The Morning Brew

Software

• IronPython 2.6 Released! – Dino Viehland announces the release of IronPython 2.6 which brings IronPython in line with the stable C Python branch, along with improving the .NET Integration features, upgrading to the latest version of the DLR and numerous performance improvements
• Entity Framework Profiler is now in public beta – Ayende announces the public beta release of EF Prof, the profiler for the Entity Framework allowing you to easily see what is going on behind the scenes in Entity Framework based data access code. Ayende also announces a new feature, Programmatic Integration – which allows you to interact with the profiler using a programatic interface allowing you to examine reports in integration tests
• Xap Reflector – Silverlight 4 – ‘nmarun’ shares his XapReflector project which is a Silverlight Application (Out Of Browser enabled) which allows you to open an .xap file and it will open the main assembly of the application and allow you to view type, methods, properties, etc, along with some other useful information about the application being inspected

Information

• Understanding Perceived Performance – Howard Dierking shares some notes he made while reading ‘Designing and Engineering Time: The Psychology of Time Perception in Software’, by Steven Seow, hopefully giving you enough of a taste of the book that you read it yourself. Howard continues with More on Perceived Performance, sharing some more thoughts from the book. The perception of time is a very important factor, and often more important than the actual time taken, and these points (and the book) make good reading
• Update on Solution Load Performance – Brian Harry continues his series of posts on the performance testing that Visual Studio 2010 is undergoing, this time looking at the performance of solution load of a variety of real world solutions. Brian also outlines the sizes and complexity of those solutions in his follow on post "Real World" Apps
• Preventing Security Development Errors: Lessons Learned at Windows Live by Using ASP.NET MVC – The Microsoft Windows Live team share a paper on their use of ASP.NET MVC and the principles of the SDL outlining how they worked to prevent developers from creating any security flaws in their projects
• Enabling IoC in ASP.NET ActionResults (or, a better ActionResult) – Jimmy Bogard looks at separating the concerns of an ASP.NET MVC ActionResults object, splitting out the parameter aspects from the execution aspects and introducing the use of an IOC container to join the parts together
• Using NHibernate In Your Service Layer – Davy Brion revisits the management of NHibernate Sessions in Service Layer projects with implementations of ISessionProvider, IActiveSessionManager and IUnitOfWork interfaces, along with the code to wire this solution into your application
• ASP.NET WebForms Best Practices – John Sprunger shares a number of best practices for ASP.NET Web Forms Development, some of which are also applicable beyond the WebForms world.
• Reading a Xml File in T4 Templates – Gil Fink shares a nice simple illustration of reading from XML files in T4 template code to allow you to generate code from the XML File
• Meet my new ASP.NET MVC Extension – System.Web.Mvc.Extensibility – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at the ASP.NET MVC Turbine Project, picking up on some areas he finds less desirable, and shares his own implementation of similar features for supporting multiple IOC/DI frameworks
• ViewModel Pattern for Silverlight – Options for Hooking a View to its Model – Nikhil Kothari explores a couple of means of linking models to the view in Silverlight with a view to gathering community feedback on these techniques to feed back into the Silverlight and Blend product teams
• Mock Objects – Liz Douglass shares some thoughts from the paper ‘Mock Roles, Not Objects’ on how we should go about mocking in our tests
• Agatha Feature Suggestion: Caching – Davy Brion starts investigating response caching capabilities for his Agatha Service Layer Implementation and already has a post’Agatha’s Caching Layer Implementation: First Draft‘ providing the first draft (in code) of such a feature

Community

• Developer Developer Developer 8 – The next instalment of the Developer Developer Developer events series will be being held on 30th January 2010 at Microsoft’s Reading Campus. Registration has not opened yet, however the call for speakers has been issued, and you can submit any sessions you would like to deliver now.

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Software

• StatLight – Goes Open Source – Jason Jarrett releases StatLight, his ‘for-sale’ Silverlight automated testing tool which supports Test and Behaviour driven development, as open source with the code hosted on CodePlex

