The Morning Brew

Software

• C# Sqlite – Miguel de Icaza highlights the work by Noah Hart on porting SqlLite from C to C#, and the creation of the C#-SQLite project. This is a line by line port, with some reasonably impressive performance, and plenty of room to improve by migrating more of the code to a C# way of working. Plans are also in place to make the port run on Silverlight.
• Released: Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 – Karin Meier highlights the release of the Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET 3.5 SP1, released yesterday to coincide with the release of Windows 7 to MSDN/TechNet/BizSpark subscribers
• Utility to generate Visual Studio solution file for a group of projects – Vagif Abilov shares a simple utility he wrote to build a solution file which contains all the projects located in a specific root directory, allowing you to exclude certain ones by way of a filter.

Information

• Not everything derives from object – Eric Lippert addresses another C#/.Net related myth, that all types in .Net derive from System.Object, and Eric shows how this isn’t actually true, but that most types do.
• What’s new in System.Net.Mail – Network Class Library Team continue with their series of posts on the new features of various parts of the .NET networking namespaces with a look at some of the new features of .NET 4 with respect to sending mail
• Vista Users – Uninstall Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 before upgrading to Windows 7 – Scott Hanselman shares some useful information for anyone running Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 beta 1 on Vista who wants to upgrade to Windows 7 – If this is you, you need to read this to avoid breaking your .NET install.
• I Hate Global.asax – Harry Pierson talks about his dislike of Global.asax, and how it makes implementing the special events of an ASP.NET Application like Application Start/End much more difficult in dynamic languages
• Pipeline and Yield in C# – Jeremy Likness looks at the pipeline pattern, and how the yield operator provides a nice means of implementing it
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 20: NHibernate – Brad Abrams series on Silverlight 3, RIA and related technologies seems to be expanding in scope – In this part Brad replaces his Entity Framework implementation in the Domain Service with an NHibernate Data Access implementation, without needing to change any other code
• ASP.NET MVC 2 – Buddy Classes for your models – Charles Vallance explores the new ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview release, looking at the new Buddy Class / Metadata classes which allow you to decorate your types with attributes which allow you to control how the model is represented in auto generated renderings.
• Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0 available on Amazon – Simone Chiaretta announces the release on Amazon of the ASP.NET MVC book he co-authored with Keyvan Nayyeri. The book is coming to Amazon UK, and traditional book stores shortly. Free sample chapters are available, as is the table of contents and index. Congratulations on getting to this point guys!
• 100 copies of Bridging the communication gap for 2.56 each – Gojko Adzic is celebrating this 256th blog post with a special offer on the e-book edition of his book ‘Bridging the Communications Gap’ which looks at improving communication with customers and the rest of the software development team. The offer runs until 100 copies have been sold at the special price of £2.56 / $3.60

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #407

Software

• WikiPlex v1.1 Released – WikiPlex, the wiki engine which is used on CodePlex gets a new release, bringing in Mono Compatibility, internal changes to the syndication feeds, ands some changes to the macro parsing.
• Continuous Testing In .NET – Tim Ross introduces his project AutoBuild which monitors a source directory, and runs a NAnt build script when ever a file changes, allowing you to run your unit tests with every save of a file, thus enabling the idea of Continuous Testing

Information

• Improvements to the Generated SQL in .NET 4.0 Beta1 – Kati Iceva of the Entity Framework Team shares some of the details of the way they have been improving the SQL generated by the Entity Framework, looking at before and after queries showing the improvement.
• Late-Bound Invocations with DynamicMethod – Jimmy Bogard talks about the use of light weight code generation using the DynamicMethod approach which he utilised in his recent improvements to AutoMapper
• Glass Effect Extender Library for your Applications. – Raghed Al-Tayeb explores how you can obtain the Glass UI effect in your applications by using a simple library to handle the underlying API calls
• New .NET Attributes – Morgan Skinner gives a simple example explaining the two new .NET 4 attributes for optional parameters and default values
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 19: ASP.NET Dynamic Data – Brad Abrams continues with his Mix 09 Business Application Demo update, with a look at creating an admin back end for the site using the ASP.NET Dynamic Data functionality
• Testing Tool Tour : QuickNet Preview – ‘kilfour’ shares a preview of a poor mans C# version of QuickCheck, the functional property based testing tool, illustrating an example of it in use against that of more traditional unit testing.
• Community Convergence LII – Charlie Calvert links to a number of great C# related articles, a few of which I’ve already linked to, but there are a good number of new ones worth checking out.

Community

• AltNetBeers #13 – StackOverflow edition – Seb Lambla announces the plans for the 13th AltNet Beers event which will be being held in the evening of 28th October, to coincide with the StackOverflow Conference in London.
• NRWConf.de/09 – The largest German Community Conference is scheduled to take place on 28th August in Wuppertal, Germany, and will consist of 4 tracks spread over 11 hours. The site and conference are to be held in German, and from my limited German comprehension skills it looks like there is a 15 Euro cost to cover hospitality, but other than that the conference is free – but please correct me if this is wrong.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #406

This will be the last of the late editions for a while, my summer break is over and its back to work for me tomorrow so The Morning Brew should be returning to its more usual 8-8:30am (UK) publishing time.

Software

• Spec# and Boogie Released on CodePlex – Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of Spec# and Boogie on CodePlex under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (MSR-SSLA) and Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) respectivly.

Information

• Default Templated Views – Phil Haack explores a good implementation of Templated Views providing a common scaffolding within your ASP.NET MVC Views.
• Tracking Dangling Object References In Silverlight – Davy Brion shares a technique for tracking the objects you create to help identify dangling object references in Silverlight, although the concepts apply anywhere
• An introduction to UI Automation – with spooky spirographs – Samuel Jack explores the UI Automation features introduced in .NET 3.0 which allow you to explores and interact with the user interface of Windows and any programs running within it
• Parallel Extensions and I/O – ‘dashih’ looks into using the Parallel extensions to provide parallelism in IO operations, along with highlighting some of the things you have to consider around thread safety.
• Exceptions: The Airbags of Code – Joey deVilla talks about Exceptions, looking at the common division by zero example, and argues that exceptions should not be considered a catch all, and that defensive programming should be used in the first instance, with the exceptions being the last resort. Some good comments on this post too.
• Analyzing AutoMapper performance – Jimmy Bogard looks at the performance of his AutoMapper project, and talks about the optimizations performed to make the times more respectable.
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 18: Custom Linq Provider – Brad Abrams continues his monster series with a look at how any Linq providers can be used with the RIA Services, and looks at making a custom Linq provider
• Unflattening a list, or"How to ask ‘how to’" – Kyle Baley asks for suggestions about how to unflatten a list and gets some really good responses in the comments
• Coding4Fun : Todo: You stuff on your desktop – Clint Rutkas runs through the creation of a simple WPF based To-Do list manager project as a part of the Coding4Fun series – full source and binary of the project are available
• Using Reflection to enforce your conventions – Derik Whittaker talks about how he used reflection to verify that all his cross process boundary types had a Serializable attribute applied, by using the naming convention, allowing these classes to be identified before runtime.

Community

• Microsoft PDC09 – Microsoft PDC 2009 to be held in LA is now accepting registrations, and until 15th September will be offering a $500 discount

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #405