The Morning Brew

Information

• Introducing the Microsoft Visualization Language – Martin R. Calsyn gives the first peep at a newly announced research project from Microsoft Research, The Verdea Project, a language designed for creating visualisations using data and graphics. First releases of the language will be made in the new year.
• Binding Operators for C# 5 – Chris Eargle is excited by the binding operators he sees in Project Verdea, and suggests that the inclusion of this style of binding operator would make a great inclusion in C#5
• Persistence model and domain anemia – Jimmy Bogard discusses the Anemic Domain Model anti-pattern and suggests that for a lot of applications an anemic domain model should not be considered a problem, suggesting that these are in fact a Persistence Object Model, a pattern in its own right
• Dynamic LINQ – Ricardo Peres highlights one of the samples from the official Microsoft .NET Samples which has an implementation of dynamic LINQ queries which allow lambda expressions to be specified as strings.
• Monitor your ASP.NET Cache API Behaviour – The UK Application Development Consulting highlights an old post from Simon Ince looking at the behaviour of the ASP.NET Cache, looking at how and when it chooses to drop entries from the cache, along with how you can control the cache better
• Processing a queue of objects using multiple threads with the ProcessQueue. – Adam Robinson shares a class for working with multiple threads to perform an operation (or set of operations) on a queue list of items to process.
• How to make your Obfuscator fool Reflector – Paul Mason continues his series of posts on obfuscation of .NET code with a look at what your obfuscation tool has to do in order to confuse the .NET Reflector from Redgate so that it can’t expose the source of your application.
• How To Use Windsor to Change a Deployed Application’s Behaviour Without Touching a Single Line of Existing Code – Rob Reynold shows how you can easily use the Castle Windsor Container to provide plugable command support in your application requiring only a little bit of configuration to add in the functionality, and no code changes to the original application
• Exact rules for variance validity – Eric Lippert shares the definitions he used when implementing the Covariance and Contravariance functionality in C#4 in the hopes of demystifying these complex rules
• Caliburn Silverlight Navigation Walkthrough: Introduction – Rob Eisenberg releases a Sample shell implementation of Navigation for Silverlight using his Caliburn framework, which out of the box provides a lot of useful functionality (see his post for the full list)
• Aspect Oriented Programming – your good friend – Maciej Gre? indulges in a few sporting analogies to explain some of the concepts of Aspect Oriented Programming

Community

• Algorithmatic – Morning Brew Reader Ahmad Al-Naimi (@anaimi on Twitter) is seeking feedback from the developer community on Algorithmatic an ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight powered site which offers a custom programming language (and IDE) to help in the construction cataloging of algorithm implementations.

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Only 10 more editions until I reach the 500 edition milestone – I really need to get started planning something special.

Software

• MVC Turbine v2.0 RTM – Javier G. Lozano announces the release of Version 2 of MVC Turbine, a project which brings IOC into the heart of ASP.NET MVC providing realdy made means to have controllers, binders, view engines, etc automatically wired together using the powers of IOC
• T4CSS: A T4 Template for .Less CSS With Compression – Phil Haack embraces the .less CSS processor which adds the ability to have variables, operators, etc in your CSS which gets processed out at delivery time. Phil contributes some support for generating static CSS files using T4 and .less, along with optionally compressing using the YUI Compressor.
• Surface SDK Now Broadly Available – Bruce D. Kyle highlights the availability of the workstation edition of the Microsoft Surface SDK, which allows you to develop and test Surface applications without needing the actual surface hardware
• MEF Refresh of Preview 8 for Silverlight – Glenn Block highlights the release of a minor update to the Managed Extensibility Framework for Silverlight preview 8 release, made last month which fixes a serious bug

