The Morning Brew

Software

• IronRuby 0.9.2 – IronRuby reaches its 0.9.2 release in the build up to a 1.0 release, and this one closes a further 44 bugs and also introduces an MSI based installer.
• Ample SDK Goes Open Source! – Ajaxian highlights Ample SDK, a GUI toolkit now released under the GPL/MIT license, which makes it easy to create cross browser vector graphics along with powerful webforms UIs using standard web technologies such as SVG, XUL, etc
• ASP.NET Debugger Extension for IIS 7 – Vijayshinva Karnure shares a new extension for IIS7 which provides additional functionality for debugging ASP.NET Applications allowing you to easily identify modules which were built in debug mode, view the callstack of threads inside the worker process, and monitor the trace output of processes. Both 32 and 64 bit versions are available

Information

• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control are not rocket surgery – Scott Koon shows how the techniques of Dependency Injection and Inversion of control are not as complicated as may developers believe, looking at definitions of the techniques and showing simple examples of both.
• Reading Code: Unity – Mark Needham discusses the technique termed ‘Effect Sketching’ by Michael Feathers, and how it can help you to understand a codebase by identifying interactions between fields and methods of classes. Mark also shows how Graphviz can help visualise such work
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas – Part 3 – Eric Hexter continues his series looking at creating and using ASP.NET MVC Portable Areas to allow you to share functionality between MVC applications. This part looks at the use of the Portable Areas created last time
• Html Encoding Nuggets With ASP.NET MVC 2 – Phil Haack talks about how they have managed to create a single ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 DLL built against .NET 3.5SP1 which is shared between VS2010 and VS2008 and can utilise .NET 4 functionality when it runs under that runtime
• I Command MVVM – Rishi talks about the ICommand interface and its implementations in nRoute.Toolkit’s MVVM implementation, showing how it is the key part in exposing and consuming the View Model in the framework
• New Article by Bill Wagner on Dynamic Method Bags in C# 4.0 – Charlie Calvert highlights a new C#4 article from Bill Wagner looking at Dynamic Method Bags, and how you can use the dynamic functionality to call your own C# objects without using reflection
• Improving JavaScript Skills – K. Scott Allen looks at the use of jQuery and qUnit combined with the Kata style problems to help aid learning and improving JavaScript skills
• The WPF Starter Kit – A simple, barebones, pick it up in an afternoon, MVVM/Navigation/Commanding Framework – Gerg Duncan highlights the WPF Starter Kit CodePlex project which provides a simple head start to creating an MVVM WPF application
• VM Workshop: Model View ViewModel (MVVM) and the Presentation Model Pattern in 5 UI Platforms – Craig Shoemaker tlaks bout a new project called the VM Workshop which aims to provide MVVM and Presentation Model patterns implemented in a number of common technologies. This is an open source project and contributions are welcome.
• A URL Resolver Module for ASP.NET MVC – Dylan Beattie shows how by intercepting the output stream of an ASP.NET MVC page you can re-write parts of the HTML, and provides an implementation of this which provides the same support for ~ in URLs that WebForms developers make use of to have URLs re-written to the application base.
• TDD is not about testing, it’s about how we develop software – Thomas Weller reflects on his 2 years of experience of Test Driven Development, talking about some of the common ideas behind doing TDD, sharing his experience of these benefits.
• Transparency 101: Basic Transparency Rules – ‘shawnfa’ talks about the basics of Security Transparency and Secuirty Critical code and how the two relate within the in .NET 4

Community

• Brighton ALT.NET Beers – Wed 4th Nov 7pm at The Lord Nelson – Iain Holder issues a reminder of tonight’s Alt.Net Brighton Beers event, starting at 7pm in The Lord Nelson pub, a great opportunity to meet and talk with fellow .Net developers over a pint

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Software

• Uploaded ASP Classic Compiler Build 0.5.4.34834. This build supports VS2010 and Silverlight. – Li Chen announces an updated release of ASP Classic Compiler, a project which takes classic ASP files written in VBScript and compiles them to .NET executables using a VBScript compiler and the Dynamic Language Runtime
• Prism 2.1 (Composite Application Guidance for WPF & Silverlight 3) just released (updated version for Silverlight 3) – Damian Schenkelman highlights the latest release of the Prism Composite Application Guidance Framework for WPF and Silverlight. This latest release now targets Silverlight 3 and contains a few minor changes to support this move
• Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 is now available for download – The Mozilla Team announce the first beta release of FireFox 3.6 which runs on the Gecko 1.9.2 engine and introduces a number of nwe developer features. Binary releases are available for Windows, Mac and Linux, although be aware that your favourite add-ins won’t necessarily work

