The Morning Brew

Software

• Now available: Small Basic v0.6 – SmallBasic gets another update, taking the version number to 0.6, and adding in German localisation, along with some bugfixes and a number of new features ranging from updates to the manual on Arrays, through to methods to measure time.
• WPF Control Verifier v0.1 Released! – Ivo Manolov announces the release of the WPF Control Verifier 0.1, part of WPF team’s three prong efforts to improve WPF application quality. The WPF control Verifier is a toll to assess the correctness of controls in the form of a number of style tests
• Remember, tomorrow is the last day to download Windows 7 Release Candidate – The Microsoft SMB Community Blog reminds us that today is the last day to get hold of the Release Candidate of Windows 7

Information

• VB and C# enhancements in VS 2010 – Soma Segar talks about some of the key language enhancements in Visual studio 2010 / .NET 4 for both VB and C# Devs
• Adding Syntactic Sugar to the Spark View Engine – Karl Seguin takes a look at the Spark View Engine for using in ASP.NET MVC, from the point of view of a green fields project and previous experience with the WebForms view engine
• Free (reg-ware) SQL Server eBook – "SQL Server Tacklebox" from Red Gate – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a new free e-book from Redgate which outlines DBA type tasks to help troubleshoot performance issues, ward off data corruption migrate data, etc. Registration is required to get the download.
• Simpler Transactions – Phil Haack looks at simplifying working with the .NET Transaction Scope using a couple of techniques to handle exceptions which should fail transactions
• Disclosing How C#-SQLite Was Ported to .NET – Abel Avram interviews Noah Hart for InfoQ discussing the approach taken to port SQLite to .NET
• Ruminations on Multi-Tenant Data Architectures – Scott Mitchell shares some of his experiences of creating and working with Multi-Tennancy applications of a number of different forms
• The first rule of exception handling: do not do exception handling. – Mike Hadlow talks about how you shouldn’t do exception handling at the micro level, allowing it to be a higher level concern, resulting in better application stability and user experience.
• ASP.NET MVC in Action: two free chapters and all source code online – Jeffrey Palermo’s book co-written with Ben Scheirman and Jimmy Bogard soon to be in print. You can get free copies of two chapters, and also get the (large amount of) sample code from the whole book now. Full E-book editions of the book are also available now.
• FluentMigrator Rising From The Ashes – Josh picks up the FluentMigrator database migrations project, and starts work on a fork to satisfy some more of his requirements. At the moment these changes are a fork, but Josh hopes that they ay make it back into the main project
• TDD: Asserting on test dependency code – Mark Needham talks about assertions on the setup work done for a test, and looks at why this is something of an anti-pattern and some ways to make it less necessary

Community

• Win ReSharper Personal Licenses in the Cool Snippets Code-Off competition! – Web 2.0 ASP.NET are running a competition where you stand a 1 in 100 chance of winning a personal license for ReSharper. To enter, you have to email a genius code snippet to them.

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Software

• Try SQL Azure Database CTP Today – The SQL Azure Team encourage you to try out their newly released CTP of Microsoft SQL Azure Database a cloud based relational database engine, which as of this release also includes a driver for PHP to access it. The service is free until Novemeber, when a charging model kicks in, see this post for more details.
• MVP Launches Bing Sharp API – Jas Dhaliwal highlights the work by Joseph Guadagno on wrapping the Bing API in C# providing a more friendly interface for C# developers to interact with Bing in their code.
• Reflector.Babel Addin – Jason Haley releases Version 1.0.0.0 of Reflector.Babel Add-in, an add-in for Reflector which provides a simple interface to the Babel Obfuscator

Information

• STM.NET Contracts aka Access Modifiers for Transactional Memory – Sukhdeep Sodhi explores some of the Code Contracts implemented in the STM.NET preview and looks at how they allow us to know what we can run inside a transaction, and also takes a look at the theory of why this matters.
• Unit Testing Has Changed How I Write Software – Joel Ross talks about how he overcame his failure to obtain the benefits of Unit Testing and Test Driven Development, and how embracing this style has changed the way he writes software.
• Preventing debugger property evaluation for side-effect laden properties – James Gregory talks about the DebuggerBrowsable Attribute which allows you to mark properties to not be evaluated automatically by the debuggers watch views, and talks about how this especially important if your properties have side effects.
• Introducing LazyLinq: Internals – Keith Dahlby talks about the implementation of the key interfaces in his LazyLinq project which aims to support lazy initialisation and deferred disposal of LINQ Query contexts
• Building Strongly-Typed Sessions in ASP.NET MVC – Jarrett Meyer shares a technique for creating strongly typed session wrappers in ASP.NET MVC allowing you to have sessions free from magic strings.
• Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 3 – Pros and Cons – Dan Wahlin talks about the up and down side of building a line of business application using Silverlight 3 based on his experiences creating a real Silverlight 3 application for a client to manage timesheets and jobs across their organisation.
• Multiple database support with Entity Framework – Muhammad Mosa talks about database independence in the Entity Framework, looking at how the providers allow this to work, and looks at the steps you should take in your model development to ensure that you obtain the benefits of database independence.
• Top 10 T-SQL Code Smells – Merrill Aldrich shares some signitures of T-Sql code smells and anti patterns along with giving some explanation of why these things are bad.