Information

• XSS Attack your database to detect missing Output Encoding – ‘Corneliu’ highlights the common security flaw of Cross Site Scripting, and shows how an automated tool can help you test places where you are displaying un-encoded strings in your application based on data sourced from the database. The tool ‘vandalises’ your data in the the database meaning that any un-encoded strings will result in message boxes being displayed.
• The File System is unpredictable – Jared Parsons talks about how it is best to consider the File System as a multi threaded object with no good synchronisation methods available, talking about some of the things that can go wrong when working with files.
• Clarified CQRS – Udi Dahan sets out to clarify the meaning of CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Separation) looking at the real meaning (minus any preconceptions from other architectures), and shows where it connects to other patterns
• Demystifying LINQ Aggregates – Malisa Ncube explores the use of Linq Aggregation functions with a number of simple worked examples showing the different ways of achieving aggregated results in different scenarios
• Constraints are not part of the signature – Eric Lippert explores another intreging compiler behaviour, this time surrounding the compilers job of determining which overload of a static method should be called when there are generic constraints
• Resizing images from the server using WPF/WIC instead of GDI+ – Bertrand Le Roy shows how you can use WPF to resize images in a better way than GDI+, and looks at the output and relative performance compared to GDI+
• 12 Days of RIA – Day 1 – Solution – John Pelak begins a series (already up to part 4, check out the other posts on this blog) building a real world Line of Business application using the RIA services and Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010
• Domain-Driven Documentation – Richard Dingwall talks about how the expression of requirements in the Domain Driven Development (Evans) style can help you in your more general documentation to craft documentation which is clear and consistent.
• The Siege Project: Siege.ServiceLocation, Part 3 – Extending the container with custom use cases – Marcus Bratton looks at how he provides for extensibility of the container implementation in his Siege.ServiceLocation project.
• Castle Windsor new feature – dynamic parameters from registration site – Krzysztof Kozmic shows a new feature of Castle Windsor which allows you to register components which take dependency on a parameter which needs to be populated with a dynamic value without having to wrap the value provider as a service.
• Are Extension Methods a Code Smell – Kevin Jones discusses why extension methods may be a code smell, rather than a nice language feature
• C# regions sure can be useless – Jeff Wilcox briefly touches on why #regions are a rather pointless feature when used in common ways. Ben Hall also shows some great examples of #region in his posts This is why I hate regions and More amazing region examples

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Software

• Visual NHibernate – Visual NHibernate the currently in beta tool from Slyce Software has reached its 2.0.9.1018 version, introducing a number of new features in this release. This tool looks to be a useful means of working with and creating the NHibernate Mappings and maintaining the database schema using a visual UML like interface

Information

• Creating extensions for VS 2010 – Soma Somasegar talks about using the Visual Studio 2010 SDK to create extensions for VS2010, focusing briefly on th whole process from downloading the SDK to sharing your extension
• Another Virtual Memory Tip – Brian Harry shares another useful bit of information about Virtual Memory use when working with NGen’d assemblies which don’t live in the Global Assembly Cache
• Mono and C# 4.0 – Marek Safar announces that the Mono C# Compiler is now at a feature complete level with the C#4 specification. He reviews the new features and how they are implemented in the Mono compiler
• Guided Tour: jQuery – guard and default operators – Sergio Pereira begins a new series of posts titled ‘Guided Tours’ which aim to take you on a tour of a particular bit of code. This post looks at jQuery.fn.text(), focusing on the use of Guards and Default operators in this code.
• Real World Benefits From Loose Coupling, Inversion Of Control And Dependency Injection – Davy Brion looks at some the real benefits of implemeing loosely coupled code using Dependency injection and Inversion of control, illustrating with an example of the benefit he realised with his Agatha Request Response Service Layer project
• Test Method Code Snippet For Visual Studio – created with the Snippet Designer – Sean McAlinden highlights the free Snippet Designer extension for Visual Studio available on CodePlex, and shows how you can use it to create simple snippets which will save you time and effort when coding common code
• DI Patterns: Constructor Injection – DotNetSlackers has a preview extract of the forthcoming book from Mark Seemann on ‘Dependency Injection with .NET’. This extract looks at the constructor injection pattern, explaining what it is, how it works and when you should use it.
• T-SQL Tuesday #001 (Date/Time Tricks): The Roundup – Adam Machanic rounds up the posts from his T-SQL Tuesday Blogging event from this week where SQL bloggers where encouraged to post on the subject of DateTime Tricks.
• "Magic" null argument testing – Jon Skeet looks at the humble null argument check, looking for ways to make it shorter and simpler to use using some of his trademark ninja C# skills (and some LINQ, delegates and extension methods)
• The Singleton Killer – Peter Gillard-Moss takes a step by step look at the refactoring to remove a singleton from some code. Peter also shares an implementation of an Immutable Wrapper to easily create immutable Lists
• The Coffee Table Guide of the Parallel Programming Samples for .NET 4 – Greg Duncan highlights a post from the Parallel Programming with .NET blog which gives an overview of all the samples for parallel programming in .NET 4
• Which Code Metrics Do You Consider Important? – Davy Brion discusses the topic of Code Metrics with a look at the various metrics offered by NDepend, classifying them into ones he finds useful, and ones that you might thing would be interesting but he doesn’t find interesting. Some good discussions starting in the comments on this one
• The Siege Project: Siege.ServiceLocation, Part 2 – Contextual Registration and Resolution – Marcus Bratton continues his series on the Siege Project with a look at how he implemented Contextual Registration in the Service Locator, allowing fine control of which types should be returned in which conditions.
• Getting Started with the MVVM Pattern in Silverlight Applications – Dan Wahlin gives an overview of the MVVM pattern with a simple implementation in Silverlight
• Using Examples in Software Development – A Team from Tel Aviv University are investigating the use of examples by software developers and could benefit from your feedback via this simple 3 page questionnaire (takes about 5-10 mins to fill out). looking at when you use and how you find example code

Community

• MIX10 Registration Open – Mike Ormond highlights the opening of Registration for the Microsoft MIX conference for Web Designers and Developers to be held 15-17th March 2010 in Las Vegas. Early Bird registrations deals bring the cost down to $795 until Jan 15th, rising to $1395 after that.

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