March 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #568
Posted by Chris Alcock on 26 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Updates: Process Explorer v12, VMMap v2.62, DiskView v2.4 – Microsoft announce updates to three of the Sysinternals tools. Process Explorer gets an update to v12 bringing a number of improvements to areas including process identification, the .NET assembly view along with the usual bugfixes. VMMap also gets a bugfix update, and DiskView adds the new feature to map alternate streams to owning files.
Information
- Red/Green/Refactor, For The Right Reasons – Derick Bailey, prompted by a brief discussion on Google Buzz discusses some of the right reasons to be in each of the TDD Red Green Refactor states
- Knights, Knaves, Protected and Internal – Eric Lippert discusses the accessibility of virtual method implementations using examples of Knights and Knaves, and another about access to resources of a family in ‘inheritance’ situations.
- "Demystifying The Cloud " An Introduction to Cloud Computing – free ebook which includes the three popular services, Amazon, Google and Azure – Greg Duncan highlights two free ebooks, this one is a complete volume looking at the three most common Cloud Computing solutions, and the second is a Draft/Preview/Excerpt of "Moving to Visual Studio 2010" – which includes 100+ pages of advice on upgrading to the latest Visual Studio from version 2003, 2005 and 2008
- .TOOLBOX – Free Silverlight and Expression Blend training program for Designers and Developers – John McClelland highlights a new multi-media structured curriculum-based training program for both Developers and Designers to learn more about Silverlight and Expression Blend
- March Newsletter – Architecture Modeling and Processes (Issue 23) – The Architecture Team at Microsoft announce the 23rd Edition of the Architecture Journal, focusing on Modelling and Processes, with articles this edition on Evaluating Architectures, comparing UML and DSLs, Architecture for Agile, along with a number of short companion videos.
- RIA Services and Validation – Nikhil Kothari follows on from his Silverlight TV interview on this subject with a deeper dive into the topic using the MIX10 Book Club example to take a look at the various forms of validation provided for in Silverlight applications running on RIA services.
- 5 Steps to getting started with IronRuby – Eric Nelson shares 5 steps and a number of great resources for each to help you get up and running and learning about Iron Ruby
- Ladies and Gentlemen, Please Welcome… the IE Mobile User Agent String! – Hot on the heels of the Internet Explorer Team announceing their User Agend string, the IE for Windows Phone Team show the format of their UA string explaining the parts and the reasons for inclusion.
- Incrementing the Assembly Version for Each Build – Jeremy Jameson looks at the technique for ensuring that when your solution is built the AssemblyVersion attribute for the components being built gets incremented correctly.
- Just how lazy are you? – Jon Skeet reviews the various definitions of what ‘Lazy’ means in terms of collection evaluation, sharing his own definition too, and talking about why it is important to know what is meant by a method being lazy as it can have significant effects on how your code works.
- Coding4Fun – Silverlight Real Time Face Detection – René Schulte highlights the publication of his article for the Coding4Fun site which looks at performing facial recognition in Silverlight 4 using the new WebCam API
- Unit Test the Behavior, Not the Implementation – Karl Seguin talks about why it is important to be careful about what you are testing, and that you should focus on testing the behaviour of your code, not testing things that relate to the implementation of your code, to ensure you get good effective tests which aren’t too brittle
- Law Of Demeter: Extension Methods Don’t Count – Derick Bailey talks about how the use of Extension Methods can look like violations of the Law of Demeter, and suggests that perhaps due to the way they are just providing helpers to writing avoid longer code you may want to consider them not to be violations.
Community
- London .NET User Group:Mixing Functional and Object Oriented Approaches to Programming in C# – Skills Matter host the London .NET Usergroup event on the evening of 31st March, where Michael Wagg and Mark Needham of ThoughtWorks will be looking at how you can integrate Functional Programming concepts into your C# programming.
- NxtGenUG – Silverlight 4 RC – The Hereford branch of the NxtGenUG are hosting two talks on the evening of Monday 12 April, featuring Richard Costall talking on Silverlight 4 RC and Ryan O’Neill looking at Parallel Programming and Debugging in .NET 4.
