The Morning Brew

Software

• xUnit 1.5 Released – Unit Testing Framework for .NET – David Hayden highlights the RTM release of xUnit.Net 1.5 which brings a number of new features of the previous official release, such as improved 64bit support, numerous improvements to the Gui test runner, MSBuild support, ASP.NET MVC 1 & 2 preview 1 support, and much more
• Prototype 1.6.1; Speed up, clean up, and team up – Ajaxian highlights the release of version 1.6.1 of the Prototype Javascript library. This new release includes full support for Chrome v1 and higher, Internet Explorer 8, along with support for the newly introduced IE8 specific mouse events, along with a number of performance and development experience improvements.

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• First videos of the structured editor prototype – Kirill Osenkov releases source and binaries of a project from his MSc work building a structured editor for C#. This is a very interesting prototype of how a richer development experience could be achieved by having an editor which works directly with a syntax tree of the code. – Interesting and impressive stuff.
• When framework designers outsmart themselves [How to: Perform streaming HTTP uploads with .NET] – ‘Delay’ looks at performing http uploads from .NET with progress reporting, and shows one of the gotchas of a simple implementation
• TwoWay binding to Name/Value Pairs – Damon Payne shows a technique using Reflection Emit to provide full two way data binding to name value pairs in a Silverlight application, highlighting along the way some of the limitations of the cut down framework available in Silverlight.
• Monitoring Production Performance – Davy Brion shows a simple method of gaining performance reporting of your code allowing you to define a threshold for a particular process and log when it takes longer – simple stuff, and something I’m sure can be built on.
• Automating database script execution – Thomas Weller shares his technique for creating and database schema using a test framework to do the running for him. Automation of this type of thing can be a very useful thing on a project, and this is one of many ways of achieving it.
• Commercial Support for NHibernate – Ayende announces a commercial support programme for NHibernate, available for a monthly fee dependent on the number of support calls you may raise. This type of support may lift one of the barriers to the use of NHibernate by companies who don’t like the lack of official support Open Source projects often have. Rob Conery is also considering setting up a SubSonic Support scheme in a similar way.
• Forcing event unsubscription – Fabrice Marguerie talks about events as a common source of memory leaks, and shows a technique for removing all event subscriptions which could be used in a dispose method.
• Simple Auditing Using an NHibernate IInterceptor (Part 2) – Scott’s Blog – Scott Kirkland continues his series looking at implementing auditing functionality using NHibernate’s IInterceptor functionality.
• 5 Minute Overview of MVVM in Silverlight – John Papa gives a simple and concise explanation of the Model View – View Model approach in Silverlight

Community

• Microsoft UK BizSpark Summit – September 28th, 2009 – Marc Holmes highlights the UK BizSpark Summit being held at the end of the month in London, and bringing together participants of the BizSpark programme for networking, workshops and a keynote by a well known speaker.
• Alternative Network Group News – AltNetBeers #12 – Seb Lambla announces the 12th Alt Net Beers event to be held on the 16th September, with Udi Dahan visiting.
• Silverlight Firestarter – Watch it Live Online or in Person – John Papa reminds us all of the Silverlight Firestarter event which is available in person or virtually on the 17th September, and gives some details of what you can expect of the event

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Software

• MVVM Light Toolkit V1.1.1: What’s new? – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 1.1.1 of the MVVM Light Toolkit providing a foundation for implementing Model View – View Model in Silverlight and WPF applications. This minor update brings a number of new features, and a new standalone installer. Laurent also runs through the process of Installing the MVVM Light Toolkit in this a related post.
• PowerCommands for Reflector – Jason Haley releases a single package containing the majority of his Reflector Add-ins, making it easier to get all the good stuff, and much easier to upgrade to keep them up to date.
• CppDepend goes RTM Today – Patrick Smacchia shares the news of the release of CppDepend, the C++ version of NDepend, bringing the power of NDepend to those working with C++ code.

