The Morning Brew

Software

• Texo – My Power Shell Continuous Integration Server – Ayende talks about and releases the source for his home grown Continuous Integration solution ‘Texo’ which has been in use providing the CI for NHProf. Based on Powershell with a C# interface into IIS this looks like an interesting project to have a look at
• S#arp Architecture Contrib…it’s alive! – Billy McCafferty proudly announces that his S#arp architecture project has now spawned a Contribs project bringing a number of new community additions to the framework

Information

• Why No Extension Properties? – Eric Lippert talks about the decision not to create support for extension properties given that .NET 3.5 brought about extension methods. Eric also provides interesing insight into how such decisions are made, looking at the key factors that result in features getting green lit for inclusion
• Fun with Func<T,TResult> Delegates, Events and Async Operations – Rick Strahl explores the many uses of the Func<T, TResults> in place of custom delegate types for events, in Linq and also its role in async operations
• Fast synchronization between a single producer and single consumer – Joe Duffy explores a technique for providing rather specialised yet highly efficient thread synchronisation between producer and consumer threads
• Private Extension Methods – K. Scott Allen explores the concept of private extension methods. At first I couldn’t see the point of this, however once you read the example you will realise that this may be a useful trick in certain circumstances
• What Do We Want in Silverlight Validation? – Shawn Wildermuth explores a number of scenarios for enabling validation in Silverlight for his Niagara project, and asks the community for feedback on his ideas
• My History of Visual Studio (Part 1) – Rico Mariani provides his own personal history with Visual Studio in response to the recent Microsoft Documentary on Visual Studio.
• Visual Studio 2010 floating windows can be maximized – Daniel Moth highlights a small yet very nice feature of Visual Studio 2010’s new floating window / multi screen support

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers! Tuesday 6th October. – Mike Hadlow highlights tonight’s Alt.NET Beers event in Brighton. This months event sees a change of location to the Lord Nelson pub.
• VAN: An evening of Questions and Sharing of group opinions regarding DDD pragmatic concepts facilitated by David Laribee October 14, 2009 – The US accessible timezone Virtual Alt,Net group welcomes David Laribee who be ill be facilitating a discussion on Domain Driven Design on 14th October. The event kicks off at 8pm (GMT-5) and is aimed for people in a US timezone

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Software

• TFS 2010 for SourceSafe Users – Brian Harry highlights the changes in TFS for Visual Studio TFS 2010 which make it easy to set up SourceSafe like features quickly and easily for small teams, and it would seem more competitively priced than before
• MVVM Light Toolkit V2: What’s new? – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of the MVVM Light Toolkit V2. Following a short beta release cycle, Laurent has pushed the release button and made this toolkit for easy Model View View Model development in Silverlight and WPF officially available

