The Morning Brew

PDC ramps up today, so in preparation for a deluge of PDC related posts I’ve broken out the special Section today with a couple of warm up posts

PDC

• Microsoft to Open Source the .NET Micro Framework – Peter Galli over at Port 25 has the first major news out of PDC09, that the .NET Micro Framework has hit its version 4 release, and the big news that it will be being open sourced under an Apache License
• Not at PDC? You can still take part – Party Underground @ PDC, See the keynotes and more… – Greg Duncan highlights a number of means which you can use to get involved in PDC this year even if you are not one of the fortunate ones who is attending the actual event.

Software

• Uploaded Asp Classic Compiler Build 0.5.5.34834 – Li Chen announces the latest release of the Classic ASP compiler which builds Classic ASP written in VBScript into .NET assemblies. This release includes some of the ground work for better mapping from the generated code back to the original classic ASP which will form the basis of debugger support
• Converting .dbp files to .dbproj files – Patrick Sirr shares a simple tool that will convert .dbp database projects to the new .dbproj file format used in Visual Studio 2010. Full source and executable version available
• Text Sharp – Visual Studio 2010 text clarity tuner – This neat little Visual Studio 2010 addin allows you to control the text rendering of the text in the new WPF Editor, hopefully providing an improvement for those who have found the text to be too fuzzy in the new editor
• p&p’s Web Client Guidance drop is out! – Julian Dominguez highlights the latest drop of the Patterns and Practices Web Client Guidance which includes guidance and infrastructure for developing ASP.NET Web Forms, Ajax applications, along with MVC and jQuery
• T4MVC 2.5.00 update: multiple output files and minified javascript support – David Ebbo announces version 2.5 of his T4 Template library for ASP.NET MVC. This release contains a number of new features suggested and assisted by the community including the ability to generate multiple files, along with JavaScript minification

Information

• Just how spiky is your traffic? – Jon Skeet talks about a Google metric ‘Queries per second’ which has moved outside the bounds of search, and discusses the differences between even workloads and spikey traffic workloads
• Back to Basics: Usage of Static – Patrick Smacchia takes a look at the use the static keyword in this back to basics article which covers the use of static classes and static fields, giving some general rules and explaining those rules origins
• Storm – the world’s best IDE framework for .net. – Theodor Storm Kristensen looks at the use of Storm to create IDE applications including code completion, dockable UI components and plugins in this Code Project Article
• Differences Between the Security Rule Sets – ‘shawnfa’ continues his look at the different security rule sets in the .NET CLR providing a useful comparison table for the three types of ruleset, the V2 CLR, V4 CLR and Silverlight CLR
• What every developer should know about character encoding – ‘Windward Wrocks’ takes a look at the trick world of character encoding and the use of Unicode in text documents sharing some useful tips for creating text files. Be sure to check out the piece linked from this one from earlier this month discussing time-zones too.
• Creating something from nothing – and knowing it [Developer-friendly virtual file implementation for .NET refined!] – Delay continues this series looking at creating files on the file system introducing some copy paste support for the virtual files
• Enabling Recomposition in MEF (Preview 8 ) – Derik Whittaker looks at the Managed Extensibility Framework’s support for discovering plugins at runtime (called Recomposition) using a simple single line change
• Request/Response Service Layer: Testing Asynchronous Client-Side Usage – Davy Brion closes out his series on the Request Response Service Layer with a look at testing the client side asynchronous layer, and wrapping up with a Conclusion
• Making ASP.NET MVC Actions be Transactional By Default – Scott Kirkland generalises his previous work on making transactional actions using NHibernate and the transactional attribute with a look at making all actions transactional by default by means of a SuperController implementation
• Closing over the loop variable, part two – Eric Lippert follows up on the comments from his previous post about a closure situation in which the compiler doesn’t do what many people would assume it would do, discussing the possibility of introducing a compiler warning to warn users about this situation
• I recant my IoC! IoC containers in dynamic languages are silly. – Ryan Svihla takes a fresh look at Python and concludes that the nature of dynamic languages makes technology like Inversion of Control containers mostly unnecessary

Community

• Alt.NET Bristol Beers #3 – Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the 3rd Alt.Net Bristol Beers event to be held on Tuesday 8th December 2009 at The Portcullis in Bristol

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Expecting this week to be a busy one with PDC being held this week.

Software

• Linq to Sql Profiler is now on public beta – Ayende announces the first beta release of Linq to Sql Profiler, a profiler for the Microsoft Linq to Sql ORM which works in a similar fashion to his NHibernate Profiler
• November 2009 Release of the Windows Azure Tools and SDK – Sam Gentile highlights the release of the latest Azure tools and SDK. This November release fully supports Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and Visual Web Developer Express 2010 Beta 2, along with a number of other changes, enhancements and new features
• RoundhousE DB Migration: Action Shots – Rob Reynolds shows off RoundHousE, an open source database deployment tool, available as a source distribution, which looks like it has a number of useful features and safegards for manipulating database schema using assisted SQL scripts

