March 2010
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #556
Posted by Chris Alcock on 10 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Open Source WPF UML Design tool – Omar AL Zabi shares a WPF based editor for the plantuml UML diagram generation tool which allows you to create nice UML diagrams using a simple language. The editor contributes with a text editor, and easy creation and management of the graphic representation generation. Full details of the implementation and source are available in his Code Project article PlantUML Editor: A fast and simple UML editor using WPF
Information
- Profiling Apps 1 of N: The MVC ActionLink – Hadi Hariri starts a new series on performance and profiling applications, talking about some of teh dangers of premature optimisation, and moving on to looking at profiling a simple ASP.NET MVC Action Link sample using the dotTrace profiler
- Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results) – Laila Lotfi shares some results from a survey published in December which looks at how developers monitor performance of their applications in development
- .Net, Native, P/Invoke marshaling just like magic… "Marshaling with C# Pocket Reference" (Think ‘Marshalling Guide for the Busy Dev Guy’) – Greg Duncan highlights a great resource on Marshalling and interop between managed and unmanaged code in C#. The first 3 chapters of this e-book are currently available in HTML with the rest to follow shortly, and also be available in PDF/XPS format too.
- Creating a Lazy Sequence of Directory Descendants in C# – Chris Sells shows that Lazy Sequences implemented in clear simple code is not just the preserve of the functional languages, showing a simple implementation in elegant C# making use of the Yield statement.
- ASP.NET 4.0 Part 11, Configuring Routing Is Easier – Dan Maharry continues his voyage round the new features of ASP.NET 4 with a look at the introduction of Routing to the WebForms, showing the process of getting up and running with routing in web forms applications.
- State Pattern Misuse – Greg Young takes a look at a common misuse of the state pattern using polymorphism, compares it to an implementation using individual classes, and shares a simple rule for deciding which implementation is right for your situation.
- Do not name a class the same as its namespace, Part One – Eric Lippert takes a look at one of the Framework Design Guidelines about type and namespace naming, looking at why the advice is given, the types of problems you can get into and something of a work around.
- Versioning REST Services – Scott Seely takes a look at various strategies for providing versioning in REST based web services looking at version parameters, and URL versioning
- The 8th Phase – Karl Seguin follows up on a post from early last year adding in a further phase of unit testing, which talks about life beyond the ‘unit’ test, and how integration tests add a lot of testing value to your tests.
- Video of My Last Iteration Planning Meeting with CodePlex – Sara Ford share a valuable insight into how the CodePlex team do agile development in this video recording of her last iteration planning meeting before moving on to pastures new.
Community
- Videos of developer sessions at Oredev (including mine on .net debugging) – Tess Ferrandez highlights the availability of the Oredev conference session videos from last year’s conference, including the video of her session on .NET Debugging.
- LinkedIn .NET User Group Online Presentation Tomorrow – Gaiaware are presenting their Gaia Ajax framework to the Linked In .NET User Group today (10th March) at 11am PST, and are also giving away 5 full annual subscriptions to Gaia Ajax to randomly chosen attendees.
- Edge UG @ UK TechDays: Functional Programming on .NET with Oliver Sturm – The EDGE Usergroup are tacking an event of their own onto the end of the Tuesday Microsoft TechDays event. This session is open to both TechDays attendees and non-attendees, and is to be hosted at the same venue in the evening, and sees Oliver Sturm present on Functional Programming on the .NET Platform.
- Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript – Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax" (93 min.) – The Yahoo User Interface blog share the latest instalment of Douglas Crockford’s talk series on JavaScript, with this 4th episode talking about the DOM and Css and how it leads into Ajax.
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The Morning Brew #555
Posted by Chris Alcock on 09 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- T4MVC 2.6.13: now officially in MvcContrib, with a few new features – David Ebbo announces a new release of his T4 MVC project and also shares the news that it is now a part of the MvcContrib project, bringing more exposure to the project and easier means for others to contribute. This new release also contains a number of new features which further improve the usability of the templates.
- WF Migration Kit CTP 1 Now Available – Ron Jacobs highlights the release of a migration kit to help aid the process of migrating code from Windows Workflow 3 to the new and significantly updated Windows Workflow 4 included in .NET 4
- Some VS 2010 RC Updates (including patches for Intellisense and Web Designer fixes) – Scott Guthrie highlights more updates for the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate to resolve problems with IDE performance on XP/Vista/Windows Server 2003/2008, along with a designer fix and a fix for problems with tool tips.
- FluentNHibernarte.Search 0.3 Beta Released Now Support Fluent XML-Less Configuration – Yoann. B has been busy building a Fluent Interface for use with the NHibernate Search functionality. The library is on a 0.3 beta release currently, with progress being made quickly on this one as this is the 3rd release this month for the project already
- RedGate – Conducting ‘ANTS 6’ UX Testing – Rory Becker helps RedGate to find developers to test their forthcoming version of ANTS profiler. If you match the requirements for the study get in touch via Rory
Information
- Developer Certification WTF? – ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin discusses the thorny issue of Developer Certification, talking about some of the inherent problems with the current model of certification in our industry, comparing with other industries, and considering if internships actually may provide a solution.
- Using Copy-On-Write In Multi-threaded Code To Reduce Locking Overhead – Davy Brion explores the ‘copy on write’ method of making a thread safe collection with lower locking overhead than the traditional lock on read and lock on write approach, discussing some of the more difficult issues with this way of working.
