The Morning Brew

As predicted, today sees a large edition of The Morning Brew due to the 4 day break over Easter. I still have a number of Easter links to include in tomorrows post.

In other news, on Thursday I received news that I have been awarded a Microsoft MVP Award – its a great honour to receive this award, and I’d like to thank everyone involved in the selection process for thinking of me.

Software

• MonoTools for Visual Studio 1.1 – Miguel de Icaza highlights the release of MonoTools for Visual Studio 1.1. This release still principally targets Visual Studio 2008, and provides means for Windows based developers to target Linux systems directly from Visual Studio.
• Prototype 1.7 RC Sizzles… – Ajaxian highlights the release of the Release Candidate of the Prototype 1.7 JavaScript library, where the most significant change is a move to the Sizzle Selector Engine along with new APIs for Events and Layout.
• MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 for Windows Phone 7 – Laurent Bugnion announces a Service Pack release for his Model View – ViewModel framework Silverlight. This service pack brings further support for Windows Phone Development including new templates, signed assemblies, and enw Windows 7 phone assemblies.
• Thinktecture StarterSTS 1.0 RTW – Dominick Baier highlights the release to web release of StarterSTS a security token service which is based on Windows Identity Foundation and the ASP.NEt Provider infrastructure. This release supports WS-Federation., WS-Trust, REST, OpenId and Information Cards and provides a good simple reference implementation.
• Performance Testing – Quick Reference Guide – Released up on CodePlex – The VSTS Rangers share a Quick Reference Guide to performance testing with VSTS

Information

• Red For The Right Reason: Fail By Assertion, Not By Anything Else – Derick Bailey further discusses the Red state in Test Driven Development, responding to an email from Thomas Weller, and talks about the reason the test reports ‘red’ and how it is important that the tests fail due to assert statements rather than any other reason
• Performing and Testing Redirects with ASP.NET Web Forms MVP – Joel Abrahamsson talks about the improvements in testability of WebForms that the ‘ASP.NET WebForms MVP’ framework brings, and takes a look at testing redirect functionality using this library.
• Multi-tenancy in ASP.NET MVC – Controller Actions (Part II) – Rob Ashton continues his series of posts following on from his DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 8 session on Multi tenancy in ASP.NET MVC. This part explores the composition of controllers and discusses how this is achieved in his reference implementation.
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Extending jQuery AJAX – Matthew Podwysocki continues his look at the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript looking at how the Reactive Extensions extend on the standard jQuery Ajax functionality providing enhancements to the callback functional.
• An Annotated Line of Business Application – Jesse Liberty starts a mini-series of posts which provides a tutorial to building a line of business application based on the Silverlight HyperVideo Player project delivery
• How ASP.NET MVC Routing Works and its Impact on the Performance of Static Requests – Thomas Marquardt explores the performance characteristics introduced by ASP.NET MVC routing looking at the impact the routing framework can have on serving static content.
• Editing Routes in ASP.NET MVC – Imran Baloch takes a simplier look at making routes editable without requring recompiles of your application by moving the code into the ASP.Net global.asax file rather than the code behind file.
• Ban HTML comments from your pages and views – Bertrand Le Roy talks about the different types of comment that are available in the ASP.NET ASPX files, highlighting the Server side comment syntax that is not particularly widely know.
• Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 (and a cool scenario w/ ASP.NET MVC 2) – Scott Guthrie posts about the new .NET 4 support for optional and named parameters, and shows how they can be utilised in the ASP.NET MVC framework
• Reading code: underscore.js – Mark Needham continues his JavaScript code reading taking a look at some of the things he learned from the underscore.js library.
• Some known WCF issues in Silverlight 4 – The Silverlight Web Services Team post about a number of known problems with the support for WCF in Silverlight 4, providing details of work arounds where they exist.
• First Pass Completed: Rough Draft TDD Demonstration Videos – Brett Schuchert has completed the first cut of all hist Test Driven Development Demonstration videos. This content is Java / Eclipse based, and he poses the question as to whether there is value in repeating the videos in C#. Take a look and give your feedback.
• Parallel Matrix Multiplication with the Task Parallel Library (TPL) – Ian Davis takes a look at the various methods of matric multiplication and shows how they can be parallelized using the Task Parallel Library, and takes a look at the performance improvement that can be realised.
• Parallel Programming with .NET : A Tour of ParallelExtensionsExtras – ‘toub’ is posting a series on the ParallelExtensionsExtras, a set of extensions which build on the official Parallel Extensions project adding additional functionality. This linked post is the index page for the series, and there are already 3 posts which explore LINQ to Tasks, Observable support for tasks, and Task Extension Methods.
• Working with Legacy code – Andrew Stopford begins a series of posts on working with legacy code, sharing his experiences of this type of work, and in the first post of the series, #1 : Draw up a plan, Andrew discusses how important it is to plan the work.
• MVC Portable Areas – Web Application Projects – Steve Michelotti takes a look at the ASP.NET MVC Portable Areas impleentation in the ASP.NET MVC Contrib project. This post contains links to the other parts of the series.

