The Morning Brew

Information

• URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series) – Scott Guthrie explores the new Routing capabilities for ASP.NET Web forms as the latest part of his series on what is new in Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4.0
• Entity Framework Design : Code Only – Further Enhancements – Alex James of the Entity Framework team discusses some of the latest advances in the Code-Only support for the Entity Framework, which is now targeted for a post .NET 4 release. This post outlines the mapping capabilities for entities, custom types, sets and associations
• Code-Only best practices – Alex James continues on his own blog discussing a nicer way of writing the code for Entity Framework Code Only code.
• Table Splitting in Entity Framework – Gil Fink shows how you can split a table into two tables and map the result using the Entity Framework
• MVVM for Tarded Folks Like Me *or* MVVM and What it Means to Me – Jeremiah Morrill takes a slightly humorous look at the Model View View Model pattern and builds it up from simple principles sharing his views on it along the way
• MVC Script & Css Helpers – Matthew M. Osborn talks about two features he got added to the ASP.NET MVC Futures assembly which help when working with JavaScript and CSS to a page
• ASP.NET MVC2 Preview 2: Areas and Routes – K. Scott Allen talks about the new Areas and routes functionality of the latest ASP.NET MVC Preview, looking at them in use, and also showing how to work around naming collisions by fully qualifying the type names
• Canadian Developer Connection : Who’s Got .NET Framework 3.5? – Joey deVilla shares some information gathered by Alexander McCabe on the penetration of the .NET Framework versions amongst normal users, showing quite encouraging growth in the percentage who have .NET 3.5 installed
• The Moth: Parallelizing a loop with tasks, avoiding the pitfall – Daniel Moth shows one of the common problems people run into when parallelizing code, and shows one common work around for this problem – this post is code heavy, with a link to more information in the form of a Stack Overflow discussion
• Using .NET 4.0 Tasks with the AsyncEnumerator – Jeffrey Richter shows an example of using the .NET 4 Tasks functionality with AsyncEnumerators to provide a good way of working with both Compute and IO bound operations
• Life inside an Aggregate Root, part 1 – Richard Dingwall explores one of the key Domain Driven Design tenants, the ‘aggregate root’ in this two part article discussing the key rules about how they should behave
• Introducing the Reactive Framework Part I – Matthew Podwysocki moves his focus over to the Reactive Framework with the start of a new series of posts. This first post sets the stage for why the reactive framework came about and what it is useful for
• Common Web.Config transformations with Visual Studio 2010 – Scott Kirkland explores the Web.Config transformation feature of ASP.NET 4 which allows you to customise the configuration created at build time by applying rule based transforms. In this article Scott looks at customising the AppSettings, removing the debug setting and points to further information
• Refactoring Dinner: Interfaces instead of Inheritance – Sharon Cichelli looks at the concept of using Interfaces in preference to inheritance from base classes with a cooking based example
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 7) – Rico Mariani continues his history of Visual Studio with a look at the uptake of managed code within Microsoft in the pre-Widby time frame
• GDI+ Updated Again – Brian Hartman highlights the reason we will all be inundated with windows updates today (I had 16 new ones this morning) as a new security update to GDI+ is released into the wild
• "Agile is treating the symptoms, not the disease" – Ted Neward kicks off an interesting dicussion about wether agile principles are masking the underling increase in technical complexity of software, and suggests that simplicity should be the next big thing we focus on. Phil Haack responds to the discussion with his piece ‘Software Externalities‘ which views the issues from a slightly different angle, and Ted responds with a follow up ‘Haacked, but not content; agile still treats the disease’ which partially realigns his argument. Interesting discussion and interesting reading, be sure to read the comments on all three posts.

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Software

• Git# – First Public Release – Miguel de Icaza highlights the work lead by Meinrad Recheis to create the first public release of Git#
• ReSharper 5.0 Overview – JetBrains share more details of the features included in the next release of ReSharper – lots of good stuff there, and I’m quite looking forward to having a play with the new version soon

Information

• How to edit code when debugging a 64-bit application – Habib Heydarian shows how you can re-enable Edit and Continue support in Visual Studio when running on a 64-bit machine by setting your project to run as 32bit
• How ISerializable are you? – Vincent Grondin reviews the process of implementing custom serialisation support for your objects with a six point checklist of steps.
• Lambda Expressions: An Introduction – Deborah Kurata has a great series of posts based around here recent code camp presentation on Lambda expressions. This post is an index post with the links to the other posts covering the different types of delegates, syntax, working with strings, etc
• Targeting earlier .NET frameworks 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 using Visual Studio 2010 – Bala Chirtsabesan of the Visual Web Developer Team looks at the support in Visual Studio 2010 to target other versions of the .NET Runtime other than V4, and shows the behaviour when those versions of the framework are missing.
• Build Your Own Data Access Layer: Enabling Bulk Inserts – Davy Brion resumes his series on creating his own ORM / Data Access Layer from scratch with a look at enabling his framework to support bulk inserts of data
• Get Time Zone Information – BlackWasp Software share some useful information about working with timezone information in your applications, allowing you to establish when and where daylight savings time applies along with a bunch of other information about the timezone
• Introducing nRoute.Toolkit for Silverlight (Part II) – Rishi continues this series introducing the nRoute Toolkit which includes a number of items what make working in an MVVM style easier for Silverlight applications. This second part of the series looks at the support for commands and event extensions
• Fabulous Adventures In Coding : Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence – Eric Lippert examines a fallacy about the requirement to initialise all local variables, but not instance variables , and the reasoning behind this.
• LINQ to SQL, Lazy Loading and Prefetching – Rick Strahl explores the use of Lazy loading and prefetching data using Linq to Sql in one of his applications, and reminds us that both techniques come at a cost in terms of database access, and that we should be careful about our decisions regarding theses strategies.
• LINQ To SQL Tips & Tricks: String Operations – Paulo Morgado looks at how you can have the database do a lot of string manipulation as a part of a query in Linq to Sql, or how by changing the linq query a little you can have the data filtering happen in the database and the string work performed in C# instead.
• A Quick Reference Guide to Microsoft Technologies (Cheat Sheets) – Neeraj Mathur gathers together links to a number of cheat sheet documents covering a range of topics including .NET quick reference, ASP.NET 2 page lifecycle, Code Snippets, JavaScript, ASP,C#, regular expressions, UML, SQL, XML, jQuery and Ajax.
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 6) – Rico Mariani continues his series of posts looking at his personal history of Visual Studio. This part looks at the vital years where the .NET framework came to the fore
• Implementing RESTful Routes & Controllers in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 – Ben Scheirman explores some of the RESTful routing capibilities introduced in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2, looking at the use of different HTTP verbs, and implementing application functionality using this REST functionality

