The Morning Brew

Software

• .NET Reflector & .NET Reflector Pro 6.1 have been released – Bart Read highlights the release of a bug fix release which addresses a number of issues which can occur with the 6.0 release of .NET Reflector
• End of support for Windows XP XP2 and Windows Vista RTM – Microsoft give a reminder of the end of support life for Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 2, and Windows Vista RTM all rapidly approaching in this half of the year, using it as a reminder to upgrade or apply service packs to ensure continued support.

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" 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.

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