Community

• Silverlight 3 FireStarter | Thursday 2009.09.17 | Redmond, WA or Online – David Chou highlights a one day Silverlight 3 event which is being held in Redmond, WA, and also available online. The event is an all day event, starting 8:45am local time, which means that the online version will be manageable here in the UK after timezones are taken into account.
• NDC Video: Michael Feathers – Design Sense – Roy Osherove is republishing some of the videos from NDC which have disappeared from the official site – check out his other recent posts for the rest of them.

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Software

• Moonlight 2.0 goes Beta – Miguel de Icaza announces the newly feature complete beta release of Moonlight 2.0, the cross platform Silverlight 2 implementation
• Rest For ASP.NET MVC SDK and Sample – Phil Haack announces the latest offering from the ASPNET MVC team, a REST SDK and sample application running on top of the ASP.NET MVC framework. From Phil’s post it sounds like lots of this functionality may make the move into the framework over time.
• KIGG 2.5 Released – Amr ElGarhy announces the release of KiGG 2.5, an update to this ASP.NET MVC powered Digg clone. This release includes updates of various components utilised, such as Moq 3, DotNetOpenAuth 3.2, along with utilising the Entity Framework with a repository pattern.

Information

• IoC in .NET part 5: Using CastleWindsor container – ‘Sharpoverride’ continues its look at the various IOC implementations available with part 5 of the series exploring how the Castle Windsor Container compares in the sample scenario, and Part 6 explores the Microsoft Unity container in the same scenario.
• F# First Class Events – Creating Events – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on events in F# with a look at how you declare / create events and publish them in F#, comparing to the same process in C# along the way.
• Arrays of arrays – Eric Lippert takes a look at the humble array, and shows how they can quickly get confusing when you have arrays of arrays, exploring different possibilities of how things might work before explaining what actually happens
• A total n00b’s guide to migrating from a custom data layer to Nhibernate: getting started – Bertrand Le Roy takes a look into NHibernate and looks at the process of migrating from a custom data access layer to using NHibernate. This post and associated screen cast explores the getting started aspects of working with NHibernate, addressing the references required, and the session factory and mapping files.
• How-To: Using the N* Stack, part 4 – Jason Dentler continues his series of posts on the alternative .NET development stack, with a look into the operation of NHibernate, and writing some tests for the NH mappings backed onto SQLite.
• Law of Demeter: Some thoughts – Mark Needham talks about the Law of Demeter, and looks at its implications on getting data into the view, along with some ways of working that support the ideals of the LoD.
• GC Helper for Obtaining Live Instances of a Type, or How I Implemented GC.GetAliveInstancesOf<T>() – All Your Base Are Belong To Us – Sasha Goldshtein provides a demonstration implementation of a method that Patrick Smacchia asks for, which retrieves references to all the objects currently in the various generations of the Garbage Collector
• Never In Doubt: Do Not Make Every Method Virtual – Ward Bell kicks of an interesting debate about having methods declared as virtual by default, looking at a number of reasons why you wouldn’t want virtual. Ayende responds with his post Virtually everything talking about closed for modification and the importance of extensibility. Mark Nijhof also responds with his post Running with Scissors, looking at keeping parts of frameworks internal/sealed and the protecting people from doing something silly angle
• (Mis)using C# 4.0 Dynamic – Type-Free Lambda Calculus, Church Numerals, and more – Bart De Smet embarks on another brain exploding post, looking at the use of lambda calculus with the C#4 dynamic keyword allowing you to create type free lambda expressions
• LINQ to Ducks – Bringing Back The Duck-Typed foreach Statement To LINQ – Bart follows up with a shorter (and more easily understood) post looking at duck typing in the foreach statement with Linq,
• Automating .NET development (and NHibernate) with IronRuby + Rake – Tobin Harris takes a look at using IronRuby and Rake to automate various development processes.

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