The Morning Brew

Software

• DevHawk – IronPython 2.0.3 and 2.6 RC2 – Harry Pierson announces a further two releases of IronPython to take their total for a week to 3. These two releases are minir, the 2.6 release is a bugfix release fixing a memory leak, and the 2.0 release back ports a few bugfixes along with a fix for Partial Trust on Windows 7
• CopyPasteKiller – Free Code Similarity Finder – Jon von Gillern announces CopyPasteKiller a simple utility which aims to identify areas of code which may have been copy pasted allowing you to identify and remove this type of duplication
• TestDriven.Net 3.0 Alpha – Support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 – Jamie Cansdale announces the latest Aplha release of TestDriven.Net which adds support for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Information

• What is Model-Based Testing? – Nico Kicillof of the Spec Explorer Team talks about the concept of Model Based Testing discussing how this lightweight formal method of testing works, and talking about where Spec Explorer fits into this
• Stop Exposing Collections Already! – Davy Brion talks about the bad practice of exposing collections to all and sundry, and by doing so allow them to manipulate and change the collection. Davy then explains a number of techniques that let you expose information from collections safely without fear of someone changing things without your knowledge
• LinqLite – Jason Allor talks about implementing custom Linq Providers, and shares LinqLite, a library he created which helps take some of the pain out of the process of parsing the linq expressions making it easier to create custom providers
• Implementing IEnumerable and IEnumerator – Brendan Enrick looks at the IEnumerable and IEnumerator interfaces, and shows how you don’t need a collection to work with and utilise these interfaces
• Running IronPython Scripts from a C# 4.0 Program – Charlie Calvert continues his exploration of IronPython with a look at calling IronPython scripts from within C# 4 code utilising the new dynamic keyword
• ASP.NET 4 Web Server Here Shell Extension – Phil Haack shares a neat registry hack (no pun intended) for both 32 and 64bit Windows which enables a context menu entry for creating a web server instance for any arbitrary directory
• Expanding the Cloud: The Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) – All Things Distributed – Werner Vogels highlights and discusses Amazon’s entry into the Cloud based Relational database arena with the Amazon Relational Database Service, which would seem to be their answer to SQL Server in the cloud
• Using T4 Templates for Simple DTOs – K. Scott Allen explores the use of T4 templates to create data transfer objects for arbitrary CSV files, along with sharing a useful list of things he learned in the process
• A Chance to Influence the MSDN Visual Studio Documentation (Help System) – Charlie Calvert highlights a survey from the documentation team at Microsoft which is hoping to gather your opinion on the MSDN Technical library, so spare them 5 minutes of your time to help them improve the docs.
• MVC Web Testing Strategies – verifying content – Jimmy Bogard follows on from his recent presentation on testing ASP.NET MVC’s last mile, the rendered output, and in this post talks about a number of strategies for verifying content
• Website Background Services Are Hot – Peter Seale looks into the background services capabilities offered as a part of the Oxcite CMS, looking at their implementation, and asking if this is a good solution to the problem
• Provide immediate feedback to the browser on Long Running Tasks – in Asynchronous ASP.NET pages – Shahed Khan has a series of posts looking at different solutions to the problem of providing users with feedback about long running processes in a number of MS web technologies. This post looks at Async ASP.NET Pages, and subsequent posts address other techniques such as streaming regular ASP.NET pages and using regular web handler
• Simple Kick Start Example using MEF (Preview 8) – Derik Whittaker looks at the Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 8 and shows how to get up and running with it using a simple example

Community

• Free WPF, Silverlight and 3.5 SP1 training for UK Developers – Eric Nelson highlights an offer from Microsoft which enables UK based developers to gain access to 3 training programmes covering RIA with Silverlight, .NET 3.5 SP1 Changes, and Rich User Interfaces using WPF, each with between 5 and 12 hours of content for free

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