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Software

• Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP1 – The PostSharp team announce the release of their first Community Technology Preview release of PostSharp 2. This version is a significant update and re-work of the the PostSharp product, and will eventually be released as commercial software
• ReSharper 5.0: Intro – Looks like the first preview releases of ReSharper 5 are just around the corner, and the V5 product aims to support VS2010 as well as 2008, improved web development support along with the usual improvements to the code analysis it performs. Tim Barcz has had his hands on an early copy as he is a JetBrains .NET Academy Experts member and talks about Resharper 5.0 – Bookmarks , a new feature to aid code exploration.
• Json.NET 3.5 Release 5 – .NET 2.0 Support, Error Handling & Databinding – James Newton-King announces the release of Version 3.5 Release 5 of his JSON framework for .NET, which brings support for .NET 2.0 meaning there is now an upgrade for people still running Json.NET 1.3.1. Also included are a number of other changes, new features and bug fixes
• Ra-Ajax 2.0.3 Released – Kariem Ali announces the latest release of Ra-Ajax, which includes bug fixes and a new effect which allows the changing of CSS classes during chained events
• Davide Mauri : QueryUnit POC v.0.0.0.6 – Davide Mauri announces the release of QueryUnitPOC v0.0.0.6, a testing framework for SQL Server and analysis services databases built on top of NUnit 2.5.1 but does not require any .NET knowledge to get up and running.

Information

• 200 Page Manual on Inversion of Control (plus or minus 199) – Rob Conery gives an excellent introduction to Inversion of control, running through a good worked example of the process of migrating code to an IOC way of working, following up with a post looking at Using Dependency Injection and Mocking For Testability focusing on some of the advantages of using an IOC approach, and responds to feedback on the original piece with 200 Page Manual on Inversion of Control, Part 2 – fantastic work Rob.
• NerdDinner with Fluent NHibernate Part 3 – The infrastructure – Bengt Berge continues his series of posts on migrating the Nerd Dinner ASP.NET MVC sample application to NHibernate using the Fluent NHibernate library looking at session management and the repository in this post.
• Finding Dirty Properties in NHibernate – Ricardo Peres shares a few extension methods for the NHibernate Session to help you to identify the entities and properties that have been changed in this session,
• Quick and Dirty Enum Mapper for Fluent NHibernate – Alex Cuse looks at changing the way that Fluent NHibernate was storing his Enum values so that rather than using string representations the numerical value was persisted to the database
• DevHawk – Hybrid App Debugging – The Debug Window – Harry Pierson continues his series on Debugging polyglot programs written in IronPython and C#. This part looks at adding fucntionality to the newly created debug window, and polls his readers for which feature he should implement next.
• STM.NETInFramework4 – Ravi Kotecha gives an introduction to the Software Transactional Memory functionality currently available in a special release of the .NEt 4 Framework
• What’s Wrong With This Code? (#22) – K. Scott Allen shares another of his short snipets of code which has a fundamental problem for you to try and spot. This one despite being harder to spot than it used to be is stll quite an easy one.
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 5) – Rico Mariani continues his series talking about his experiences with Visual Studio over the years
• Video Posted for Belgium Visual Studio User Group: 10 Years of Framework Design Guidelines – Brad Abrams shares the video taken from his recent 10 Yeats of Framework Design Guidelines talk at the Beldum VS user group.
• F# in VS2010 – Soma Segar highlights the inclusion of F# in the Visual Studio 2010 release giving a brief overview of the new features that it includes.
• Event Aggregation – Davy Brion explores the concepts and implementation of Event Aggregation Patterns for use in communicating occurrences to other parts of the code without caring about what those other parts are.
• TDD: Keeping assertions clear – Mark Needham talks about the importance of keeping assertions clear so if is obvious why a test is failing

Community

• Languages on the Java VM – ThoughtWorks Manchester (UK) GeekNights events make a welcome return, and on the 21st October Sam Newman will be talksing on Clojure and Scala, two languages built on top of the JVM. These talks, while not .NET related have proved to be very interesting in the past, as have the discussions in the bar afterwards with a good group of agile developers. Well worth checking out if you are in the area.
• Last Call: PDC09 $300 discount ends October 13 – Tomorrow is the end of the $300 off PDC registration. Also worthy of note is the $500 reduction you can get if you are a BizSpark programme participant

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