Information

• Castle Windsor lazy loading – Krzysztof Kozmic talks about a new feature recently added to Castle Windsor which allows you to defer component registrations until the last minute meaning that you don’t have to register all components up front
• Consuming a Portable Area with a Web Forms application – Jeffrey Palermo shares an introduction to the Portable Areas functionality that HeadSpring Systems have donated to the ASP.NET MVC Contrib project, providing a way to build an area of the page which can be reused between projects
• ASP.NET MVC: Validating objects using Enterprise Library validation application block – Gunnar Peipman talks about integrating the Enterprise Library Validation application block into an ASP.NET MVC application, showing where the application block sits in the archicture, how to implement the validation in business models, and report back on validation to the User
• Multi-Threaded K-Means Clustering in .NET 4.0 – Justin Etheredge shares a worked example of an implementation of the K-Means clustering algorithm using the parallel features of the .NET 4 CLR. Full source is included
• TDD: Combining the when and then steps – Mark Needham talks about how a strict adherence to the DRY (Don’t repeat yourself) Principle in Unit Tests can result in less readable tests. Mark also issues A reminder to talk to the rubber duck, a useful technique which I refer to as the ‘Code Bear’, where simply expressing the problem you are having leads to a solution
• Lessons Learned (Part 2: Performance Testing and Garbage Collection) – Patric Fornasier shares some more lessons about performance testing practices, and the role of the garbage collector
• Validating business objects with AOP (1: the domain) – Thomas Weller investigates using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques to apply validation checks to his business objects using PostSharp and the ValidationAspects aspect library
• MVVM Study Part 4: Naked WPF – Rob Eisenberg shares a simple implementation of Model View View Model using just the core WPF stack (without any additional frameworks), allowing you to see what the core principles are
• Videos: Azure Services in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 with Jim Nakashima, Part I – Charlie Calvert shares a video interview series he did with Jim Nakashima, looking at the support for Azure in Visual Studio 2010, looking at techniques for quickly deploying applications to the cloud. (three parts linked from this post)
• Fun with Linq Aggregate – Mike Hadlow explores the Linq Aggregate function, showing how it might be used to parse a CSV file into nested lists of ints.
• Capturing and Transforming ASP.NET Output with Response.Filter – Rick Strahl takes a look at the ASP.NET ResponseFilter, and shows how you can use this extension point to plug in some cool functionality such as Gzip compression
• It’s Time for This: ActiveRecordEngine for ASP.NET MVC – Rob Conery talks about his dreams of creating an ActiveRecordEngine implementation for ASP.NET MVC which would allow for any implementation of active record to be plugged into the framework. Interesting stuff
• Request/Response Service Layer: Testing Synchronous Client-Side Usage – Davy Brion continues his Request Response series with a look at testing synchronious client side calls to the service layer, and looks at Asynchronous Client-Side Usage

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Update: I seem to be having a bad week of Morning Brew this week – apologies for the duplicated content (complete with uncorrected typos). I suspect a double ctrl+v was responsible. Hopefully next week will be a better week 🙂

Software

• Pex 0.19.41110.1: Better Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 2 Support, Smoother Moles – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the latest release of Pex which improves the integration with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, brings improvements to Mole and Stub generation, allows for their use in VB.NET projects, improves the syntax and binding of moles and improved support for moles and stubs in other unit testing frameworks
• S#arp Architecture 1.0 2009 Q3 with NHibernate 2.1.1 GA Released – Billy McCafferty announces the Q3 release of S#arp Archictcture.. This Quarterly release brings a number of its dependencies up to date, along with some minor improvements to project templates and documentation
• Diagnosing runaway CPU in a .Net production application – Sam Saffron shares a simple xcopy deployable profiler application which allows you to identify the thread within your .NET application that is consuming the most CPU, a useful one for the developer tool belt
• Microsoft’s Oxite Successor, Orchard, A CMS ‘Platform’ – Mohamed Meligy highlights the release of Orchard, the replacement for the much maligned Oxite CMS project from Microsoft, with more of a community focus
• Disk based data structures – Mikael Svenson announces his Disk based collections library which provides the traditional collection interfaces we all know and love with the ability to be backed onto memory mapped files on disk, allowing for collections to utilise disk space and to therefore be far bigger than anything possible in RAM and can be accessed in a thread safe way

Information

• CQRS à la Greg Young – Mark Nijhof explores the Command and Query Responsibility Segregation principle favoured by Greg Young, and looks at its origins in Domain Driven Development and Bertrand Meyer’s original notion of Command Query Separation applied at the object level, showing how Greg applies it at the overall architecture level too.
• How We Do Things – Evolving our Specification Practice – Scott C Reynolds continues his series on ‘How We Do Things’ sharing his experiences with starting out with big design up front, and comparing it to how his team now do specification
• Introduction to the Reactive Framework Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his tour of the Reactive Framework with a look at migrating from events to Observables using the Reactive Framework
• From "Oslo" to SQL Server Modeling – Douglas Purdy talks about where Oslo came from, and what its future is looking like for the project, in the form of ‘SQL Server Modelling’, and that they will now ship with SQL Server
• An Introduction to MEF – J. Eggers shares a simple introduction to the concepts behind the Managed Extensibility Framework, illustrating with a simple Hello World style example
• Test-Driving a new feature for JavaScript – Sergio Pereira looks at applying Test Driven Development to JavaScript development by developing an implementation of Array.indexOf that will work in all versions of Javascript, test driving the development using QUnit
• Closing over the loop variable considered harmful – Eric Lippert shares another crazy looking gotcha which can occur in C#, which on first encounter may look like a mistake in the compiler but is in fact a mis-interpretation of how the language works by the programmer.
• The future of Moonlight – Miguel de Icaza talks about some of the fun stuff they are looking at including in Moonlight 3
• Request/Response Service Layer: Synchronous Client-Side Usage – Davy Brion continues his series on the Request Response Service Layer with a look at making the proxy be one time only generation, and how it supports all possible operations without requiring changes, Davy also looks at the code to support synchronous clients calling the service

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