The Morning Brew #514

Information

• January’s Toolbox Column Now Online – Scott Mitchell highlights his last Toolbox Column for MSDN Magazine’s January Edition, available online now. Other articles this month discuss the Cloud, Software Transactional Memory, T4 Templates, DSL Patterns, and all the usual .NET, ASP.NET , ASP.NET MVC, etc
• ASP.NET MVC 2 – Scott Guthrie kicks off a series of posts on ASP.NET MVC 2 in the build up to the final release, with the first part discussing Strongly Typed Html Helpers – which help you achieve better type safety in the view templates.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks – Introduction – Mike Hadlow starts off a 10 post series on IOC / DI tricks using Castle Windsor. This series is his preparation for a talk on Windsor at the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper (DDD) event to be held in Reading at the end of the month. Part one of the series looks at Registering Delegates – looking at some tricks you can use when registering types to achieve powerful effects
• Virtual Method Performance Penalty – Davy Brion talks about the alleged penalty in performance when working with Virtual methods in .NET, and tries some simple benchmarks which appear to show that there is little or no actual penalty in hi use case.
• Covariance and Contra-variance in C# 4.0 – Abhijeet Patel takes a look at one of the interesting (and confusing) new features of C#4, co- and contra- variance, illustrating with examples based on animals.
• TekPub’s Mastering LINQ Challenge – Justin Etheredge talks about his LINQ series of video casts for TekPub, and sets a competition with a LINQ Question (Competition now closed). In a follow on post The TekPub LINQ Challenge Part 2 – Faster Algorithms – Justin examines a more performant implementation than his simple solution.
• Why You Don’t Need ModelMetadata.Attributes – Brad Wilson feeds back on why the ASP.NET MVC2 team won’t be including an attributes collection on ModelMetadata, and highlights two techniques which answer the same requirements,
• NHibernate, polymorphic associations and ghost objects – Ayende talks about NHibernate’s support for Lazy loading via Proxy / Ghost objects, and shows how you can work round any problems caused by them by choosing eager fetching to ensure that the real object gets loaded rather than the proxy
• Roy Osherove’s TDD Kata: An F# attempt – Mark Needham continues his explorations of Roy Osherove’s TDD Kata exercise implementing in F#
• Async and Parallel Design Patterns in F#: Parallelizing CPU and I/O Computations – Don Syme talks about the parallel and reactive nature of F# and explores techniques for performing computation and I/O in parallel
• 16 Ways To Create IObservables without implementing IObservable – Scott Weinstein shows 16 different ways of making observables using the Reactive Extensions which do now involve implementing the IObservable interface yourself.
• Learning in the Open: I – Starting with ActiveRecord – Krzysztof Kozmic takes a look at Castle ActiveRecord as a part of a new series, looking at a real world use of active record, and the steps involved in getting up and running.
• What’s After Unit Testing? – Martin Rue talks about a next stage of testing after your unit tests using a framework to perform UI tests. Martin runs through the basics of the Selenium Web Application UI Testing Framework.
• Who takes care of my database connection when I don’t close it in my code? – ‘Snehadeep’ of the SQL Server team talks about what happens in your applications when you don’t close your database connections manually, and how this can be a real performance problem is left unchecked.
• ASP.NET Performance – Part 2 – YSlow – Karl Seguin looks at how a number of the YSlow website performance recommendations can be met with the help of a simple ASP.NET HttpModule
• QBasic on Javascript – Ajaxian highlights a QBasic implementation crafted out of JavaScript and using the Canvas element for its output. The post linked to by Ajaxian gives some in-depth details of how all of this is made to work.
• Image Blitting in Silverlight with WriteableBitmapEx – Adam Kinney shows how some interesting image effects can be achieved using Image Blitting in Silverlight

Community

• Next agile testing UG in London: Cucumber on February 4th – Gojko Adzic will be talking about Testig using Cucumber in a BDD way at the next Agile Testing User Group meeting to be held at SkillsMatter in London on 4th February 2010