The Morning Brew

…hopefully with fewer embarrassing typos today 🙂

Software

• Downloads for SharpDevelop 3.1 – SharpDevelop 3.1 has reached its official release, which from the look of the change log is pretty much the same as the RC2 release with an update to the version of NUnit and some fixes for NRefactory.
• XAML Power Toys v5 Published – Karl Shifflett releases Version 5 of his WPF and Silverlight XAML Power Toys. XAML Power Toys is a VS 2008 add-in which brings enhanced functionality for working with XAML to build line of business applications by having generations tools for data entry forms and common controls functionality
• Typemock Isolator 5.3.5 is out! – The TypeMock team announce the release of their latest edition of TypeMock Isolator. This updated version brings a new API for calling inaccessible methods and events along with support for custom verification along with the usual bugfixes.

Information

• Make It Easy To Refactor – Jak Charlton talks about some factors that can make a code base easier to refactor, just by making some sensible decisions in naming and style of coding/testing
• Tip/Trick: Increase your VS screen real estate by disabling HTML Navigation Bar – ScottGu shares a simple tip which can gain you back a couple of lines of screen space in the Visual Studio Editor when working with HTML documents
• Unit Testing with jQuery using FireUnit & QUnit – Elijah Manor gives a short introduction to testing JavaScript using FireUnit and QUnit in this 5 minute screencast.
• .NET University is Live – Charlie Calvert highlights two great learning resources for .NET Developers, the .NET University (from Doug Turnure and Mark Dunn) and Microsoft’s MyRampUp.com. Both offer a range of learning resources including slide decks, speaker notes, demos, labs sessions and webcasts.
• Update on the Next Microsoft .NET Services CTP – The .NET Services Team share some information on what will be included in their October CTP release
• Why do ref and out parameters not allow type variation? – Eric Lippert takes a look at Ref and Out parameters and looks at how they differ in allowing variation of the types in question to be supplied
• Mocks are not about isolation, but about responsibilities – Gojko Adzic sumarises a presentation by Steve Freeman at CITCON Europe about the use of mock objects, what they were intended for originally and how you should use them. Some interesting thoughts
• TDD: Tests that give us a false confidence of coverage – Mark Needham talks about some classes of test which do nothing to improve the confidence in the application due to the way the tests exercise the code but don’t actually check anything important is correct
• Download four free sample chapters from Visual Web Developer book – Mikhail Arkhipov of the Visual Web Developer Team highlights the availability of four chapters from Jim Cheshire’s book on Visual Web Developer 2008 which are available for free download
• A Developer’s Guide to the WCF REST Starter Kit – Aaron Skonnard highlights the availability of his latest MSDN whitepaper which takes the covers off the WCF REST Starter Kit and explores the various features of this new library

Community

• CodeCamp.pl – October 17th sees Cracow host the Polish CodeCamp, with a great line up of well known speakers covering a range of topics from .NET to Business Intelligence in English language sessions. The best bit is that the event is free to attend (registration required)
• Announcing a new kind of events: AltNetCrossTalks, this Friday at MRM! – Seb Lambla announces the first of a new type of cross technology event, the AltNetCrossTalk. This first instance is occurring this Friday and Ruby, Ruby on Rails and IronRuby are the topics

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UPDATE: Corrected typo in DynamicWrapper summary – thanks @martinrue for pointing it out

Software

• Introducing DynamicWrapper – Brian Genisio shares his DynamicWrapper project which allows you to apply an interface to any object and call those methods on the object, allowing for suck duck typing in static languages.

