The Morning Brew

Software

• Reflector Pro moves into beta! – Alex Davies highlights the Beta release of Reflector Pro, the commercial version of the Reflector tool aquired by RedGate last year. Reflector Pro includes Visual Studio integration, and the tool has had a number of improvements and enhancements, along with the inclusion of .NET 4 support.
• ASP.NET Support in ReSharper 5 – Hadi Hariri shows off some of the ASP.NET related features of Resharper 5, illustrating with screenshots of the features in use.
• .Net Coding metric released – Garren Smith releases a simple code metrics tool built on Mono.Cecil. Currently the tool calculates lines of code per method and cyclomatic complexity. Licensed as open source, the code is available on GitHub

Information

• [Required] Doesnt Mean What You Think It Does – Brad Wilson takes a look at the [Required] validation attribute and explains what it is intended for, and what it does not do, along with discussing some best practices for model binding.
• My Favorite Helpers For ASP.NET MVC – Rob Conery shares some of his favourite ASP.NET MVC Helper extension Methods
• A new feature request for C# I would like is fall through exceptions – Derik Whittaker outlines a feature he (and quite a few others) would like to see introduced in C# which would allow you to catch a range of exceptions and handle them all with the same exception handler.
• Announcing Enterprise Library 5.0 and Unity 2.0 Roadmap – Grigori Melnik shares the vision for forthcoming releases of the Enterprise Library and Unity along with how they allign with Visual Studio 2010 releases.
• Diving a Little Deeper into AutoMapper Part 1 – Deran Schilling begins a new series of posts looking at the AutoMapper project in use, using a worked example to illustrate the power of AutoMapper when dealing with mapping to and from a complex set of domain objects.
• Reducing Duplication By Passing Code – Charles Courchaine illustrates the use of functions as parameters with a WCF based example which shows how you can remove duplicate code surrounding code that varies by passing the variable bit of code into the method.
• Functional collectional parameters: Some thoughts – Mark Needham looks at how declaring a problem and solving it as a pair in an imperative way initially and then refactoring to an elegant declarative solution can be a good way of working, illustrating with an example.
• Debate: Comparing NHibernate and EF 4 – Abel Avram posts on InfoQ with a summary of some of the recent discussion on NHibernate vs Entity Framework providing a nice balanced of the views expressed by various interested (and well known) parties.
• Rebuttal: Constructor over-injection anti-pattern – Mark Seemann follows up on Jeffrey Palermo’s post on Constructor Over Injection as an anti-pattern with a look at an alternative way of solving the problem of expensive object creation, and responds to a comment in a follow up post ‘Enabling DI for Lazy Components‘ looking at making his lazy initialised component support dependency injection.
• Asking the Mountain To Come To You – Rob Conery follows up on Ian Coopers state of Alt.Net post, haring his views on the subject, and Steve Bohlen summarises and urges everyone reading these posts to also read the comments attached to them in his post ALT.NET: Looks Like its Introspection Time Again!

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Software

• Firebug 1.5 released! – Alix Franquet highlights the release of FireBug 1.5 king of Firefox developer tools which provides debugging support for CSS, HTML and Javascript. The 1.5 release is a major upgrade with a good number of really useful new features.
• New Cumulative Updates for SQL Server 2008 RTM & SP1 – Aaron Bertrand highlights the release of new Cumulative Updates packages for SQL Server 2008 in both SP1 and RTM configurations.

