January 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #528

Posted by on 29 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Looking forward to the 8th DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper conference down in Reading tomorrow. As always, if you are there and spot me, please come over and say hello.

Software

  • Announcing PostSharp 2.0 CTP 3 – Gael Fraiteur announces the release of the 3rd CTP release of PostSharp 2. This release is mostly a bugfix release over the previous CTP2 release and is set to expire on 1st March 2010
  • Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework 2010-1-25: brief intro of new samples – All-In-One Code Framework got an update earlier this week which added a number of new samples for Azure, WorkFlow, Visual Studio Extensibility, and much more
  • NDepend v3 is now 100% integrated in Visual Studio – Patrick Smacchia talks about the new NDepend 3 Beta, and how it integrates tightly withVisual Studio, and the lengths they went to in ensuring that it performs well in the IDE. The Beta is available now, and works with VS 2005/2008 with support for some VS2010 builds.

Information

The Morning Brew #527

Posted by on 28 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Data Services Update for .NET 3.5 SP1 – Now Available for Download – Mike Flasko announces the (re)release of an updated version of the ADO.NET Data Services 1.5 (which is now called Data Services) with separate releases for Windows 7/2008 and other Windows editions. This release includes a number of new features including URI support for projections, feed customisation and two way data binding support.

Information

  • NHibernate new feature: Lazy Properties – Ayende introduces a new feature for NHibernate, the ability to have properties which are lazy loaded only on first access, useful for properties which contain lots of data that may not be needed in all cases. Currently this implementation is in the trunk version and will only work with the Castle Proxy Factory, and has no implementation in the critiera API.
  • Transparently releasing components in Windsor – Krzysztof Kozmic proposes some functionality for the Castle Windsor container to allow it to not just manage the lifecycle of the components it brings into being but to manage the release of these components without your intervention, backing the ideas up with a simple (and not production ready) prototype implementation.
  • .NET 4.0 and System.Collections.Concurrent.ConcurrentBag – Justin Etheredge explores the Concurrent Bag implementation included in .NET 4’s Concurrent Collections, looking at it in uses and the facility it provides to allow you to parallel program efficiently against it.
  • It’s the maintenance, stupid! (or: Something is rotten in developerland.) – Thomas Weller shares a well thought out and researched piece on the problems with software development in terms of maintenance of existing projects, looking at the factors which makes maintenance more difficult.
  • The Weekly Source Code 48 – DynamicQueryable makes custom LINQ expressions easier – Scott Hanselman follows on from his previous Weekly Source Code post revisiting the problem and (with the help of some community members) finding an improved solution.
  • Securing Your Agatha Service Layer – Davy Brion talks about implementing security within his Agatha Service Layer project, which can be achieved by the usual WCF security methods, or as Davy explores in this piece by implementing custom authentication into the request processing.
  • Hacking Mono.Cecil – allowing invalid opcodes – Paul Mason continues his series of posts on obfuscation with a look at hacking Mono.Cecil to allow it to happily ignore invalid opcodes and therefore read assemblies which contain them.
  • Converting An Enter Key Press Into A Tab Key Press For Web Forms – Brian Jackett shares a simple bit of JavaScript which converts enter key presses into tabs having the effect that the enter key will move you into the next field on the Web Form rather than submitting the page.
  • Simple Query Results Caching with EF4 – Danny Simmons explores Caching query results in Entity Framework 4, addressing a particular problem he encountered in the field, and highlighting a few useful .NET 4 and EF4 features along the way.
  • Automated WPF functional tests using White – Laurent Kempé highlights a tool from ThoughtWorks which allows you to write functional tests for Rich Client Applications (Win32, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight and SWT) in .NET languages. White is based in the Microsoft UI Automation library, but abstracts away a lot of the complexity. Looks like a project to watch.

The Morning Brew #526

Posted by on 27 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Information

  • Type initialization changes in .NET 4.0 – Jon Skeet looks at the differences in type initialization between .NET 3.5 and .NET 4, showing that .NET 4 has become more lazy than 3.5 about when it initializes types, waiting longer before actually doing the work.
  • FAQ :: Are all of the new concurrent collections lock-free? – ‘dashih’ discusses the use of locks within the new concurrent collections available in .NET 4 and how they are not completely lock free, utilising locks in certain places, but do use lock-free techniques to increase performance in certain areas.
  • Translating routes (ASP.NET MVC and Webforms) – Maarten Balliauw explores the use of Routes to provide translated URLs in WebForms and ASP.NET MVC instead of using country code and English phrases for the URL, with full support for all the MVC features such as action link and controller identification.
  • I just installed Visual Studio 2010, now how do I get Code Contracts? – Melitta Andersen talks through the process of getting the new Code Contracts functionality in your Visual Studio 2010 install, highlighting the separate installer and the project property that needs setting to enable the functionality.
  • Simulating Snakes and Ladders with a PLINQ Turbo boost – Samuel Jack looks at modelling the game of Snakes and Ladders and then set about analysing (by way of simulation) the typical lengths of game you can statistically expect, looking at improving the performance of the simulation using Parallel Extensions to LINQ,
  • View Models in ASP.NET MVC – Simon Ince answers the question ‘Should I have a view Model in my ASP.NET MVC architecture?’ very quickly and then shows three ways of coding starting from the no view model, moving through a container view model and finally to a true view model implementation.
  • Cross-thread operations with PostSharp – ‘Lesnikowski’ look at using PostSharp to inject code on method start to provide an easy means of calling methods on Winforms controls from any thread and ensuring that the call is made with BeginInvoke
  • Software Development Do’s and Dont’s – Michael Ceranski shares some of his wisdom gained over the years in the form of some do’s and don’ts con software development practices
  • Command Query Responsibility Segregation – Udi Dahan – Mark Harris shares video of Udi Dahan’s recent talk on Command Query Responsibility Segregation delivered at the Victoria .NET Dev SIG on 19th Jan 2010.
  • Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network – Microsoft have updated their JavaScript CDN to include versions 1.4 and 1.41 of jQuery in addition to the 1.3.2 release. The one thing that does appear to be missing currently is the VSDOC version which gives intellisense in Visual Studio – hopefully that will appear soon.

Community

  • Brighton ALT.NET Beers – 2nd February at The Skiff – Mike Hadlow gives notification of the next Brighton Alt,Net Beers event, to be held at a new venue, ‘The Skiff’ a co-working space in Brighton. Other than the location the format of the event will be as usual starting arround 7PM

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