- VcsSurvey – Martin Fowler follows on from his recent Version Control discussions by sharing some survey results on peoples satisfaction with the various version control systems in common use currently, giving some idea of wider feelings on the subject.
- WPF and Text Blurriness, now with complete Clarity – Scott Hanselman talks about the improvements to text clarity in the latest WPF build, comparing its graphical output to that of the .NET 3.5 edition showing that while the differences in text rendering are small, they do make a big difference.
- CQRS Performance Engineering: Read vs Read/Write Models – Derick Bailey looks at one of the useful side effects of Command Query Responsibility Separation, that in addition to providing easier to work with single purpose code, it also makes engineering the application for performance much easier.
- Introducing the Earthquake Locator – A Bing Maps Silverlight Application, part 1 – Bobby Diaz looks at consuming Bing Maps in a Silverlight application and combining it with a data feed of earthquakes and volcanoes. Full source is provided for this worked example.
- How to Create a Powershell 2.0 Module and Cmdlet with Visual Studio 2010 (Screencast included) – Saveen Reddy shares a step by step blog post and screen cast exploring building a module for use in Powershell 2, illustrating with a simple example module which shows the core concepts.
- Building Hello MEF – Part IV – DeploymentCatalog – Glenn Block continues his series of posts looking at building his PDC HelloMEF dashboard with part 4 upgrading to the latest Silverlight 4 MEF bits and looking at the DeploymentCatalog, and Part V takes a look at moving the application to a View Model pattern.
Community
- "Leading-edge Web Development with ASP.NET MVC" with Steven Sanderson – Tuesday 11th May sees Steve Sanderson deliver his talk on Web Development in ASP.NET MVC at DotNetDevNet hosted at The University of the West of England in Bristol. Steve is a well known speaker and author on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and this is sure to be a useful event.
- Lessons learned from building the NHibernate Profiler – Ayende shares the video recording of his recent SkillsMatter session on ‘Lessons Learned from building the NHibernate Profiler’ giving some insight on the product, his development methodology, and the design of the products infrastructure
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The Morning Brew #554
Posted by Chris Alcock on 08 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- Pex and Moles become Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools – Nikolai Tillmann gives an update on some exciting news for the Pex project, the move to becomming a Visual Studio 2010 power tool including a re-grading of which versions / dditions of Visual Studio it will run in, and updated licensing.
- New drop of the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) available – Bart De Smet announces a new release of the Reactive Extensions for .NET which includes support for the .NET 4 RC as well as .NET 3.5
- Introducing Typemock Test Lint – Roy Osherove highlights a new tool from TypeMock which provides as you type lint style warnings for your test code. Operating against all the common .NET testing frameworks and running on VS2010 this free tool will help you write better tests.
Information
- BSON Serialization – Karl Seguin discusses BSON a Binary encoding for JSON-like documents which is gaining acceptance in the world of document databases.
- Don’t Expose IList<T> Just So You Can Assert Against Its Contents – Derick Bailey talks about controlling the interface of the items returned from your collections to make it so that your collections can still be used for read only operations in consuming code, but cannot be modified.
- NET basics – Difference between the stack and the heap – Steffen Jørgensen talks about the differences between the Stack and the Heap in terms of the types of data they store.
- Additional WPF Text Clarity Improvements – The WPF Text Blog talks about some recent improvements in the text rendering of WPF4, which should be of great interest to anyone who has worked with the now WPF based Visual Studio 2010 editor and had issues with text clarity.
- Unit testing with Microsoft Moles – Kristofer Liljeblad gives a brief tour of the Moles functionality of the former Microsoft Research project Pex, showing an example of them in use in a realworld test
- The Power of Blue Books for Platform Impact – J.D. Meier talks about the range of titles available in the Patterns and Practices series of books, talking about the use of the types of advice they contain
- A Few Thoughts on DDD, DTOs, View Models, Repositories and Separation of Concerns – Billy McCafferty talks about some of the principles and ideas he has adopted based on discussions surrounding his Open source projects and communities.
- Providing Metadata to you MEF exports – Derik Whittaker follows on from his introductory MEF post from a while back with a look at easily providing metadata parameters to MEF based exports.
- Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – jQuery Integration – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on the JavaScript Reactive Extensions with a look at combining them with the jQuery library making it easier to move between libraries when needed.
Community
- Next European VAN on 06 April 2010 – The next European Virtual Alt.Net usergroup meeting looks set to be a good one. Covering the topic of Software Craftsmanship will be ‘Uncle’ Bob Martin, David Starr, Mark Nijhof, Scott Bellware and Corey Haines, with the screencast event kicking off at 7:00PM GMT on 6th April. Be sure to tune in for an interesting discussion.
- Introduction to OpenRasta – developer Fusion – ASP.NET, C# Programming, VB.NET, .NET Framework, Java and Visual Basic Tutorials – If screencast events aren’t your thing and you are London based, the evening of 6th April also offers you the ThoughtWorks London Geek Nights event, and will be covering the Open Rasta REST/HTTP Framework.
- A few announcements for those in the UK – Scott Guthrie is visiting the UK again, and will be presenting at a couple of fre events over here in Birmingham and Glasgow, as well as attending the UK MIX party.
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