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The Morning Brew #567
Posted by Chris Alcock on 25 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- ReSharper 5.0 Goes RC! – JetBrains announce the Release Candidate release of ReSharper 5.0. This relase does not contain any new features, but has had lots of focus on performance and integration with the IDE, so they should be much improved.
- Introducing QuickUnit – Roy Osherove highlights a new Unit Test Generation tool which aims to make it simpler to create test projects following your conventions and create test outlines with mock/isolation support using an IDE integrated environment.
- Metsys.Bson – the BSON Library – Karl Seguin has extracted his BSON serialisation support out of the MongoDB Driver project he is involved in into a separate project, allowing you to easily use this serialisation format in your own applications
Information
- Diagnosing ASP.NET MVC Problems – Brad Wilson highlights a useful feature of the MvcFutures library which provides a diagnostic page which you can copy into your website to help diagnose problems with ASP.NET MVC if you are having problems getting it going in a web server environment.
- Moving from Silverlight 4 Beta to RC – Part 1 & Part 2 – Ross Wozniak takes a look at the process of moving a Silverlight 4 project from the beta to the release candidate builds of Silverlight 4. Part 1 focuses on the development environment requirements, and part 3 looks at some of the changes needed to your projects.
- Creating a dynamic proxy generator with c# – Part 2 – Interceptor Design – Sean McAlinden advances his series on building a dynamic proxy generator in C# with part 2 looking at his implementation of the interceptor support which then allows for Part 3 – Creating the constructors which looks at the constructor proxying which allows the proxy objects to be created, plugging into the interceptor and type builder functionality from the earlier posts. Full Code is available on the CodePlex site for this project.
- Silverlight / Castle Windsor – implementing a simple logging framework – Giorgetti Alessandro takes a look at building a simple logging framework for use in Silverlight applications, powered by Castle Windsor, and providing a number of features which are similar to log4net.
- View/ViewModel Interaction – Bindings, Commands and Triggers – Nikhil Kothari builds on the concepts from his Mix 10 talk with a more detailed look at using declarative XAML features like bindings , commands and triggers to provide interaction with the underlying View Model
- GuestPost: Unit Testing Entity Framework (v1) Dependent Code using TypeMock Isolator – Eric Nelson hosts another Guest Post on his blog, this time with Muhammad Mosa taking a look at testing Entity Framework code using Moq and Typemock Isolator
- Creating a Performance Baseline – Part 2 – Anu Chawla continues this series of posts on building up a baseline of performance on SQL Server machines, this time looking at Memory related metrics
- Strengthening your domain: Encapsulating operations – Jimmy Bogard continues his series looking at using DDD techniques to build a better domain model. This post looks at applying a number of techniques to take an anaemic domain model and turn it into a real DDD style domain model.
- The Case of the Caffeine Overdose: A CQS Mystery – Russell Ball (Aka Caffeinated Coder) takes a look at a real-world inspired case where Command Query Separation was broken, and looks at the solution to remedy the problem.
- The 98th Thing Every Programmer Should Know – Greg Young talks about the over application of the Single Responsibility Principle, and how incorrect application of SRP can be identified.
- Pipes and Filters Pattern in .NET – Keyvan Nayyeri walks through the creation of a Pipes and Filters implementation in native .NET and shares the resulting project (VS2010 RC format)
Community
- FREE Windows Azure evening in London on April 15th including FREE access to Windows Azure – Eric Nelson highlights a great Free Event to be held in the evening of 15th April in London, piggy-backing on the UK TechDays events to be held that week. This event from the UK AzureNET user group will be looking at some real world uses of Azure, along with a look at noSQL databases. Eric also highlights other TechDays Fringe events taking place in London and the rest of the UK during the TechDays week.
- Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You’re Using XCopy, You’re Doing It Wrong – Scott Hanselman highlights one of the sessions he presented at Mix 10 which looked at using the MSDeploy / WebDeploy functionality of Visual Studio to make deploying web applications a breeze.