Information

• Enterprise Library Validation example for ASP.NET MVC 2 – Brad Wilson looks at plugging in the Enterprise Library Validation functionality into the provider model provided byt ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2
• ModelValidator in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 – Part 1 – ‘sankarsan’ starts a series exploring the model validation features present in the latest ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. This first part looks at the Model Metadata and Model Metadata Provider interface, and Part 2 continues with a look at the Model Validator and ModelValidator Provider
• Five Myths about Managed Code – Immo Landwerth explores five commonly held myths about Managed Code, discussing JIT compilation, the presence of generic co and contra-variance in earlier versions of the framework, static and dynamic language support, everything being an object, and the use of managed code at Microsoft
• Lazy loading, Inheritance, and Persistence ignorance (part 3) – Thomas Weller continues his series on the behaviour of ORM libraries with a look at the loading process in NHibernate and how you can insert your own code at certain extension points.
• Lookbehind in Regex searches – Rick Strahl explores the use of lookbacks in his regular expressions and shows how this powerful (if sometimes confusing) technique can be used
• xProfiler – A generic OR/M Profiler – Ayende talks about his plans to create a generic profiler to support a number of different ORM technologies such as Linq-to-Sql, Subsonic, LLBLGen, and even your own data access layers. This will certainly be an interesting project and one that would really help the community
• Writing meaningful, self-documenting, behavior-oriented tests – Daniel Cazzulino talks about his previous style of testing and how it has led him to explore Behaviour Driven styles of test to improve the clarity of his test naming
• NHibernate dialect for SQL Azure – Fabio Maulo talks about a simple use of the NHibernate Extension framework to allow the NHibernate tests to function correctly against SQL Azure due to the limitation that all tables have to have a clustered index on SQL Azure
• How we do things – Preamble and Contents – Scott C Reynolds starts what looks like an interesting series of posts on how the team he works with go about doing their job. This one looks like it will be a 20ish part series, and from the interesting looking content list one that will be well worth reading
• Did you know you can use Amazon’s SimpleDB for free? – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of free accounts on Amazon’s Simple DB with the restriction that you can only transfer 1GB and not use more than 25 machine hours processing each month.
• Sorting Lists using IComparable and IComparer Interface in .NET. – Abhishek D V takes a look at the two similarly named interfaces IComparable and IComparer, and shows how each is used to sort a list.
• Model View Controller, Model View Presenter, and Model View ViewModel Design Patterns – Oleksiy Shelest explores three common patterns used to achieve the same kind of thing, MVC, MVP and MVVM, highlighting their differences and showing some fleshed out examples of the standard patterns in this Code Project Article
• Coding: Rules of thumb – Mark Needham shares some of his rules of thumb for development that he tries to avoid breaking unless absolutely necessary.
• Delegate Mapper – Greg Young shares a useful snippet for mapping delegates from a base class onto a derived class

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 – Phil Haack announces the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. New additions in this preview release include jQuery Validation support for client side validation, Areas allowing you to divide up your project more easily, model validation providers and metadata providers allowing you to support validation and metadata based on something other than the default of Data Annotations. This release is for VS2008 / .NET 3.5 Sp1 only.
• CruiseControl.NET 1.5.0 CTP Released – CruiseControl.NET – Confluence – The Cruise Control Team announce the release of the Cruise Control 1.5 CTP. This release contains a number of bug fixes, a new range of security settings to allow you to lock down control of the build server, support for a number of new source code control tools such as Git, Mercurial, etc and a number of new tasks.publishers. Looks good, but as its a CTP not recommended for production use

Information

• New features in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview – ‘Shaans’ explores a number of the new features of the latest preview release of ASP.NET MVC 2, including some sneak peeks at the VS2010 beta 2 version. UPDATE: This appears to be an extract from the MVC release notes available in full here in MSWord Format
• Code Contracts Preview: PostConditions – Dino Esposito continues his series over at DotNetSlackers looking at the Code Contracts Functionality, and in this article looks at PostConditions, looking at how they are implemented and how they work, along with comparing them to the use of asserts
• Why does char convert implicitly to ushort but not vice versa? – Eric Lippert dives back into the past to discover why it is that you can convert from a char to a ushort but not the other way round, explaining how and why such a decision was made
• Lazy<T>: On Demand Construction in .NET 4.0 – Bill Wagner talks about one of the less publicised features of .NET 4, the ability to make object construction an on demand process by the use of Lazy<T>
• An Engineer’s Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Carlos Bueno, a software engineer on the Yahoo Mail project has written a good article looking at network bandwidth with a particular slant for developers. I always feel it is important to understand the process between your code and yor users, and this article seems to fill in a number of those gaps
• Mike Chaliy: Code-generation DSL with T4 (Text Templates) – Mike Chaliy takes a look at T4 Template generation using a DSL and T4 Templates to easily build configuration section reading code. A nice short understandable example of these sometimes confusing concepts
• Generically Constraining F# – Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Generic Constraints in F#. This part continues on from the previous looking at the remaining constraints that exists, including Constructor, Delegate and Reference constraints.
• Perspective camera animation on a cube in WPF 3D – Razan Paul Blog – Razan Paul has a number of posts on interesting animations created in WPF with full sample code provided. This one is the spinning cube, and others include roll down, wheel and circle animations, so be sure to take a look at them too.
• Strive for Functional Cohesion – Chris Eargle talks about Functional Cohesion, and the important decision developers are making all the time about where to place certain functionality in your object mode.

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