The Morning Brew

Software

• TestDriven.Net 2.22: Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 – Jamie Cansdale announces the latest build of TestDriven.NET which adds in partial support for Visual Studio 2010. There have been significant changes in VS2010 which means that the command bar integration no-longer works, but shortcut keys will.
• IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – ScottGu announces a new set of add-ins for IIS7 which bring a number of SEO functions into the IIS Admin tool allowing you to manage robots exclusions, crawl your site looking for potential SEO problems, and build and maintain sitemaps
• Windows Mobile 6.5 Developer Tool Kit is Available! – Murray Gordon highlights the release of the Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK
• Ra-Ajax Version 2.0.0 Released Today – Kariem Ali talks about the release of Ra-Ajax, described as a no-JavaScript Ajax library for ASP.NET, this release brings a huge array of new features, along with a shift in licensing from LGPL to full GPL

Information

• In-Process Side by Side (Part1) – Luiz Fernando Santos talks about a .NET 4 feature called In-Process Side-By-Side which will allow multiple versions of the .NET CLR to be loaded inside the one process. This sounds like a great feature, as I remember the problems with IIS using ASP.NET 1.1 on a server with .NET 2 also installed, and .NET based COM components trying to load .NET 2
• How to implement "lock" with timeout? – Eric De Carufel shares some code to implement a C# style lock which has a timeout capability allowing code which may deadlock to safely stand off and retry.
• VS2010 Tutorial: Building VS Extensions with the Beta 1 SDK – Jason Zander gives a screenshot rich run through of creating an extension for Visual Studio 2010 using the Beta 1 SDK
• NHibernate – Beware of inadvisably applied caching strategies – Ayende talks about how bad caching settings in NHibernate can cause more performance headaches than they solve. I also think that the title of this post (minus the NHibernate) is a good general rule regarding caching
• Fighting technical debt with the wall of pain – Jimmy Bogard talks about the concept of Technical Debt, and looks at three strategies for dealing with it, randing from the bad to the good.
• LINQ to SQL changes in .NET 4.0 – Damien Guard talks about the changes and improvements that have been made to LINQ to SQL in the upcoming .NET 4.0 release
• Developing Component-Driven Applications powered by IoC Containers – Rinat Abdullin talks about Inversion of Control and how introducing an IOC container can help you componentize your applications
• ASP.NET MVC Training Kit – Mike Ormond highlights the availability of a training kit for ASP.NET MVC, including Demos, hands on labs and slide decks.
• Mechanisms for Creating Tasks – ‘toub’ talks about some tricks you can do when working with creating tasks using the new System.Threading.Tasks.Task functionality of .NET 4
• SOLID and DRY Part 2 – Jeremy Likness serves up the second half of his 2 part series on the SOLID and DRY principles, looking at the Interface Segregation Principle and Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection
• Software Development: Traditional or Alternative? – Philippe Destoop compares Traditional Waterfall software development with the more Agile techniques and Scrum, looking at how you can make a decision about the best one for you.

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I’ve noticed an increase in readership of The Morning Brew in the past few days, so hello to the new readers, and thanks to Scott Mitchell for including The Morning Brew in his MSDN Magazine Toolbox Columnand to Roy Osherove for the links in his recent post on .NET daily news.

As always, if you see an article that you think would be worth including in The Morning Brew, drop me an email and let me know about it!

Software

• Sandcastle Help File Builder – Release: 1.8.0.2 Beta – The SandCastle Help File Builder gets an updated beta including some of the re-workings that will allow them to integrate this into Visual Studio as a Visual Studio package
• Windows 7 Coming October 22 – M3 Sweatt highlights the news that it is looking like an October 22 release for Windows 7
• ANTS Memory and Performance Profiler 5 Release Candidates Now Available – Bart Read highlights the release of the release candidate of the new Version 5 of ANTS profilers for both memory and performance. This release includes (unofficial) support for CLR 4 beta, along with Windows 7 support, and a whole bunch more