- #Develop, F# and Google Summer of Code – Robert Pickering higlights a great prospect for any Computer Science Students who want to take part in the Google Summer of Code and work on integrating F# into the SharpDevelop IDE. Contact Rob if your are interested and want to know more.
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The Morning Brew #566
Posted by Chris Alcock on 24 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- jQuery UI 1.8 adds position, button, autocomplete, new widget factory, lighter core – The jQuery UI Team announce the release of jQuery UI 1.8. Available in three forms, starter, developer and theme pack this new version of jQuery UI adds 5 new plugins, 1 new effect and a huge number of bugfixes and improvements, along with reducing the size of some of the files.
- JetBrains to Launch dotCover EAP Next Week – JetBrains announce their new product dotCover, a code coverage tool which integrates tightly with Visual Studio 2005, 2008, and 2010 and Resharper, providing feedback on test coverage. Initial Early access releases will be available from next week.
Information
- Checklist for Developing Message-Based Systems – Billy McCafferty follows on from a previous post earlier in the month to discuss a checklist of questions that it is helpful to know the answers to when working on building a message based architecture. These questions provide a framework to guide the development of your architecture, and the answers provide valuable documentation of the design.
- Web Test Authoring and Debugging Techniques for Visual Studio 2010 – Ed Glas explores the Web Test / Web Performance Test functionality of Visual Studio 2010, giving some background to how the testing works, looking at some of the common pitfalls / mistakes, and talking about the new features introduced in the 2010 release.
- GenesisEngine: Don’t Get Domain Objects From The Container – Eric Lee takes a look at one of the Inversion of Control / Dependency injection anti-patterns and shows how you can avoid the multi stage initialisation by using the factory pattern to correctly create your entity and satisfy its dependencies.
- Entity Framework 4.0 – Part4: How to use your own POCO’s – Sven shares part 4 of a series looking at Entity Framework, looking at the new Plain Old CRL Object (POCO) support introduced in Entity Framework 4, showing the method of working illustrated by a simple console application.
- Introducing IE9’s User Agent String – The Internet Explorer Team talk about the constituent parts of the Internet Explorer 9 User Agent string
- Upgrading Suteki Shop to ASP.NET MVC 2 – Mike Hadlow shares his experiences of upgrading an ASP.NET MVC project to the ASP.NET MVC2 release edition using the Solution Converter by Eilon Lipton, and talks about the manual changes he needed to make to fix the post upgrade issues.
- Garbage Collection in IE7 heavily impacted by number of JavaScript objects and string sizes – Andreas Grabner talks about performance impacts of having large numbers of JavaScript objects, and large amounts of string data in scope, and how it makes a significant performance difference in Internet Explorer 7.
- Creating a Performance Baseline – Part 1 – Anu Chawla shares soem useful information on the Performance counters to monitor to establish a performance baseline for SQL Server, explaining the key ranges for values from each counter.
- Leveraging expression trees to unit test ViewModel classes – Jeremy Alles looks at how you can use Expression Trees to shorten the code required to test view model properties, working from the verbose manual method, to his expression tree method. Full source is provided.
Community
- Free Windows Azure event next Monday in London (29th March) – Eric Nelson highlights a free all day Azure event to be held in London next week. Spread over three tracks this event covers a number of aspects of Azure from PHP / Ruby support though to the commercial model for Azure, and is targeted principally at startups, although Eric suggests that it would be of interest to anyone.
- Canadian Developer Connection : David Laribee on Thursday’s "Ignite Your Coding" – Tomorrow Evening UK (2pm Eastern) sees the Ignite Your Coding live webcast featuring David Laribee talking on the concept of Technical Debt, looking at ways of paying back the debt, and taking questions from the audience.
- Unveiling Raven DB – Ayende announces that he will be giving a talk on the evening of 28th April at SkillsMatter in London where he will be giving his Raven DB Document database project its first public ‘unveiling’. The Event is free to attend, but registration is required. Ayende also gives a sneak peek at some of the UI for Raven DB in his post ‘First look at Raven DB‘
