The Morning Brew

Looks like the .NET world has been busy over the Christmas break…

Software

• Now Available: Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Virtual Machines with Sample Data – Brian Keller highlights updated Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 virtual machines for HyperV, Virtual PC 2007 and Windows 7 Virtual PC. Also available are virtual machine instances of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 Beta 2.
• Introducing MarkdownSharp – Jeff Atwood announces the release of MarkDownSharp, a C# server side implementation of the MarkDown markup language under an open source license
• Json.NET 3.5 Release 6 Binary JSON (BSON) support – James Newton-King announces the latest release of Json.NET 3.5, bringing support for reading and writing Binary JSON format data, removing dependency on the Entity Framework, automatic serialization of DataSets and DataTables, along with improved FAQ documentation
• SharpTestsEx 1.0.0Beta : Satisfy your test – Fabio Maulo announces the release of SharpTestsEx 1.0.0 Beta. SharpTestsEx aims to bring a set of extensible extensions to testing which allow assertions to be written in a concise expressive manner using IDE intellisense as a guide using a fluent interface.

Information

• More LINQ with System.Interactive – Getting Started – Bart De Smet kicks off a series of posts on the System.Interactive assembly, which is the dual of the System.Reactive assembly we’ve been hearing quite a bit about lately. In this introductory post Bart looks at the differences between interactive and reactive, and then dives much deeper in the follow on posts The Ultimate Imperative, looking at the imperative operators provided, Exceptional Exception Handling, looking at the exception handling facilities provided by EnumerableEx, and Sequences under construction examining the constructor operators. Another great in-depth series illustrated with plenty of diagrams and code
• String Interning: The Garbage Collectible way – Ayende explores string interning in a way which allows the Garbage collector to clear out all your interned values when you no longer need them, a technique which allowed him to gain 50% improvement in memory use in his profiler suite of applications
• Update about FunctionalNHibernate – Robert Pickering gives an update on his progress with the FunctionalNHibernate project, which can now do everything the first example FluentNHibernate project does
• Creating An Application With Full Plug-in Support – Arian Kulp posting on the Coding4Fun blog takes a look at using the Managed Extensibility Framework to add add-in support to a previous project the ‘Utility Runner’
• (free) Training videos from the last year. – Eric Hexter highlights some of the great resources the HeadSpring Systems have been making available throughout the year, and points you in the direction of a Feed containing current and future items
• Accelerator and F# (II.): The Game of Life on GPU – Tomáš Pet?í?ek takes another look into the Microsoft Research Accelerator project combining it with F# to create an implementation of the game of life which runs on the GPU
• WPF : 3D graph – Sacha Barber shares an impressive looking WPF 3D bar graph implementation with some explanation of the techniques and code used in this CodeProject article.
• Roy Osherove’s TDD Kata: My first attempt – Mark Needham shares his thoughts on his first attempt at the Roy Osherove TDD Kata problem, talking about going mouseless and his struggles with doing the smallest possible step
• Does Event Sourcing works with DDD? – Mike Chaliy discusses some thoughts arround Command Query Responsibility Separation in Domain Driven Design considering splitting the responsibilities of the Aggregate Root out into separate classes
• Parallel Performance Case Study: Finding References to Parallel Extensions – Stephen Toub talks about a real world use of the Visual Studio 2010 parallel visualiser which helped diagnose performance problems in a simple tool for finding dependencies in the Visual Studio assemblies.
• What can EF 4.0 do that NHibernate can’t? – Ayende sparks discussion on Entity Framework 4 Vs NHibernate with an opening post, followed by responses to comments in Responding to how EF is better NH commentary…, continuing the discussion in comments, and Rob Conery adds his thoughts to the discussion in his post Thoughts on EF vs. NHibernate Redux.
• Simplifying Entity Framework: Data-Driven Design – Oleg Sych takes a look at using the Entity Framework to create Data access layers when developing in a Data-Driven way using T4 templates from the T4 toolbox and working through the process of creating the DAL using this tooling.

Community

• The cloud silver bullet – ThoughtWorks kick off their 2010 Manchester GeekNights events series with Chris Read talking about cloud computing, and event to be held in Manchester UK on 21st January 2010. These ThoughtWorks events are a great way to meet developers from right across the technical spectrum

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