Information

• A Pair Programming Article…in the New York Times?! – Joey deVilla highlights a mainstream media article about pair programming in the New York Times. This may be a good article to reference if ever needing to convince a non-technical audience of the benefits.
• Fluent API for .NET RIA Services Metadata – Nikhil Kothari shares a first attempt at creating a fluent interface for the RIA Services meta data, replacing the buddy class approach with some solid code
• JavaScript and its love for zeroes – Sergio Pereira talks about some of the issues with number conversion froms strings in JavaScript, and the importance of the radix parameter
• WPF Designer sample code is posted – Jim Galasyn highlights the release of some code samples for creating custom design time functionality for your WPF controls including custom property editors and control adorners. Silverlight samples are due to be released soon.
• Lazy loading, Inheritance, and Persistence ignorance (part 2) – Thomas Weller continues his series looking at the common pitfall of ORM loaded polymorphic objects and proxies. In this part Thomas looks at the first of the possible work around to help avoid these problems
• An in depth look at the Historical Debugger in Visual Studio 2010 (Part VI) – Habib Heydarian takes a look at the historical debugging capabilities of Visual Studio 2010
• NHibernate, Inverse, and Object Associations – Jonathan Oliver talks about the inverse attribute in NHibernate, and the important issue of collection ownership with NHibernate
• The 23 Gang of Four Design Patterns .. Revisited – Subodh Pushpak shares a nice short summary of the patterns outlined in the Gang of Four book on Design Patterns, with a short summary of each.
• Why is ‘Buy’not always better than ‘Build’ – Mike Hadlow talks about the important considerations about buying systems and customising versus creating a custom system from scratch.
• Hacking LINQ Expressions: Join With Comparer – Keith Dahlby looks at creating SQL like joins in Linq expressions by adding support to join to objects based on a comparer implementation
• Open Source development model – Ayende shares some interesting thoughts on Open Source development, encouraging adoption and the CodePlex Foundation
• Control web.config inheritance with IIS 7, ASP.NET options – Steve Schofield highlights three ways you can control the inheritance of the sections of web.Config with applications in multiple virtual directories and site roots in IIS 7.
• Optimizing Windsor – Ayende talks about some optimisation work he recently carried out relating to large numbers of Windsor component registrations, identifying an O(N^2) issue and how ti was resolved

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Software

• xVal v1.0 Now Available – Steve Sanderson announces the version1 release of xVal his Validation Helper for ASP.NET MVC. New in this release are support for dynamic client side validation summaries, support for remote ajax based validation, and localisation into a number of languages. This post also give a simple getting started tutorial

Information

• Getting to know .net build tools – Garren explores two of the common .NET Build tools, looking at NAnt and Rake, showing a configuration for a CI build in each.
• How A .NET Developer Hacked Out A Rake Task – Derick Bailey takes a look at building a ‘real’ Rake custom task, and then looks at some alternative ways of handling dependencies in custom tasks in his next post An Alternate Way To Handle Task Dependencies In Custom Rake Tasks
• The cost of latent logging code – Mark S. Rasmussen shows a useful technique for improving the performance of logging code when logging is disabled by deferring the execution of building the message until we know logging is on, and maintaining noise free logging code.
• Integrating OpenID in an ASP.NET MVC Application using DotNetOpenAuth – Rick Strahl shows how he integrated Open ID authentication into his CodePaste.Net code sharing application using the DotNetOpenAuth library
• The case for two-way mapping in AutoMapper – Jimmy Bogard talks about some of the requests he gets for features for his AutoMapper library, and looks at the core use cases it was developed for. Jimmy also asks the community for the use cases where they might require two way mapping
• Introduction to Data Binding in Silverlight 3 with CTP2 – Shayne Burgess runs through the process of working with the ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 CTP2 release support for databinding in Silverlight 3 applications, showing an end to end tutorial to build some simple functionality using this feature.
• Developing for Surface, part I – Dennis Vroegop starts a series of posts talking about development for the Microsoft Surface, proving an interesting insight into the device and its features for those of us who aren’t lucky enough to have one to play with
• NHibernate Image User Type – Ricardo Peres looks at how you can create a custom type in NHibernate to support image data stored in your database being pulled out and sent back via NHibernate
• Professional NHibernate Support – Steve Strong shares the news of his employers new support offerings for NHibernate, joining the support programme Ayende announced recently. This one is priced slightly differently, with ‘points’ being purchased and support activities costing specific numbers of points
• Bringing The Heat With Dynamic – Justin Etheredge re-invigorates his enthusiasm with the C# language (and the .NET platform) by taking a look at the dynamic support being added in V4, and talks about how it moved C#/.NET ahead of other platforms
• Fun with C# 4.0’s dynamic – Bertrand Le Roy discusses some of the hotly debated items arising from the introduction of the dynamic keyword and looks at some of its power, suggesting that given some time everyone will find it indispensable.
• TDD: Testing with generic abstract classes – Mark Needham takes a look at using abstract classes to provide the basis for testing similar structures in the model.

Community

• Video of the Continuous Integration workshop – Eric Hexter shares some video / slide content from the recent Continuous Integration Workshop held in Austin. The three hours of content include coverage of automated build and deploy, continuous database integration, continuous testing, and software configuration management. Well worth checking out

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