Community

• Next European VAN on 06 April 2010 – Tonight sees the next European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup event, with a great lineup of speakers discussing Software craftsmanship.
• Brighton ALT.NET Beers. 7pm Tuesday 6th April at The Skiff – Mike Hadlow highlights the next Alt.Net Beers event to be held in the Brighton Co-Working venue ‘The Skiff’ tonight, starting at 7pm.
• Free talk: In The Brain of Simon Brown, Architecture: where do you start? – Skills Matter host a free evening event to be held on 20th April where Simon Brown will be discussing how you get started building your architecture.
• Notes From Guathon Birmingham – Dan Maharry shares some comprehensive notes from the ‘Guathon Birmingham’ event wher Scott Guthrie presented for 5 hours on ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio. This post contains a good number of links to further information about the topics discssed.
• Microsoft TechDays – Open Source on .NET. April 14th, Shepherd’s Bush. – Mke Hadlow highlights an event organised by Sebastien Lambla as a part of the UK TechDays fringe being held on Wednesday 14th April in Shepherds Bush, in the evening following on from the Officail TechDays event.
• Brad Wilson: Advanced ASP.NET MVC 2 – Brad Wilson shares a re-take recording of his recent presentation to the Community4MVC.Net virtual usergroup replacing the original which suffered from a bad sound recording.
• Community For MVC.Net – April Presentation – MVC 2 from The Source – Tomorrow evening (UK) sees Phil Haack present to the C4MVC Virtual Usergroup on ‘ASP.NET MVC 2 From the source’ looking at the range of new features included in this release, exploring how they are implemented.
• LDNUG: Mixing functional and object oriented approaches to programming in C# – Mark Needham talks about his recent presentation with Mike Wagg to the London .NET Usergroup, including the slide deck and a link to the video hosted by Skillsmatter.

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This will be the last edition of The Morning Brew this week, as Friday and Monday are the Easter public holidays here in the UK. This means that you can expect the next edition of ‘The Brew’ on Tuesday 6th April, which based on previous years will be a bumper edition (as 4 days is about the longest break in publication). Enjoy your Easter eggs everyone.

Software

• Announcing PostSharp 1.5 SP1 – Gael Fraiteur announces the last support release of the PostSharp 1.5 AOP framework. This release is licensed under the same terms as previous 1.5 releases and provides bugfixes for all outstanding issues. If you wnat to get this release you need to ensure you have registered on their website before the release of PostSharp 2.0 as the download will not be available to users who register after that time.
• Announcing YUI 3.1.0 – The Yahoo! User Interface Team announce the release of YUI 3.1.0 the latest update to their UI framework for JavaScript based web applications. This release includes improved internationalization support, the near completion of the Widget infrastructure, improvements to the loader and much more.

Information

• BCL CodePlex Site Launch – The BCL Team announce a new CodePlex project site where they will be releasing samples of proposed new functionality which do not require a Beta or CTP .NET Framework release. The idea is to allow the team to put out new ideas and get community feedback on them. Currently there are 4 projects on the site, BigRational, Long Path, PerfMonitor, and TraceEvent, and the team would love to hear your thoughts on them.
• Strengthening your domain: Avoiding setters – Jimmy Bogard continues his series on moving from an anemic domain model to a rich DDD style domain model with this post looking at the removal of setters to further lock down the ability to mutate data stored in entities outside of the defined business rule based methods provided on the domain.
• UNISA Chatter- Operating System Concepts: Part 8 – Memory – Willy-Peter Schaub shares his notes from his course on Operating System Concepts at UNISA, focusing this part on Memory on techniques of Operating System memory management.
• The Problem with Immutability – Kathleen Dollard discusses immutability, and looks at how it can be applied in MEF / IoC based code, outlining a number of possible solutions , and explaining her frustrations with the lack of support in this area.
• Effective Model-Based Testing with Spec Explorer Full Class – Nico Kicillof shares video footage of the 2.5 day course he and his colleague Wolfgang delivered on using Spec Explorer to perform model based testing. The footage is broken down into 4 sessions, each composed of 4 parts, allowing you to more easily schedule your viewing
• Easy way to update models in your ASP.NET MVC business layer – Raj Kaimal highlights the CopyModel method included in the ASP.NET MVC Futures library, which provides a lightweight object mapper to move values from one object to another matching up on property name and type.
• Speeding Up NHibernate Startup Time – Ricardo Peres shares a tip for improving the startup time of .NET applications which use NHibernate, by storing the NHibernate configuration in a serialised form on disk, and reloading from there on application start rather than rebuilding it.
• TDD with complex infrastructures – Gojko Adzic shares some notes from the GOOSGaggle event, with a look at Nat Pryce’s thoughts on ‘System Test Driven Development’ which focuses on system level tests which span across complex infrastructures allowing you to ensure that your business domain can work in the way dictated by the infrastructure.
• Overriding MEF Metadata – Daniel Plaisted takes a look at providing and utilising additional metadata on MEF Exports to provide functionality such as priorities for plug-ins.

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