The Morning Brew

Software

• Pex 0.16.40915.5: Moles, a lightweight Detour Framework, and better support for Test Frameworks – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of PEX which includes Moles, an extenion of the Stubs framework which enables you to replace any .NET method with your own implementation as a delegate. Other features include the inclusion of a HostType for Pex for better integration with the Visual Studio Unit Test Framework and easier integration with your test framework of choice
• Anti-XSS Library V3.1 – Microsoft have released an update to their Anti-Cross Site Scripting library whch helps to sanitize user provided HTML input. Details of the new features can be found in AntiXSS v3.1 new features by Syed Aslam Basha.

Information

• Actually Querying with the Specification Pattern – Chris Missal continues exploring the Specification pattern and implementations of it and the repository. In his post Chris explores backing the repository onto a collection allowing querying against that collection, and explores backing it onto Linq-to-mocks collections which are a part of the Moq framework
• Drawing the Line Between MVC Controllers and Application Services – Billy McCafferty talks about the decision of where to draw the line between your UI / presentation code and your application code, and how the evolution of application frameworks such as web forms, ASP.NET MVC and DD practices have changed the rules
• How to Unit Test ASP.NET MVC Controllers | Arrange Act Assert – Jag Reehal also talks a little about what should be a part of your ASP.NET MVC controller and looks at testing controllers in detail with a number of good examples.
• ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 5 – Working with Converters and the new CDN – Fredrik Normén continues exploring the new ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 Preview 5 release with a look at the new converters feature which works with the libraries databinding functionality, and also takes a look at how you can work with the new CDN from Microsoft which hosts the Ajax library .
• Microsoft Ajax CDN and the jQuery Validation Library – Stephen Walther talks about the Microsoft Ajax CDN which provides an edge content delivery network containing the ASP.NET AJAX libraries along with JQuery and the JQuery Validation library. In this post Stephen talks about the Validator library and how you can easily use it to gain client side validation.
• Ultimate IE6 Cheatsheet: How To Fix 25+ Internet Explorer 6 Bugs – A very useful Cheat Sheet from Virtuosi Media detailing how you can work around a number of common IE6 bugs, along with other coping strategies for working with this old (yet still officailly supported by MS) browser
• NCover and NUnit Can Play Nicely on x64 – Justin Etheredge talks about how he managed to get NUnit and NCover (free) to work together on the x64 platform. Having recently moved over to an x64 based machine I’ve found this type of gotcha to be time consuming and anoying.
• Gotchas: Adding Attributes to Properties on Interfaces in F# – Ade Miller looks at how adding attributes on properties as a part of interfaces in F# triggers a bug in the F# May 2009 CTP, and offers a work around for this problem which makes consumption with things like Unity from C# more difficult
• Interface Subscriptions Now Supported by MassTransit – Chris Patterson talks about a new feature being added to MassTransit to allow subscriptions based on interfaces to allow evolution of the messages being passed through Mass Transict and consumed .

Community

• Video of the David Ebbo presenting T4MVC to the Community For MVC virtual user group – Eric Hexter shares the video from last night’s Community Fro MVC group where David Ebbo talked about his work with T4 Templates in ASP.NET MVC to eliminate magic strings.

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Software

• Qizmt – MapReduce On Windows – Scott Watermasysk shares the news that MySpace are releasing their MapReduce based data mining framework as open source. The release is an alpha release, but already it includes support for building MapReduce jobs in C#, an IDE / Debugger, cluster administration, failover, etc. This one looks like one to watch
• Google Chrome after a year: Sporting a new stable release – Google announces a new stable version release of their Chrome web browser, taking Chrome to Version 3. The release contains a number of new features, along with what would seem to be a significant improvement in JavaScript performance

Information

• Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of .NET 4 / Visual Studio 2010 with a look at the ability to have your ASP.NET applications automatically start without requiring a request to be serviced, meaning that your users shouldn’t see the first hit to the application start up penalty any more
• Announcing the Microsoft AJAX CDN – Scott Guthrie also announces a new Content Delivery Network offering JQuery and ASP.NET AJAX libraries on a Microsoft powered edge delivery network offering the most speed possible for these shared libraries. This service is enabled very simply by setting one property of the Script Manager, and is free for both commercial and non-commercail use.
• Trying MonoDevelop On OS X – Davy Brion dips a toe into the world of cross platform .NET Development exploring the MonoDevelop IDE running on OS X
• Generating Dynamic Methods with Expression Trees in Visual Studio 2010 – Alexandra Rusina of the C# team takes a look at the extensions to expression trees which are a part of Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4, and shows how you can exploit these features to generate dynamic methods without resorting to writing MSIL.
• Hacking LINQ Expressions: Select With Index – Keith Dahlby looks at Linq Query expressions and attempts to add in support to the select operation to allow it to expose the item index along with the item. Check the comments for some other solutions to this problem.
• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report – Steve Strong gives another update on his work implementing the new Linq to NHibernate parser, which he is now making good progress with (which can be seen in the NHibernate Trunk)
• Reflection with dynamic – Kirill Osenkov talks about some work done by Paul van Brenk during his time as an intern on the Visual C# IDE Team on using dynamic to make calling private mentods using refection easier. Krill also talks about the design decisions behind dynamic (and other feautes) and how these principles give the resultant language such power.
• Generically Constraining F# – Part I – Matthew Podwysocki picks up on the work Jon Skeet has been doing looking at generic constraints in C# for Enums and delegates and shows how in F# all these things are possible, and how having the language designed by one of the key people in designing the generics functionality can help.
• Simple auditing using an NHibernate IInterceptor (Part 4) – Scott Kirkland continues his series looking at using the IInterceptor functionality of NHibernate to build auditing support in your applications. This part looks at hooking all the functionality into the NHibernate session and giving it a try
• Shrinkr – Url Shrinking Service Developed with Entity Framework 4.0, Unity, ASP.NET MVC And jQuery (Part 3) – Kazi Manzur Rashid continues his series on building a URL shortening service using .NET with a look at compiled query support in the Entity Framework
• Take Two: A jQuery WCF/ASMX ServiceProxy Client – Rick Strahl revisits the idea of having a jQuery powered proxy for ASMX and WCF web services rather than using the Microsoft AJAX libraries script reference. Full code of the implementation is provided.
• Microsoft Chart Controls to PDF with iTextSharp and ASP.NET MVC – Mike Brind takes a look at embedding the Microsoft Chart Control charts inside dynamically created PDF documents using iTextSharp and the ASP.NET MVC
• Best Practice No 4:- Improve bandwidth performance of ASP.NET sites using IIS compression – Shivprasad koirala takes a look at the built in compression in IIS and explores its usefulness, how it works and how to configure it in this Code Project article.
• Challenge: NH Prof Exporting Reports – Ayende issues a chalenge to create a reporting feature for NHProf creating PDF versions of some sample reports, and winning yourself some fame and a license to NHProf.