Information

• Lambda Abuse: The MvcContrib Hash – Jeremy Skinner follows up on the recent discussions on the use of lambda expressions in ASP.NET MVC Contrib for building dictionary like structures, explaining the technique used, and answering some of the criticisms of that method
• How Dot Net 4 Side by Side will impact API writers – Jason Short of VistaDB discusses the impact side by side installations of .NET 4 and earlier versions will have for people developing Add-ins, libraries and APIs, dicussing the confusing area of which version of the framework gets loaded in which circumstances
• MEF and Prism, to be or not to be – Glenn Block looks at the future for the Managed Extensibility Framework and the Patterns and Practices Prism project, answering one the Frequently Asked Questions he always receives
• Have you checked out the new RichTextArea control? – ‘Nitya’ highlights the inclusion of a Rich Text Editor control in the Silverlight 4 Beta release, giving a brief introduction to working with it in both XAML and Code
• 2009 Advent Calendar December 2nd – ‘cellfish’ continues with the Advent series of posts with a look at a better method of locking than yesterdays, looking at oving the lock to a separate object, and adding some mocking support by making it an interface implementation
• Analyze .NET Fusion log with PowerShell in timely manner – Freist Li shares a useful tip for using PowerShell to parse out the important information about binding problems from the Fusion Log file
• TPL (That is, Task Parallel Library) Article of the Day: – Parent-Child Task Relationships in the .Net Framework 4 – Greg Duncan highlights a document from Microsoft which looks at the Parent-Child task relationships included in .NET 4, providing guidance on working with such tasks, along with looking at task completion, waiting and cancellation.
• Query performance, scalar UDFs, and predicate pushdown – Dimitri Furman shares some useful tips on improving the performance of a query which utilises a scalar User Defined Function in the where clause, where the function operates on a column of data.

Community

• Write Extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 Editor – Kate Gregory shares another Talk on Code Project, providing demos, speaker notes, the presentation files and the code samples to illustrate alongside the presentation, along with videos of the demos. This really is everything you need to deliver her talk on extensibility of the Visual Studio 2010 Editor

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Software

• Tools We Use – John Robbins posts up a list of the tools that the technical folks at Wintellect use on a day to day basis. I always find these lists interesting as you often find whole classes of tools which solve or assist with problems you are having

Information

• One bug, two developers: Collaborative debugging is now a reality in Visual Studio 2010 – Habib Heydarian looks at the features in Visual Studio which allow for better collaboration between developers when they are doing debugging, such as import and export of data tips and break points
• December’s Toolbox Column Now Online – Scott Mitchell higlights the features from his December Toolbox column for MSDN Magazine, Nikhil Sachdeva also highlights his contribution of an article on Pex at MSDN and the CLR Team blog also highlights the work of Jesse Kaplan and Luiz Fernando Santos in their article CLR Inside Out – In-Process Side-by-Side
• Good Claims, Bad Claims 1: an Example – Vittorio Bertocci looks deeper into the concepts of claims discussing when and where it is appropriate to use which claims concept
• Windows 7 resources for developers – in one place – Eric Nelson highlights the work being done within his group to bring together the best Windows 7 related resources for developers for the UK MSDN
• Your Abomination Is My Clever Hack – K. Scott Allen discusses the interesting use of Lambda expressions in the ASP.NET MVC Contrib library functions for building tables, and how, depending on your position, this is either a lovely or horrid use of the language.
• Hacking the ASP.NET Parser – Unhandled Exception – David Fowler looks at the extension points available in the ASP.NET Parser and uses some of them to add in the ability for templates for controls such as repeaters to be specified as external ascx templates
• A* pathfinding search in C# – Part 3 – Leniel Macaferi posts the final part in a series of posts begun in June this year looking at the A* Search, using a real world example based on cities in Romania to illustrate the concepts
• Migrating to Fluent NHibernate – Jimmy Bogard runs through the process he took to migrate existing NHibernate .HBM XML mapping files to Fluent NHibernate, and how some of the features of Fluent NHibernate made his work easier than expected
• Web Application Performance: CSS Data URIs – ‘Sanjay’ talks about, and looks at using Data URLs for transmitting CSS and Images to the browser from your .NET Applications
• The Halting Problem and the Church-Turing Thesis – Chris Smith shares some classic Computer Science with look at the concept of the Turing Machine, and the problem of determining if such a representation of a program will ever complete.

Community

• AltNetBeers – The Xmas Edition – The Cambridge (UK) .NET Developer’s User Group announce the date for their first official AltNetBeers style event to be held on 15th December at The Tram Depot in Cambridge
• NotAtPDC – The NotAtPDC website has been updated, and now includes video recordings of over half the sessions – there are a few of these that I really want to check out as I wasn’t able to see them live, so looking forward to spending some time watching

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