Information

• How many PCs in the world have the .NET Framework installed? – Scott Hanselman shares some of the official numbers about installed base of .NET based on information from Windows Update and other sources. Useful numbers to have one hand.
• Building an External DSL in C# – Nicholas Blumhardt looks at building a Domain Specific Language using C# and the Sprache parser creation library to create a questionnaire DSL example with source code provided for the sample.
• Use .NET Built-in Methods to Save Time and Headaches – Shay Friedman looks at common pieces of code that have better alternatives backed into the framework which provide safer and better solutions to this common programming requirements.
• 10 Advanced Windsor Tricks – 7. How to Write a Facility – Mike Hadlow presses on with his series of posts looking a the Castle Windsor Containers more advanced use cases with a look at creating your own facilities which provide the means of extending the behaviour of the container.
• Dependency Injection Inversion Rejection – Davy Brion picks up on some of the points in Uncle Bob’s recent post on Dependency injection mostly discussing the flip side of the pointsand how the suggested usage still causes too much coupling to the container. Jimmy Bogard also follows up on the same topic with his post Poor use of DI versus need for DI.
• Constructor over-injection anti-pattern – Jeffrey Palermo looks at a Dependency Injection Anti-Pattern where constructors require lots of dependent objects passing in and where some (or all) are not required for the operation of the component.
• LINQ to Rx: second impressions – Jon Skeet follows up on his first discussion provoking post about the Reactive Extensions posting up a summary of some of the discussion clarification setting the record straight.
• Are ORMs Solving Anything? – Shawn Wildermuth posts a discussion starting post about whether Object Relation Mapping Frameworks are helping or hindering. Lots of interesting discussion in the comments of this one, and I suspect there will be some follow-up posts before too long.
• Whither Alt.Net? – Ian Cooper discusses the current state of the Alt.Net Movement and reviews the initial progress of the movement, along the way comparing the motives to that of movements like Software Craftmanship. Discussion is starting in the comments and Sergio Pereira follows up with his post On ALT.NET and patience looking at the sorts of people involved in the movement and appealing for a little patience as changing ingrained behaviour takes time.

Community

• SQL Server Usergroup – Dundee Event Tonight – SQL Server MVPs Tony Rogerson and Allan Mitchell will be running a free event this evening at the Queen Mothers Building in Dundee University this evening with talks on Integration Services, SQL Server tools, along with a discussion about identity keys and a general Q&A Session

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Software

• Caliburn v1.1 Release Candidate Available! – Rob Eisenberg announces the release candidate release of Caliburn his WPF and SIlverlight UI pattern implementation library. This release includes lots of community driven changes along with bugfixes and improvements in a number of areas.
• VS 2010 Guidance Documents Released – David Jung highlights the release of 5 new guidance documents on Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 including reference documents on Upgrade, quick reference, branching and requirements management.
• jQuery Lint – James Padolsey introduces his jQuery-Lint runtime jQuery validation library. Unlike a lot of other Lint type tools this one is a runtime library which runs on the site in the browser validating pages for correct usage of jQuery. This project is young, but seems to be an interesting one.

Information

• Use C# 4.0 dynamic to drastically simplify your private reflection code – While not advocating using reflection on privates, David Ebbo shares a technique using the new Dynamic functionality of .NET 4 for performing this type of reflection more easily.
• Editable Routes Using App_Code – Phil Haack reworks his editable routes implementation to use app_code to allow it to work in a medium trust environment (where FileSystemWatchers don’t).
• Web testing with Selenium and xUnit.net – Joel Abrahamsson looks at using Selenium to test web applications using xUnit.Net rather than NUnit looking at how you can write more maintainable tests
• UML Modeling and Code Generation in Visual Studio 2010 – Oleg Sych gives a tour round the UML Modelling functionality of Visual Studio 2010, showing how you can customise the UML profiles, and looking at generating code from the model
• Much Ado About Monads – Creating Extended Builders – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Monads with a look at some of the other methods required to help build a rich programming model for the monads.
• Building a LINQ Provider – Pedram Rezaei runs through the process and buildof a custom IQueryable LINQ Provider implementation which, much link LINQ to SQL can perform queries, and create, update and delete operations in this comprehensive MSDN article
• CLR V4: Profiler Attach Part 2: Ok, now what? – David Broman continues his series on the .NET 4 CLR profiling APIs with a look at what profilers should be doing once they are attached to a running process
• Getting started with dependency properties – Luis Abreu takes an introductory look at dependency properties, looking at what they offer beyond the standard property implementation, and follows up with Dependency property and value inheritance.
• A Definite Assignment Anomaly – Eric Lippert takes us on another voyage of exploration of the C# compiler looking at some strange behaviour which can be allowed with external assemblies defining structs.
• FubuMVC – Define your actions your way – Joshua Flanagan talks about the support for different types of Action in the FubuMVC framework, which while being an opinionated framework allows you a good degree of flexibility in this regard.

Community

• DDD Scotland – Vote for Sessions – Voting on the proposed sessions has opened for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Scotland Event to be held in May in Glasgow. This is your chance to shape the agenda for the day, and to pick from a great range of proposed sessions.
• Wanted: Virtual Alt.Net Community Contributors, Organizers, and Presenters – Steve Bohlen issues an appeal on behalf of the Virtual Alt.Net Community for volunteers to help with the organisation of this Virtual User Group, present sessions virtually, or to help out more generally.

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