this important community project

Information

• PTOM – Brownfield development – Making your dependencies explicit – Gabriel Schenker kicks off the ‘Pablo’s Topic of the Month’ posts over at LosTechies with a look at introducing Dependency Injection into existing code to reduce coupling.
• Metadata Classes – A Force for Good or Evil? 🙂 – Mike Taulty talks about a pattern he has spotted in a few recent Microsoft releases, which use partial classes and duplicate definitions of properties on the other side of a code generated partial class to allow you to add custom attributes.
• Metadata Belongs With The Class, Not With Another Class – Sasha Goldshtein follows up on Mikes post with some more discussion on this style of code.
• Stubs as Parameterized Models with Contracts – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux gives some details of a useful interaction between Stubs, Code Contracts and Pex
• Functional Composition and Partial Application – Matthew Podwysocki revisits some of the fundamentals of Composition and Partial Application
• Creating jQuery plug-ins from MicrosoftAjax components – Bertrand Le Roy talks about some technques to make working with Microsoft Ajax components and JQuery components easier to do from each other.
• The best way to learn new API > TDD! – Gøran Hansen talks about using Test Driven Development practices when learning a new API
• F#: Stuff I get confused about – Mark Needham looks at 2 common causes of confusion for developers getting used to F#
• Upgrading the default ASP.NET MVC project with IoC and the Unity Controller Factory – Kevin Hoffman talks about integrating ASP.NET MVC with the Unity framework using a custom Controller Factory

Community

• London AltNetBeers #8 – 12th of May, Back to the pub – Seb Lambla announces the next Alt.Net London event to be held on 12th May.
• Brighton ALT.NET Beers, Tuesday 5th May at the Prince Albert – Mike Hadlow highlights a similar event to be held in Brighton tonight, organised by Iain Holder
• Live Q&A with Scott Gutherie – Andrew Coates highlights the LIDNUG (Linked In Dot Net User Group) events coming up in the near future, including an appearance by non-other than Scott Gutherie. There is also an event this week featuring Stephen Toub on the Parallel Extensions. I attended ‘virtually’ at the last week event, and found it to be rather good. I look forward to the rest of these events

1 Comment »