The Morning Brew

500th Post Celebrations

(If you just want the links for today, skip down the page)

Today marks a major milestone in the publishing of The Morning Brew, being the 500th edition. I find it staggering that I’ve managed to produce this daily update every week day (minus public holidays of course) 500 times, it really doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing it that long. Of course, I’m not the only one to reach the 500 post milestone, but it still feels significant.

Since today is a milestone, I though it was a good time to do a little work on the blog as a whole, and since Tthe Morning Brew has somewhat taken over all the blogging here in the past 2 years I’m going make it the main feature here, and the observant of you (or those who read this on the actual site) will have noticed a few minor changes to the appearance of the blog, and most significantly the name of the blog is now ‘The Morning Brew’, and I will soon be migrating all the site over to being hosted at its new address of ‘http://www.TheMorningBrew.Net. The old address will be maintained in the form of redirects to the new address for all posts.

In addition to some name changes and a little bit of rebranding I’d also like to attempt a little marketing of The Morning Brew in the form of Blog Badges which you can place on your sites where you wish to link to The Morning Brew. These badges were produced for me by my friend and former colleague Derek Fowler almost a year ago, and I never got around to using them at the time, so a mix of ‘sorry’ and ‘thanks’ go to Derek for them.

If you would like to include them in your log, here is an HTML snippet for the general ‘I read The Morning Brew’ badges (they cycle randomly through different badges):

Which will display something like:

If you’ve had your articles featured in The Morning Brew you may wish to use the Contributor set of badges instead, in which case your HTML will need to look something like:




Which will display a badge looking like:

I’d be very happy to receive additional badges of the same dimensions, so if you have some design flair (which I don’t) and fancy having a go at creating a badge or two please feel free to send your attempts over and I’ll look at including them in the appropriate rotation.

There will be a few more changes to The Morning Brew over the coming weeks, including actual Morning Brew coffee mugs, a look at possibly including sponsorship / advertising, and a few other minor improvements. As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas please drop me a line.

Many thanks to the authors of the great articles I have the privilege of being able to link to, and to you for your readership over the past 500 editions. Here’s to the next 500!

Software

• LINQPad updated to support Data Services! – Chris Sells highlights a new beta release of LINQPad the tool which allows you to interactivly issue LINQ queries against a variety of backing sotres, and which as of this release now supports querying against OData powered services (such as WCF Data Services)
• ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 now available – Greg Duncan highlights the release of an update to ADO.NET Data Services which extends the functioanlity of the .NET 3.5 SP1 release of ADO.Net Data Services. Packages are available for all supported Windows Versions (with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 having their own special version)

