February 2010

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #548

Posted by on 26 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • .NET OSS dependency hell – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses some of the problems caused by dependencies between different Open Source projects (and the same principle applies with your own projects) looking at some of the ways that direct dependency can be avoided, and some of the things the Castle Project are doing to help.
  • "Thread safe"Âť Dictionary(TKey,TValue) – GrumpyDev AKA Steven Robbins takes a look at implementing a Thread Safe Dictionary in .NET 3.5 for a pet project, with a view to moving his project to using the .NET 4 concurrent collections dictionary in the future.
  • Coding: Shared libraries – Mark Needham discusses code re-use across projects via a shared library, looking at the types of code you might want to share, some situations where it may seem like a good idea to share when in practice it is not, and some things to be careful about when sharing code
  • Noisy code does not equal clean code – Derik Whittaker talks about what he considers to be noise in code, looking at an AutoMapper based example, and showing why he considers certain parts of the usage code to be noise, and looks at a cleaner solution.
  • .NET 4.0 And Our Parallel Future – Justin Etheredge takes a look at the Damerau–Levenshtein edit distance algorithm, and shows how the .NET 4 concurrent collections and PLINQ can be combined to make use of multiple CPU cores and improve the performance of the algorithm
  • Careful with that axe, part two: What about exceptions? – Eric Lippert continues looking at closing down worker threads, looking this time at the options when a worker thread throws an exception, discussing the possibilities of how your application could behave in that case
  • Super Combo: Map + Function Pointer – John Sonmez shares one of his favourite techniques for improving code, combining a map with function pointers and enumerations to help replace a string based switch statement – a nice coding technique, with a good clear example to help explain
  • Encrypted Hidden Inputs in ASP.NET MVC – Ashic Mahtab shares a solution for storing secret values in an HTML Form in ASP.NET MVC using encryption and providing the values back to ASP.NET MVC in a seem-less way making their use easier.

The Morning Brew #547

Posted by on 25 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • WSCF.blue 1.0.7 supports VS10 RC – Santosh Benjamin announces the release of a minor upgrade for WSCF Blue, taking the version to 1.0.7, WSCF Blue is a tool for generating web service implementation classes in WCF from the service contract rather than a service implementation, and this updated release brings Visual Studio 2010 RC support in addition to VS2008 support.

Information

  • Database theory, your friend for success – Frans Bouma fights the corner for the Relational Database with a look at some of the key concepts in understanding Relation Database Stores
  • Sharing the goodness that is VB : Dotfuscator Gets Better (and still FREE) in Visual Studio 2010 – Beth Massi highlights some of the improvements to the free edition of Dotfuscator which is included in Visual Studio 2010, and shares a number of related videos on the Dev Center
  • New in .NET 4: Don’t Forget to Dispose() your SmtpClient Instances – Lee Dumond talks about the importance of calling Dispose on objects which deal with unmanaged resources (files, networks, etc), and highlights a change to an existing class which give it a Dispose method.
  • ASP.NET, Part 8: Introducing ClientIDMode – Dan Maharry addresses another of the major selling points of ASP.NET 4, the ability to control the identifiers used on HTML elements output by the ASP.NET framework, making it much easier to work with these elements on the client side.
  • Is CAS dead in .NET 4? – ‘shawnfa’ talks about some of the changes made in .NET 4 to the way Code Access Security is implemented, and how the Code Access Policy has been deprecated, explaining some of the reasons why and discussing the implications.
  • Excerpt #3 from CLR via C#, Third Edition – Jeffrey Richter shares an excerpt from his forthcoming book CLR via C# 3rd Edition, taking a look at the ConditionalWeakTable class.
  • The Case of 64-Bit .NET Upgrade Bug – Russell Ball shares a useful reminder of some of the problems you can run into when upgrading projects and running them on different processor architectures even in the .NET world.
  • MEF, Silverlight and the DeploymentCatalog – Mike Taulty takes a look at producing a realworld use of the Managed Extensibility Framework in Silverlight, illustrating the principles in some of his previous articles in this screencast.
  • How to Setup WinDBG – Chris Clayton shares some tips to ensure that you are getting the most value out of your time working with WinDBG by making sure the environment is correctly configured.
  • Sexy Windsor Registrations – ‘Wes’ talks about using the IWindsorInstaller interface to provide an entry point into registering components with the Castle Windsor container in a more fluent way.
  • Branching Strategies: When To Branch And Merge – Derick Bailey looks at a couple of different ways of managing your branching in your version control, discussing Branch per feature, branch per team, and branch per iteration patterns, and also looks at The Cost Of Branching And Merging and how that should influence your decision to branch/merge
  • Unique Keys versus IDs in Web Applications – Chris Missal discusses the use of human readable (and memorable) identifiers in web applications, and highlights some resources to help make this a reality.

Community

  • .Net User Group get-together at QCon London – Mark Nijhof highlights a free ‘Geek Gathering’ in association with NNUG Bergen and the QCon London Conference, to be held in the evening of 11th March 2010 starting at 18:30 (shortly after the end of the second day of the conference), where you will be able to mingle with some of the speakers, and other conference attendees. The event is free, but signup is required
  • Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript – Act III: Function the Ultimate (73 min.)" – The Yahoo! User Interface Blog Team share the latest part in Douglas Crockford’s lecture series on JavaScript. This 73 minute episode looking at the vital role that functions play in the JavaScript language

The Morning Brew #546

Posted by on 24 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Information

  • ASP.NET MVC 2 Localization complete guide – Alex Adamyan takes a comprehensive look at how to create a Localized ASP.NET MVC application using the ASP.NET MVC 2 RC2 release, exploring view localization, switching languages, Validation, and the effects on caching.
  • Why you should check out MVC – Ryan Ohs shares the reasons he believes that you should check out ASP.NET MVC if you havn’t already, exploring some of the common reasons, and a few less common ones too.
  • Free Entity Framework v1 eBook – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of a 514 eBook covering a range of Entity Framework V1 functionality, useful if you are working with that version, or simply want to see how things were to better understand where Entity Framework came from.
  • System.Uri FAQ – The Network Class Library Team (the folks behind the System.Net Namespace) share a Frequently Asked Questions document on the use of System.Uri, looking at the facilities that it provides.
  • Introduction into ADO .NET Data Services/RIA Services – Sacha Barber shares his latest article on CodeProject which takes an introductory look at the ADO.NET Data Services (AKA Astoria) and the Rich Internet Application Services showing the simple use cases (create, update, delete, select and validate) in both of these technologies
  • Strengthening your domain: Aggregate Construction – Jimmy Bogard talks about the process of moving from a Model Driven Architecture with and anaemic domain and a number of domain services to a more DDD approach, and the concept of creating valid aggregates in all cases
  • Introducing Location in .NET 4.0 – The Sensor & Location Platform Team show how .NET 4 allows you to easily obtain details of where the user is (assuming they have suitable hardware) via the new Sensors API
  • ASP.NET, Part 7: A New Viewstate Opt-in Model – Dan Maharry continues his tour of the new ASP.NET 4 functionality with a look at the new Opt In Viewstate functionality which allows easier and finer grain control over which controls are creating viewstate.

Community

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