The Morning Brew

Information

• Accelerator and F# (I.): Introduction and calculating PI – Tomáš Pet?í?ek takes a look at the Microsoft Research Accelerator project which is a C# library which allows array manipulations to be run on the GPU. In this article Tomáš looks at using the Accelerator library to speed up the calculation of an accurate value of Pi in F#, complete with source for the sample.
• Views and Databases Don’t Mix – Jason Dentler talks about the reasons to introduce a true ViewModel to avoid your views triggering unexpected database activity
• A JavaScript Event Bus – Simon Ince shares a prototype implementation of an Event Bus in JavaScript which can be used to provide a means of loose coupling between JavaScript / AJAX components
• [Video] Spark View Engine Part 1 – Mike Ormond continues his series of posts looking at the Spark View Engine with a Video version of the previous few posts in the series looking at replacing the standard View Engine with Spark.
• 6 Of My Favorite Visual Studio Shortcuts – Hatim Rih shares his 6 favourite Visual Studio keyboard shortcuts and asks for your suggestions of other good ones in the comments (where a good list is starting to form)
• Entity Framework troubleshooting and performance – Simon Sabin outlines his plans for a series of posts looking at the Entity Framework and its effects on the database when being used, along with how you can shape your usage to avoid bad queries
• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths – Rick Strahl gives a good summary of the various paths which are exposed by the .NET Framework in ASP.NET looking at their meanings, along with looking at resolving paths, and parsing URL paths
• High CPU in .NET app using a static Generic.Dictionary – Tess Ferrandez talks about an investigation she did with the ASP.NET team looking at some High CPU usage in an application which worked with the Generic Dictionary held as a static refernce when the application was under high load, and explains how and why the problems were occurring
• Which Profiling Mode Should I use? – ‘Daryush’ looks at the various profiling modes supported by the Visual Studio 2010 Profiler, looking at what each does, and where it is particularly useful.
• Three-tier .NET Application Utilizing Three ORM Technologies. – Bryan Thomas Weikel shares an indepth article which looks at the use of the three most common ORM solutions (LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, and NHibernate) in use in creating a WinForms application using a Three Tier architecture.
• When using LINQ don’t forget about deferred execution – Mark Meyerovich reminds us that Deferred Execution of LINQ statements can result in some strange behaviour due to the way variables are captured by the statements
• OR-ing criteria with NHibernate, or "How to include it all" – Kyle Baley looks at some of the more advanced querying support in NHibernate building searches for entities based on the entities contained in a few of their collections.
• Effectus: Isolated features – Ayende has been posting a number of follow on posts which continue looking at the Effectus sample application which was created for his MSDN Magazine article. This post talks about the organisation of the implementation of features and how each feature is implemented in isolation. Be sure to check out the other posts around this one.
• Using conventions with Passive View – Mark Nijhof picks up a theme from one of Ayende’s Effectus posts and talks about the conventions used in his Command Query Responsibility Separation Sample application

Community

• CodeCampServer Call for Participation – Jeffrey Palermo issues a call for assistance with the CodeCampServer open source project for managing a usergroup’s events. The project team are looking for assistance with the maintenance of the project (recruiting usergroups, supporting the hosting environment, etc) and running a CssContrib project to contribute new ideas to the project. A great opportunity to get involved with a well known community project.

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Software

• ASP Classic Compiler 0.6.0 released. It can run FMStocks 1.0 – Li Chen announces the release of Version 0.6 of the Classic ASP Compiler which takes Classic ASP code written in VBScript and runs it under the ASP.NET / CLR. This release is significant in that it runs the Fitch and Mather Stocks 1.0 sample application completely. Currently this requires a few minor modifications to the original, but even so, its pretty impressive stuff
• Pex 0.20.v0.20.41218.2: Beavers, new Event View and bugs fixes – Jonathan "Peli" de Halleux announces the release of Pex 0.20. This release introduces Beavers’ which are models which build on Moles, adding behaviour to the mole. Thsi release also adds a global event view to Visual Studio allowing you to more easily see the outcome of your explorations. Thsi release also contains the usual bugfixes and improvements, along with a few breaking changes.
• Agatha 1.0 – Davy Brion announces the 1.0 release ofAgatha, his Request Response Service Layer implementation. This release adds support for one-way requests to the framework, but other than that is the same as the 1.0 beta 2 release
• Blogging code samples stays easy [Update to free ConvertClipboardRtfToHtmlText tool and source code for Visual Studio 2010!] – David Anson (AKA Delay) releases an update to his utility which converts from the Visual Studio Rich Text clipboard format into formatted HTML. This update now supports the current beta release of Visual Studio 2010 which uses a slightly different clipboard format.
• Windows Azure AppFabric SDK v1.0 Released (Service Bus and Access Control) – Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of the Azure AppFabric SDK (V1.0). The SDK contains all the API’s nexessary for working with Azure, including the Service Bus and AppFabric Access Control functionality for WCF, and also includes numerous samples and sample applications covering the range of internet applications in use today.