Information

• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report – A Christmas Gift? – Steve Strong gives his latest progress report on his work on the full featured LINQ to NHibernate provider bring the good news that it now supports 100% of the test cases from the old provider, and adds a lot of extra abilities too. Steve also shows a number of example queries, along with encouraging you to give the provider a try, and gives some further setup assistance in his next post ‘Using the new Linq to NH Provider and migrating from the old one‘
• FREE MSDN Flash eBook of the best 13 technical articles of 2009 – Eric Nelson shares an eBook of the best 13 technical articles that have been featured in the UK MSDN Flash newsletter in the past year. The eBook is now available in XPS and PDF formats for you to download and enjoy over the Christmas holiday period
• Silverlight 4 demos from my PDC Keynote now available – Scott Guthrie prodices the downloads for the source to his PDC Keynote Silverlight 4 demo applications which demo some of the key new features of Silverlight 4 including webcam and microphone support, video effects, rich text editing and HTML hosting support
• Architecting Silverlight 4 with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM – Part 1 – Shawn Wildermuth begins a new series of posts looking at the architecture options and best practices behind building a Silverlight 4 application using the Rich Internet Application Services, the Managed Extensibility Framework and the Model View View Model pattern
• Building Hello MEF – Part III – XAP Partitioning (with the host’s permission) and the sweetness of recomposition. – Glenn Block continues his series on the Managed Extensibility Framework with a look at the support in MEF for Silverlight 4 and the dynamic loading of parts from different XAP files, exploring recomposition and how that can effect your application design.
• Thinking about the future of the Caching block – Christopher Tavares talks about the Patterns and Practices Caching Application Block, asking if, now that the framework has caught up with peoples requirements, the caching block may no longer be required in the Enterprise Library, and solicits your feedback on the subject.
• Unit Testing Strategy: Hiding Out In the Open – Tim Barcz examines some hard to test code which touches the file system, taking a look at what can be done to make this code more testable, along with having a look at ‘hiding’ a method by having it as a public method but not part of the Interface that the class is implementing.
• IronRuby @ RubyConf 2009 – Part 3.5: Embedding IronRuby – Jimmy Schementi is publishing his notes from RubyConf 209, and in this part of his series of posts looks at the embedding capabilities of IronRuby, showing how it can be embedded into your own applications, and sharing some sample applications which show this in use.
• The Common Principles Behind the NOSQL Alternatives – Nati Shalom posts on the subject of Not Only SQL (NOSQL) alternative database systems, looking at the common concepts behind all of their implementations, and how they aim to address scalability and performance.
• Codename "Dallas" Developer Portal Walkthrough – Roger Jennings takes a look at the Dallas Project using his newly recieved developer token for the service, giving us a sneak peek at the innards of the Developer Portal, and some of the data feeds available.
• Silverlight Advent Calendar: December 14th: The Local Connection API explained – Gill Cleeren, as a part of the Silverlight Advent Calendar series, takes a look at the Local Connection API which allows messages to be exchanged between different Silverlight controls on a web page. Be sure to check out the other informative posts in this series.
• Tracewriter App Available for Download on Code Gallery – ‘James’ on the Parallel Visualizer Team highlights the code release of a fun project from another team member (Ryan) which writes words in multiple threads viewable from the Parallel Visualizer
• Open Source Success Metrics – Ayende talks about some of the different metrics that can be used to help gauge the success of an Open Source project and how adoption of and contribution to open source projects are two very different things.
• Comparing Entity Framework 4 New Stored Procedure Support to LINQ to SQL – Steve Michelotti explores the Entity Framework 4 support for data access via Stored Procedure, and compares the level of support to that of LINQ to SQL.
• John Resig: "Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4" – Eric Miraglia shares the video taken from a recent BayJax event where John Resig spoke on the subject of JavaScript performance and Unit testing, along with the changes being introduced in jQuery 1.4

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Last post of the 400’s today, and I have to confess I’ve not prepared much special for the big 500 tomorrow, but there are still a few hours for some plans to fall into place.

Software

• Nine Months Later: Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2 – Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2, the latest major release from the Mono Project. Mono 2.6 boasts WCF client and server at the Silverlight 2.0 level, Linq to SQL, support for MSBuild projects, along with performance optimisations and a reduction in size. MonoDevelop 2.2 now has support for ASP.NET MVC, numerous UI improvements, T4 processor support, Mac and Windows support, new refactoring features, a new debugger and is now licensed as LGPLv2 and MIT X11