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Software

• AutoMapper 1.0 RC1 released – Jimmy Bogard annouces the release of AutoMapper 1.0 RC1, his library for easily mapping data between object graphs. This release brings some significant improvements and new features, and from here to the 1.0 release Jimmy will be making only bugfixes
• MonoTouch 1.0 goes live – Miguel de Icaza shares thw news of the release of MonoTouch 1.0, a commercial library for the Mono platform which makes it possible to work with the features found on the IPhone and IPod Touch. Licenses stare at $399 for a personal license.
• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit v3.1! – Jeff Brown announces the release of Gallio and MbUnit 3.1, a complete testing platform. Jeff’s post gives a really comprehensive run through of all the new features including such gems as video capture (useful for UI Testing), a bunch of enhancements to MbUnit such as new asserts, retry support, and details lots of platform improvements in Gallio.
• Object Hydrator fills your objects with random data…on purpose! – Ryan Smith talks about his Object Hydrator project, a testing tool which allows you to pass objects in and have them filled with test data using some predefined generators. A useful sounding tool, and something I can see being really useful for building demo data.

Information

• XmlSerializer in Action or why does my application start csc.exe processes? – Alois Kraus looks at what goes on behind the scenes in a .NET application when it tries to XML Serialise objects, and looks at how you can pre-prepare the serialisers and hook them into your code via an attribute
• Introducing PostSharp 2.0: #1 – NotifyPropertyChanged – Gael Fraiteur shows off the new PostSharp 2.0 with a look at creating an AOP implementation of NotifyPropertyChanged, showing the ease of use of the new version.
• What’s the difference between a partial method and a partial class? – Eric Lippert continues his ‘What’s the difference’ series with a look a the application of the partial keyword to classes and methods
• Object Overhead: The Hidden .NET Memory Allocation Cost – Andrew Hunter talks about the cost in memory terms of creating lots of objects, looking at some of the theoretical maximum numbers of objects on different hardware platforms due to these allocation limits.
• AOP can save you tons of repetitive code – Thomas Weller highlights the power of Aspect Oriented Programming to help reduce the clutter and common code. In his example he shows how validation logic can be reduced to simple attributes leaving the implementation of ou business objects very clear
• S#arp Architecture has Moved to GitHub (this ain’t yo momma’s SCM) – Billy McCafferty announces the move of his S#arp Architecture project to GitHub (where all the cool Open Source .NET projects seem to be moving their SCM), and talks a little about the future of the project.
• Append Only Models with NHibernate – Ayende talks about some of the differences when working with an append only model of data over the more common updateable model.
• ASP.NET MVC Translated for the Web Forms Programmer (4 in a series) – Sara Chipps continues her series looking at ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of an ASP.NET Web Forms programmer with a look at how ASP.NET MVC uses GET and POST rather than the postback model.
• Adventures in System.Diagnostics – The Sequel – Ralph Wheaton follows up on his previous post about System.Diagnostics with a look at using the Trace in production applications.

Community

• Scott Guthrie, Manchester (UK), 29th September PM – Mike Taulty shares the news of a Scott Guthrie visit to the North West of England (Manchester). Registration for this event is open, and If all 233 places have not been taken yet I encourage you to register now for what promises to be a great 4 hour event!
• Community For MVC – Virtual Meeting – Wednesday 9/16/2009 12:00 – 1:00 PM CST ; T4MVC presented by David Ebbo – David Ebbo will be speaking about the work he has been doing using T4 Templates in ASP.NET MVC to do some quite incredible things at this virtual user group meeting.
• Upcoming .NET events at Skills Matter: MassTransit, Future of Web development and Mono – Gojko Adzic highlights the next 3 months worth of free events to be held at Skills Matter, with three great speakers lined up to to talks about Mass Transit (Mike Hadlow), HTML5 and ASP.NET MVC 2 (Dylan Beattie) and Mono (Toby Henderson)

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