Information

• Your testbed has to have the same volume of data as on production in order to simulate normal usage – SQLDenis talks about the importance of testing with real world quantities of data, and looks at some of the common problems that can occur if you don’t.
• Internal DSLs, method chaining and discoverability – Seb Lambla talks about the current trend towards Fluent Interfaces, and how they, and method chaining can have discoverability problems when it comes to trying to use the API.
• Update on Windows Azure – Joe Stagner gives an update on some of the work that has been done to Windows Azure since the MIX announcements
• Specifying Inversion of Control through Contracts for Interfaces – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux talks abotu Interfaces, IOC/DI and Contracts, and looks at how you can pull all of them together
• F#: Tuples don’t seem to express intent well – Mark Needham talks about the negative side of Tuples, looking at how they, as a very generic container of data, don’t express what the data is well.
• An Alternative Approach To Strongly Typed Helpers – Phil Haack talks about different techniques for having strongly typed helper methods in ASP.NET MVC. Also worth checking out is the ASP.NET MVC Performance slide deck Phil mentions
• Unit Testing JavaScript Using JQuery QUnit – AzamSharp explores using QUnit to unit test JQuery based JavaScript code
• ASP.NET MVC and the templated partial view (death to ASCX) – Jeffrey Palermo looks at a technique for decomposing ASP.NET MVC pages into partial views using ASPX pages and masterpages to provide a means of pulling it all togogether
• Visual Studio 2010: Multiple web.config versions – Gunnar Peipman talks about the new Visual Studio 2010 feature which brings support for multiple web.config files, allowing yo to have different ones for each build type/configuration.
• NHibernate Mapping <map/> – Ayende continues his expose on the collection mappings in NHibernate with a look at the map element
• Fluent Silverlight – Auto Wiring INotifyPropertyChanged – Ray Houston picks up the torch from Gabriel Schenker and continues talking about their Fluent Silverlight project with a look at their INotifyPropertyChanged implementation
• Microsoft Web Platform Installer – ScottGu gives one of his usual indepth rundowns of a current Microsoft Web Project, looking at the details behind the Web Platform Installer which makes it really easy to get various Microsoft (and non-MS) web technologies, platforms and applications installed on a server
• Domain-Driven Design: Two basic premises – Artur Trosin talks about two of the main concepts in Domain Driven Design, and how they are an aggregation of a number of other practices to handle complexity

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Software

• SubMain acquires GhostDoc, releases new version, integrates it with CodeIt.Right – SubMain have taken on the GhostDoc tool, and have been further developing it to add in VB support, VS2010 support and done some re-architecting. Part of the agreement is that GhostDoc will continue to have a free version. Roland Weigelt, the orignial creator of Ghost Doc gives further details in his post The Future of GhostDoc
• Nova Commons – Nova Software make their first release of Nova Commons an application architecture for MVC which pulls together a number of common patterns along with a number of other open source frameworks and tools
• MsSqlSchemaDoc Version 4.2 Released – Henk Oberholzer announces version 4.2 of his Sql Server Schema Documentation tool. This release fixes problems with triggers linked to more than one event.

Information

• Free ASP.NET 4.0 beta hosting available – Gunnar Peipman highlights the availability of free ASP.NET 4.0 hosting from the team over at ORCSWeb. The hosting is free until October, allowing you to host your .NET 4 creations making use of SQL2008 and all the new toys in the .NET Framework
• Git For Windows Developers – Git Series – Part 1 – Jason Meridth starts a series looking at running the Git version control system on Windows machines. This first part runs through the setup and gets you up and running with your code in Git.
• Starting Out in Web, SharePoint or Mobile Dev? Why not Ramp Up? – Mike Ormond highlights the Ramp Up series of online training in Web, SharePoint and Mobile Development on the Microsoft platforms
• Why goto Still Exists in C# – Steve Wellens looks at s situation where he considers the goto statement to be vital to improve the readability and comprehension and simplicity of code.
• Anti-Patterns and Worst Practices – Utils Class – Chris Missal continues his Anti patterns series with a look at the somewhat nasty catch all of a Utils class, suggesting that you should actually create classes for the particular purposes of your utility functions.
• Abstract Class Vs Interface – Arati Kadi explores the differences between abstract classes and interfaces in this Code Project article
• Fluent Silverlight – Part 1 – Gabriel Schenker introduces the work he and Ray Houston have been doing on creating a fluent interface for Silverlight to help improve the easy of working with Silverlight and implementing the Model View View Model. The Second part (Fluent Silverlight – Part 2 – Binding Properties) of the series explores property binding in their framework
• NHibernate Mapping – <list/> – Ayende talks about the <list /> mapping type in NHibernate looking at its differences from other types of collection and looking at how the data is stored.
• Is Code Complete? – Saurabh_Saxena gives a brief run down of a number of common key software development principles illustrating a number of them with code examples.

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