The Morning Brew

Monday is a Bank Holiday (public holiday) here in the UK, and in keeping with the Morning Brew tradition I will be taking Monday off, so your next instalment (#423) will be on Tuesday. Have a good weekend everyone.

Software

• Office Extensibility : Announcing the Release of the August 2009 CTP for the Open XML SDK – Brian Jones announces the 3rd CTP release of the Open XML SDK 2.0 which adds futher support for Office 2007 XML File Formats including semantic validation and markup compatibility and extensibility support
• Assembly List Import/Export Reflector Addin – Jason Haley releases another Reflector Add-in, this one allows you to import and export lists assemblies to load

Information

• Fun With Method Missing and C# 4 – Phil Haack explores the wonderful world of the C#4 dynamic support, and along with Method Missing creates a dynamic dictionary and puts it to work in an ASP.NET MVC solution
• F# First Class Events – Changes on Creating Events – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on F# Events with a look at how the F# language is evolving, exploring how events are created in the VS2010 timeframe.
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Lazy Loading – Davy Brion continues his series of posts on building a custom DAL, looking at how Lazy Load of entities can be achived. In A guide into OR/M implementation challenges: Lazy loading Ayende follows on from Davy’s post with a look at how NHibernate handles the Lazy Load
• NHibernate tips & tricks: Efficiently selecting a tree – Ayende also offers a useful post about loading Hierarchical trees of data using NHibernate, showing how you don’t need to round trip to the database for every set of children.
• NHibernate EnumStringType error, and praise for Open Source – Thomas Weller talks about an issue he ran into in NHibernate to do with having enums in the domain represented as strings in the database using the EnumStringType. Thomas shows how he worked through isolating the problem and fixing it in his copy of the NHibernate source, along with submitting a ticket to the project.
• Dynamic Part Instantiation in MEF – Nicholas Blumhardt shows off a new feature of the Managed Extensibility Framework which will not be a part of the .NET 4 release of MEF. This feature surrounds the ability to dynamically create parts in response to application events using a Declarative Context Adapter called PartCreator<T>
• Better Visual Studio F1 – Brian Schmitt follows on from the recent discussion on removing the MSDN Library install from your system and relying on online help with a nice little Visual Studio macro which can be assigned to your F1 key and will take the currently highlighted text and search a number of different sites for it – a worthy replacement I think.
• How To Get Started With Selenium Core And ASP.NET MVC – Derick Bailey gives a nice run through of working with Selenium Core to test your ASP.NET MVC applications interactively
• What’s the Difference? Part Three: fixed vs. fixed – Eric Lippert continues his ‘What’s the Difference’ series with a look at the fixed keyword and its role in making pointers work when there is a garbage collector wanting to move memory around.
• Auto-mocking hierarchies (a.k.a. recursive mocks) with Moq – ‘bengtbe’ follows on from Richard Dingwall’s post I linked to a few days back about complicated mocking requirements offering a suggestion of a Law of Demeter violation. This post talks about how the Moq recursive mock functionality makes the problem of complex mocking of this sort much easier
• SQL Server Express – A Complete Reference Guide – Pinal Dave post a great collection of resources about the SQL Server Express product.

Community

• Silverlight 3 Firestarter Event Streamed Live – Mike Ormond highlights the Silverlight 3 Firestarter event which is being streamed live on the 17th September. For us in the UK it will be a 4:45pm start.

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Software

• A Real WPF WebBrowser – Chris Cavanagh has been at work combining the Chromium and Awesomium projects with some WPF to create a fully functional WPF based web browser allowing you to have a web browser component in WPF applications which behaves well in the WPF layout system. Source is available on CodePlex, and there is a ClickOnce demo too.
• QuickGraph 3.3: Easy interop with Delegate Graphs – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces a new release of his QuickGraph library of graph data structures and algorithms which includes a number of bugfixes and new graph structures based on delegates
• Popfly Parting Present – Ben Anderson shares one part of the now close Popfly system, the game engine which is written in Silverlight. Unfortunately due to the nature of Popfly being a hosted serivce this is the only code that could be released as everything else is coupled to the hosting environment, other systems or shares IP with other products