Information

• Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Refcard – Keyvan Nayyeri announces the release of the Getting Started With ASP.NET MVC DZone Reference Card which he has created along with his co-author from the book Beginning ASP.NET MVC, Simone Chiaretta
• Dynamically Loading Config Files – Joel Ross continues on from his post on dyamically loading assemblies with look at doing the same for configuration files
• Lazy loading, Inheritance, and Persistence ignorance (part 1) – Thomas Weller begins a series looking at some of the difficulties with working in a truly persistence ignorant way when the persistence frameworks introduce complications such as the use of proxies when lazy loading.
• How To Publish an ASP.NET Website from a Command Line – Syed Aslam Basha shares a simple batch file to help with the deployment of ASP.NET websites.
• A Fix We Really Need in MEF for .NET 4.0 – Kathleen Dollard talks about a problem she has encountered with the Managed Extensibility Framework’s attributed model in an attempt to drum up community support to have it fixed before the release.
• Extensible Windows Azure projects using MEF – Magnus Mårtensson talks about the AzureContrib enhanced support for Work Service and looks at how MEF was used to power it
• ASP.NET MVC: Using RESTful Architecture – Srinu Tamada explores how you can use ASP.NET MVC in a RESTful way, and suggesting that you are writing an application rather than a site in ASP.NET MVC
• "Screen Activator" Pattern – Jeremy D. Miller talks about what he calls the Screen Activator Pattern, but asks the community if they can come up with a better name for it.

Community

• Next European VAN on 05 October 2009 – Jan Van Ryswyck announces the next Europe Virtual ALT.NET Event, to be held in October. These events are virtual, meaning you attend from the comfort of your own PC using Live Meeting. This next event is going to be a presentation by Arnon Rotem-Gal-Oz looking at the xsights architecture, evolving architecture and real world SOA.
• Scottish Developers: Tayside DevDrinks – Andy Gibson issues a reminder of the Scottish Developers Tayside Drinks event, to be held tomorrow night in Dundee. The event is free form, with no speaker, agenda or registration – just good conversation of a developer nature.

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Many thanks to Greg Duncan for making ‘The Morning Brew’ the second feed featured in his ‘A Feed You Should Read‘ series

Software

• Doloto on DevLabs – Soma Segar announces the release of Doloto o the Microsoft DevLabs site. Doloto is a tool which aims to help mak the initial load size of modern ajax enabled sites smaller, and therefore make the application start quicker
• ASP.NET MVC MvcSiteMapProvider 1.0 released – Maarten Balliauw announces the 1.0 release of his ASP.NET MVC Site Map Provider
• .NET Micro Framework 4.0 Goes to Beta!!! – The .NET Micro Framework team announce the beta releases of the .NET Micro Framework 4.0. There are two beta programmes, one for the SDK and one for the porting kit. This post also summarises some of the new features
• Exploitable Crash Analyzer – Sasha Goldshtein highlights the release of a debugger extension which looks into crash dumps and assesses the security risks associated with the the crash. Sasha also shows an example of the extension in use.

Information

• Code Contracts.Net to Xml Comments! – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux highlights a new feature of the latest release of the Code Contracts functionality which embeds the contract information into the XML comments in the XML documentation file.
• NHibernate on the cloud: SQL Azure – Ayende talks about the compatibility of NHibernate with the new SQL Azure cloud database, and in his next post,SQL Azure, Sharding and NHibernate: A call for volunteers, discusses some of the limitations, and attempts to rally the troops in completing the port of Hibernate Shards to the NHibernate/.NET platform to work around the limitations of the SQL Azure database size
• LLBLGen Pro and SQL Azure – Frans Bouma has also been testing his ORM solution against the SQL Azure database platform, with good results. This post contains a few things you may need to be aware of when using LLBLGen Pro with SQL Azure
• F# First Class Events – Async Workflows + Events Part III – Matthew Podwysocki completes his series looking at F# events and async workflows with some further discussion of combining the eventing and workflow
• Introducing 5Whys.com – Roy Osherove announces a new website which targets developers and team leads who want to be better offering tips, tricks and techniques to achive this aim
• NHibernate Bidirectional Cascade – when is it appropriate? – Alex Scordellis discusses the use of cascades in NHibernate, looking at single directional cascades and the more complex bidirectional case
• Dynamic type parameter constraints in C# 4 – Chris Burrows digs a little deeper into the possibility for using the new dynamic type as a type parameter
• SharpDevelop now creates projects as 32-bit by default – The SharpDevelop team talk about why they are following Visual Studio’s lead in making the default executable type to be a 32 bit one in order to help eliminate issues from not testing on 64bit platforms.
• Checking invariants in a factory method – Mark Needham talks about the use of the factory method to create objects in a consistent state by having the factory be responsible for ensuring all the invariants are satisfied
• BDD from scratch – Build your own framework (Part 1) – Garry Shutler starts a series looking at constructing a BDD framework on top on NUnit.

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