Information

• The impact of language choice on github projects – Aldo Cortesi takes a look at some statistics from the GitHub databases looking at the use of languages in projects, analysing the numbers of lines per commit, commit activity by language, and numerous other metrics. Interesting reading, even if you don’t agree with the analysis (and plenty of comments discussing it too)
• An Update on the FubuMVC Reboot – Jeremy D. Miller talks about the work he has undertaken to rewrite some of the core of the FubuMVC projects MVC implementation discussing his design principles for the changes and looking at the request lifecycle
• Making F# type inference friendly for C# – Jared Parsons talks about some of the pain of interoperability between F# and C# code which results in a proliferation of explicit types, and shows a trick using static non-generic classes to have the type system infer some of the type information needed.
• The Architecture Journal – The December 2009 issue of The Architects Journal takes Business Intelligence as its topic, with articles looking at bring the power of Business Intelligence to the hands of a large group of users.
• Entity Framework 4.0 Resources gets a December 2009 Update – Eric Nelson updates his Entity Framework Resources post with relevant links from the past few months, keeping his originals post as a great resource for all things EF4
• Entity Framework POCO (EF4): A Simple Mapping – Jarod Ferguson takes a look at the code only mapping functionality available in Entity Framework 4 working from nothing to some working EF code. In his next post in this series he look at creating a Generic Repository and Unit of Work Prototype, and in his latest post looks at using the Unity library to introduce some DI/IOC capabilities – Unity Extension for Entity Framework POCO Configuration, Repository and Unit of Work
• Remember JScript closures capture all variables in scope – Marcelo looks at an example of how closure in Javascript captures variables values which are in scope, reminding along the way that different languages work differently in this regard.
• Limiting Variable Scope Using (function(){})(); – David Walsh looks at a useful trick involving variable scope in Javascript which allows you to control your variables and keep them separate when writing JavaScript resources which may be combined on a single page.
• Fiilling an array with a default value – Mikael Svenson looks at the performance of 5 different ways of filling a large byte array with values, along with the code for each of the techniques
• Designing for Resilience in n-Tier applications (part 1) – Nuno Silva begins a series looking at the standard n-tier application architecture, and how performance and resilience can be improved in such an application structure
• Happy 10th birthday Cross-Site Scripting! – David Ross highlights the 10 year anniversary of the Cross Site Scripting attack, and how the name came into being (and some of the other alternatives suggested at the time)
• Injecting Your Favorite IoC Into MVC Turbine – Javier G. Lozano discusses some of the common questions regarding service location and component registration in his MVC Turbine project
• Live Preview jQuery Plugin – Phil Haack shares a nice jQuery plugin for providing live previews of HTML Content where there is a limited subset of tags available such as for use in blog comments.

Community

• A List Apart: The Survey, 2009 – A List Apart are running their anual survey for web developers looking at the state of the industry, how you work, your level of skills, and how you go about your business. The results from this survey have made interesting reading in the past, and if you work in a ‘people who make websites’ role I urge you to fill it out.

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Short edition today – didn’t seem to be vast quantities of relevant posts in my RSS reader this morning which usually means tomorrow will be a large edition.

Information

• Windows Azure platform AppFabric Breaking Changes Pre-Announcement – The Windows Azure team share news of some breaking changes in their forthcoming release of the Azure AppFabric. Most of the changes look to be security related, and there are details of each change in this post
• Towards FsUnit 1.0 – Ray Vernagus talks about his plans for FsUnit, refocusing the project on classical Unit Testing utilising existing testing frameworks in a more functional way
• Validation attributes for business logic – Peter Blum continues his Exploring Dynamic Data series with a post on the Validation attributes utilised by the dynamic data framework
• Back in Business – The .NET community welcomes Phil Haack back after his webserver’s data loss, and Phil talks about the recovery process and How the IIS SEO Toolkit Saved My (his) Butt, and Scott Guthrie encourages you to check out the SEO Toolkit in his post Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit
• “Everything You Need to Know About Azure as a Developer” 18 part course on msdev.com updated to include four new Windows Azure AppFabric sessions – Greg Duncan highlights an 18 part course on Azure from MSDev.com. These parts range from 15 minutes to 120 minutes, and might prove to be a great resource for filling in time over the Christmas holidays
• Going Hybrid – Implementing a Shopping Cart in F# – Matthew Podwysocki explores how you can utilise functional style programming in among your object oriented code with a look at the canonical shopping cart as an example.
• ElementAtOrDefault – Bill McCarthy talks about an interesting feature of the VB.Net compiler in VB9+ which allows you to access indexed items on non-indexed enumerables, and how this makes use of extension methods behind the scenes, but how caution has to be exercised to avoid bad performance.
• Use the right tool for the job – Eric Lippert discusses an flawed cryptography solution to a problem, and shares 10 good practices for working with cryptography in your applications to help avoid getting stung
• MVVM Study Part 5: Convention over Configuration – Rob Eisenberg talks about how convention over configuration can simplify your applications illustrating with an MVVM example

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