Information

• Using one platform to build another [HTML 5’s canvas tag implemented using Silverlight!] – ‘Delay’ talks about the implementation the HTML 5 Canvas element in Silverlight, allowing browsers without support for canvas (but with Silverlight support) to run HTML5 Canvas based code. Full source code and sample applications are provided
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Session Level Cache – Davy Brion presses on with his series on building your own DAL / ORM with a look at session level caching using the identity map pattern
• A guide into OR/M implementation challenges: The Session Level Cache – Ayende follow on from Davy’s post with a look at how the Session level cache in NHibernate compares to Davy’s Implementation
• Starter Project Templates (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – ScottGu continues his series on .NET 4 / VS 2010 with a look a some of the new template projects available in Visual Studio for ASP.NET. These now offer the choice between empty solutions and solutions with some common functionality included
• Four Little Known, Helpful Methods, Properties, and Features for ASP.NET Developers – Scott Mitchell shares 4 lesser known ASP.NET framework features, the Application Offline functionality, Default Buttons, Context properties about local access and debug mode, and fully qualified URLs
• IL Stub Diagnostic Tool – Yongtai Zhu of the CLR Team talks about the IL Stub Diagnostic Tool and how it can help debug interop issues
• CodeProject: Embedding JavaScript into C# with Rhino and IKVM. Free source code and programming help – ‘GWBas1c’ combines IKVM and the Rhino projects to create the ability to run scripts in JavaScript which call .NET Code, and to run JavaScript code from your .NET applications in this Code Project Article with source released under The BSD license
• Plus (+) in .NET Class Names – Ibrahim Abdul Rahim talks about why you sometimes see a plus character in the typename for a .NET type, and how this is due to nested classes
• LINQ to NHibernate: A Vast Improvement – Russell Ball talks about his experience moving from the NHibernate criteria API to the newly RTM LINQ implementation.

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Information

• Clean Web.Config Files (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – ScottGu begins a series of posts looking at Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 features. This first post looks at the improved Web.Config file, which after a number of releases adding clutter to these configuration files the team have cleared it all out of the way of your applications config, leaving you with clean config for just your settings
• Law of Demeter is easy to spot when you need extra mocks – Richard Dingwall shows how friction setting up mocks is a sign of (and can be caused by) violations of the Law of Demeter
• The good and the bad of exception filters – Mike Magruder talks about exception filtering, looking at how it works at the CLR Level, some for the unexpected way it behaves, and talking about why so few languages implement support for it
• === vs == – Luis Abreu talks about the difference between the == and === operator in Javascript, and how using the === operator can, due to the lack of type coercion, lead to more understandable code / expected behavior.
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Hydrating Entities – Davy Brion continues his series on building a custom DAL with a look at filling his entities with data and Ayende follows up with this post ‘a href=”http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/08/26/a-guide-into-orm-implementation-challenges-hydrating-entities.aspx”>A guide into OR/M implementation challenges: Hydrating Entities to his shadow series looking at the NHibernate aspect of entity hydration
• Requiring SSL For ASP.NET MVC Controllers – Dan Wahlin shows how using an ActionFilter Attribute you can force certain controllers to run on a SSL secured HTTPS connection in ASP.NET MVC
• NerdDinner with Fluent NHibernate Part 2 – The mapping – ‘bengtbe’ continues the series of posts looking at replacing the NerdDinner sample projects data access with NHibernate using Fluent NHibernate. This part takes a look at the mapping process using Fluent NHibernate
• ASP.NET MVC + MVC Contrib + Unit Testing – Patrick Steele works through building an ASP.NET MVC Controller Action with full unit tests, in a step by step manner using the MVC Contrib Test Helper to assist in the testing

Community

• The SQL Server Conference – SQLBits goes West – 19-21 Nov 2009 – Newport – Registration for the three days (or any part of the 3 days) of SQLBits V has opened. You will probably want to register quickly for this one, especially the free Saturday conference as places will go quickly. The Thursday and Friday days are a training day and SQL 2008 R2 day, and both carry a fee, with a special rate for those registering early
• Alt.NET Bristol Beers #2 – Bristol’s second ALT.NET Beers event will be held on the 16th September 2009 at The Portcullis on Wellington Terrace.
• Free evening talk: DDD and relational databases, the value object dilemma, September 28th, London – Gojko Adzic will be speaking at the newly formed DDD User group in London, at Skills Matter on the 28th September, discussing persisting of value objects and the associated best practices and pitfalls.

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