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010 – Phil Haack outlines the compatibility issues and limitations introduced between ASP.NET MVC 2 releases and Visual Studio 2010 beta releases, and shares his hopes that the VS2010 RC will be able to include the RC release of ASP.NET MVC 2
• Passing anonymous objects to MVC views and accessing them using dynamic – David Ebbo shares a custom implementation of ViewPage which makes it possible to pass anonymous types through to the ASP.NET MVC View and work with them using the Dynamic support in .NET 4
• Open Source Licensing, Copyright Notices, Contributions: What To Do? – Davy Brion discusses some of the issues involved actually applying an open source license to his work, and seeks community assistance with where the license boilerplate should be placed, and what it should contain.
• Introducing FunctionalNHibernate – Robert Pickering introduces FunctionalNHibernate, an attempt to make working with NHibernate from F# easier, and to utilise some of the F# functionality such as quotation system in place of C# expression trees.
• Adding a bit of Spark to Nerd Dinner – Mike Ormond continues his exploration of the Spark view engine with a look at introducing the Spark engine into the MVC Nerd Dinner Sample application
• The Polyglot Tester – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin argues for the idea of Polyglot’s in testing, meaning that testers are able to choose the best method of testing for the particular problem, Illustrated with some examples of where the Given-When-Then style testing is better replaced with a table based approach,
• Trying MonoDevelop On OS X, Part Two – Davy Brion re-explores the idea of developing .NET on OSX with a look at the latest releases from the Mono Project
• What Is The Difference Between an IoC Container and MEF? – Jak Charlton sets about looking at the differences between the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and standard Inversion of Control (IOC) containers, looking at how MEF is an architectural decision which brings more to the table, where as IOC is a code level decisoin.
• Logging Guidelines – Tom Czarniecki gives some guidelines as to what should be logged at the various logging levels provided by Log4Net (and many other logging frameworks)
• C# String Interpolation – Miguel de Icaza discusses a proposed extension to Mono which will allow for easier string interpolation by using different string syntax. Interesting discussion in the comments

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #502

Many thanks to everyone who offered their congratulations, thanks, tweets and re-tweets for yesterday’s milestone edition. Special thanks to David Brown for contributing Blog Badge button which I’ve now inserted into the rotation. I’m hopeful that the amount of community noise that was generated yesterday pushed the subscriber numbers past the 5000 mark (I was very close on edition 499) so I await FeedBurner’s stats to update with baited breath.

Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 RC Released – Dispite being on Paternity leave, Phil Haack still has a very good handle on what is going on in the ASP.NET MVC Team, and shares the news of the release of the Release Candidate of ASP.NET MVC 2. The majority of changes in this release are bug fixes, but some work has also been done on the validation functionality too.
• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Beta period extended – Soma Somasegar, Scott Guthrie and Brian Harry talk about the decision to extend the beta period for Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 a little, and release a Release Candidate in late February, pushing back the expected ship date a little
• Releasing Moonlight 2, Roadmap to Moonlight 3 and 4 – Miguel de Icaza highlights the official release of Moonlight 2 the Mono Project’s Silverlight implementation, and outlines the plans for the next two major releases. Miguel also highlights another feature of the Mono 2.6 / MonoDevelop 2.2 release, the support for Debugging Silverlight/Moonlight Apps on Linux

Information

• ADO.NET Data Services Update Released – Yesterday I highlighted the release of ADO.NET Data Services, and today Ricardo Peres highlights the what was new in that release with an overview of new features and improvements
• Getting Started with the Data Services Update for .NET 3.5 SP1 – Part 1 – Alex James of the ADO.NET Data Services team begins a series of posts taking a a step by step run through the new features of the new ADO.NET Data Services release. The team also have release notes for the new release which link back to blog articles discussing the new features and improvements.
• ASP.NET MVC 2 RC – Validating Credit Card Numbers – Jacques Eloff explores the validation support in ASP.NET MVC2 RC with a look at the thorny problem of Credit Card Number validation
• Update on Debugger Perf – Brian Harry gives an update on the performance improvements that have been made to Visual Studio 2010 since the beta 2 release by means of a video showing the performance difference, and it looks to be a significant improvement
• The Siege Project: Siege.ServiceLocation, Part 4 – Integrating Siege.ServiceLocation with ASP.NET MVC – Marcus Bratton continues his series on his Siege.ServiceLocation project with a look at how you can consume it in ASP.NET MVC, and in the final part of the series provides A guide to getting started with Siege.ServiceLocation with a downloadable quickstart sample of code to allow you to get started
• Extending ASP.NET MVC – Replacing the View Engine – Mike Ormond explores ASP.NET MVC Extensibility with a look at the process of replacing out the default View Engine with the Spark View engine, showing the installation and configuration required. In his next post ‘A Bit About Spark‘ Mike looks at some of the features of the Spark engine, and how you can use it.
• Using LINQPad with NHibernate – Alan Northam shows how you can use LINQPad, the easy to use tool which allows yo to query LINQ providers, to query NHibernate entities with a little bit of setup involving DLL references, namespace imports and a little boilerplate setup code.
• Why static classes are evil! – Maciej Gre? shares an amusing look at why static classes are evil, taking the explanation out of the standard software development view and illustrating with people examples.
• Walkthrough: Test-Driven Development with the Entity Framework 4.0 – The ADO.NET team share a step by step walk through of the process of working with the Entity Framework 4 in a Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) way using Test Driven Development practices
• JavaScript Part 1 – hello JavaScript! – "fallenrogue" has a series of posts looking at JavaScript as a language, currently running to 4 parts, looking at the language, the prototype way it works, the standard types, and the this operator. Be sure to check out all 4 parts (and don’t be alarmed and think part 2 is missing, for some reason it comes before part 1 in the blogs index)
• GPGPU and x64 Multicore Programming with Accelerator from F# – Satnam Singh talks about the recently released preview of Accelerator V2 which allows F# to run code on the GPU and x64 multicore systems. This post is quite a complex one, and I think I’m going to have to read it twice to properly understand it (probably not one for the mathematically phobic)

Community

• Edge UG January: SOLID & SharePoint 2010 – The EDGE Usergroup based in London see in the new year with an event on the 20th January focusing on the SOLID principles with a session delivered by Ian Cooper, and Dave McMahon looking at SharePoint 2010

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