Information

• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas – Part 2 – Eric Hexter continues with his series of posts looking at implementing Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC using the MvcContrib library, in this part looking at the actual construction of a portable area sample
• New article: How to detect and avoid memory and resources leaks in .NET applications – Fabrice Marguerie highlights his latest article available in both French and English, published on MSDN in English and DotNetGuru in French. This article takes a look at what memory leask are, how to sport them, common causes, how to fix them and tools and resources to find out more.
• Using ASP.NET and Jcrop to crop images online – Gunnar Peipman shares some simple Javascript and ASP.NET Code to allow you to easily crop images from within a Web Applciation using the JCrop library for jQuery
• Simple names are not so simple – Eric Lippert takes us on a tour of some of the rules about where and when you can name a variable, revisiting the concepts of declaration space and scope and showing some examples of the stranger things that can happen
• Free eBook – Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 – Matt McSpirit highlights a free e-book of ‘Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2’ from Microsoft Press, allowing you to get up to date with the latest Server class OS from Microsoft
• What kind of logging should you do in production? – Ayende talks about the types of logging he uses in production applications, and how it depends on the type of application and the support levels of the application as to how much logging he includes and how that logging is presented
• An xVal Provider For NHibernate Validator – Scott Kirkland shares an xVal provider for the NHibernate Validator allowing the NHibernate validator metadata to be used
• An Introduction to Fluent Interfaces & Internal DSLs in C# – Steven Holdsworth shares a simple introduction to the concepts of Fluent Interfaces and Internal DSLs with a simple code example to illustrate, showing that these concepts don’t have to be big and complicated
• WCF 101: The Simplest WCF Example You’ll Ever See – Youssef Moussaoui shares the simples possible WCF example, so short it easily fits on a single screen and shows how WCF is another technology which doesn’t have to be complicated
• Introduction to the Reactive Framework Part II – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the Reactive Framework with a look at the duality of Enumerable and Observable
• WF4 Beta1 => Beta2 Breaking Changes Document Published – Matt Winkle highlights a document from Microsoft which outlines the changes that have been made to the Windows WorkFlow implementation between Beta 1 and Beta 2 of .NET 4
• Unit testing ASP.NET MVC routes – Thomas Weller takes a look at unit testing his ASP.NET MVC Routes, showing why this can be hard to achieve, and how ASP.NET MvcContrib and a custom base class can make the process easier
• NHibernate feature: SaveOrUpdateCopy & Merge – Torkel Ödegaard explores two of the less well know NHibernate persistence methods, SaveOrUpdateCopy and Merge, showing how they can be used and what situations they suit
• Lifting T out of Task with dynamic dispatch – Joe Duffy takes a look at using Tasks to generate an object and then calling a method, showing how traditionally this would result in you blocking until the taks completed, and looks at an alternative way of doing this using the C#4 Dynamic support
• Search and Messaging – Udi Dahan talks about the use of Messaging to perform searches, and how it can be a suitable fit to the problem

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Software

• NHibernate 2.1.1 Released – Ricardo Peres highlights the release of NHibernate 2.1.1 GA on Saturday. From the look of the Release Notes (and the version number) its a bugfix release with some minor improvements
• Mvc Turbine v2 RC – Javier G. Lozano announces the release candidate for the second version of Mvc Turbine, a plug-in which brings improved support for Inversion of Control (IoC) , Auto-Registration of View Engines, Filters, Controllers, Routes and custom IHttpModules, along with a set of core components refered to as Blades for MVC, routing and web components

Information

• Irony – Kirill Osenkov takes a look at Irony the .NET Compiler Construction Framework created by Roman Ivantsov, showing how to create an expression tree via expression parsing
• Castle Dynamic Proxy tutorial part XV: Patterns and Antipatterns – Krzysztof Kozmic closes out this considerable series on Castle Dynamic Proxy 2.1 with a look at some of the problems people often run into when working with dynamic proxying along with a reminder about applying the Single Responsibility Principle to interceptors
• ASP.NET MVC Resource Guide – Chris Bowen presents a number of useful resources for getting started with and looking deeper into ASP.NET MVC which complements the talk he gave with Patrick Hynds at the Stack Overflow DevDays Conference in Boston
• DDDD: Why I Love CQRS – Jonathan Oliver talks about Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) talking about the basic concept and how it can be applied
• ASP.Net MVC Portable Areas via MvcContrib – Eric Hexter talks about the concept of Portable Areas in ASP.NET MVC, and how Version 2 of the framework makes achieving this functionality in the MVC Contrib project possible
• Character Testing with the Char Structure – BlackWasp highlight some useful methods available on the Char class which allows you to easily check the characters for particular properties such as being numeric, whitespace, etc.
• Should I use MEF with an IoC container? – Part 1 – Glenn Block answers the question which is complementary to that answered in a previous post, looking at if you need / should use the Managed Extensibility Framework with an IoC Container
• T4 Preprocessed Text Templates in Visual Studio 2010 – Karl Shifflett explores the new VS2010 functionality for Preprocessed T4 Templates, showing what they are, and how they can be utilised
• NHProf and Caliburn Testability – Rob Eisenberg shares some of his experience on UI Testability by talking about how he did he UI testing on NHProf
• The Bad Practices of Exception Handling – Hans-Eric Grönlund shares his top 3 exception handling worst practices, which I’m sure we’ve all seen in code, and probably written at some point too.
• State Pattern, Enumeration Class and Fluent NHibernate (Oh my!) – Richard Cirerol talks about refactoring from simple enums to a full state pattern implementation and some of the bits surrounding persistence that he found troublesome
• Simple way to cache objects and collections for greater performance and scalability. Free source code and programming help – Omar Al Zabir shows how caching can drastically improve application performance, and shows how you can easily implement caching using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques with the AspectF library
• Coding: Invariant checking on dependency injected components – Mark Needham continues discussing invariant checking, this time looking at checking on the dependencies that should be being provided by the Dependency Injection framework, asking if this is necessary, and if there is a better place to check these dependencies
• You see that database? OFF WITH HIS HEAD! – Ayende reminds us that set based database operations are far and away the best way of working with databases for performance
• Contract classes and nested types within interfaces – Jon Skeet talks about the use of contract classes with interfaces, and discusses where it is best to locate these classes

Community

• ThoughtWorks Quarterly Briefings in December – Jim Webber highlights the ThoughtWorks Quarterly Briefing Events to be held on 7th December where he will be speaking on web based SOA. These events are held in both Manchester and London, with the London event being a breakfast event, and Manchester an evening

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