The Morning Brew

All the fun of the UK Election gives way to the bigger excitement of DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Scotland for me this weekend. If you are there and spot me, please come over and say hello.

Software

• Microsoft StyleCop : StyleCop 4.4 – Jason Allor announces the first beta release of StyleCop 4.4. This updated release includes full support for the new syntax in C#4, along with integration for Visual Studio 2010 and 2008. Existing rules will need to be rebuilt to run against this version and full source code is available.
• CodeRush Xpress for C# and Visual Basic for Visual Studio 2010 (aka v2010 1.1 and/or 10.1.1) released and still very free (registration not even required) – Greg Duncan highlights the VB Developer centre highlighting the free edition of DevExpress CodeRush Express, available for free for Visual Studio 2010 in both C# and VB.NET forms.

Information

• jQuery Templates and Data Linking (and Microsoft contributing to jQuery) – Scott Guthrie talks about Microsoft’s relationship with the jQuery project, talking about the submission process for them (and anyone else) to submit changes / features to jQuery, and looks in detail at the new Client Side Template functionality which they are proposing for inclusion.
• Every Program There Is, Part Four – Eric Lippert continues his exploration of generating every program that the can be to verify compiler behaviour. This part continues looking at the procedure to generate valid strings based on the syntax of the language, comparing brute for and more intelligent approaches using parsers.
• That No SQL Thing: Graph databases – Ayende continues looking at No SQL databases with a look at Graph based databases, which take document databases and add relationship functionality, illustrating this with a social networking example showing the relationships between people
• Notes From A Project Applying Domain-Driven Design, Event Sourcing and CQRS : Part 1 & Part 2 – Mike Nichols begins a series of posts looking at the experiences he gained working a a project utilising these techniques using Monorail, Rhino Service Bus, SQL Server, NHibernate and TDD / BDD. Part 1 focuses on the background and Ubiquitous Language, with part 2 discussing Command Query Responsibility Separation.
• Announcing the Growl for Windows Target for NLog (and another reason to love Growl) – Ryan Farley talks about the Growl notification system, and shares an implementation for NLog to log to Growl
• Assembly Private Bin Path Pitfall – Sasha Goldshtein looks at the Private Bin Path functionality which allows you to tell an Application Domain where to get its assemblies from, and shows that bad path manipulation can resulting the path falling outside the AppDomain’s base directory and the load of assemblies failing.
• Avoiding Leaking Connections With NHibernate And TransactionScope – Davy Brion looks at using TransactionScope with NHibernate, and reproduces a problem where all the database connections were consumed due to not closing things off correctly when rolling back the TransactionScope transaction.
• Code Contracts: Unit testing contracted code – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at writing unit test for code that uses Code Contracts, looking at how tests are still required when working with code contracts, and looking at the types of test to perform. Also well worth checking out some of Gunnar’s other posts on code contracts for some more background.
• Do You Have a Case of var Guilt? – John Sonmez talks about the guilt he first felt when using the var keyword in C#, and shares how his feelings changed as he realised that var, as well as being shorter to type, actually helped reduce his dependency on concrete types therefore affording some looser coupling in his applications
• Dyadic Map and Higher in .NET 4 – Chris Eargle talks about the new Dyadic Map functionality in .NET 4 provided by the Zip extension method on the IEnumerable<T>
• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC NerdDinner App using Unity 2.0 – Shiju Varghese follows up from a previous post, and looks at using Unity 2.0 to provide Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC using the Nerd Dinner sample application

Community

• Free Online Performance Tuning Event – Andrew Kelly of Solid Quality Mentors shares the event details for a free all day virtual event (10am – 3pm EST) looking at performance tuning in SQL Server
• NxtGenUG – Event: Behaving during Development – Elizabeth Keogh will be speaking at the NxtGenUG event in Southampton on Thursday 27th May 2010 on the background to Behaviour Driven Development, and looking at applying BDD techniques to your code.

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Software

• HTML5 and Same Markup: Second IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers – Dean Hachamovitch of the Internet Explorer Team announces the second preview release of Internet Explorer 9, bringing further performance and standards support improvements, with HTML5 and CSS3 support, and GPU hardware acceleration to give snappy web application performance.
• AutoMapper 1.1 released – Jimmy Bogard announces the release of AutoMapper 1.1. This release adds support for use in Silverlight 3.0, along with some new functionality, improvements and bugfixes
• YUI 3.1.1 and YUI 2.8.1 Released – The Yahoo! User Interface Team announce two minor releases of YUI, one on the 2.8 version and the other on the 3.1, principally fixing a possible Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the History functionality, and additionally adding some minor updates to other components in both releases.
• Enterprise Library 5.0/Unity 2.0 – second batch of deliverables – Grigori Melnik announces the release of the second part of the Enterprise Library 5.0 / Unity 2.0 release, releasing documentation for the whole library, along with Unity 2.0 for both standard CLR applications and Silverlight.
• NavigateToTest VS extension – Lesnikowski release a simple Visual Studio 2010 extension which takes a convention based approach to navigate between implementation and test code. If this fits your work pattern, it may be a useful addition to your IDE.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: May 2010 Issue – The May edition of MSDN Magazine is now available on the MSDN Website. Features this month focus on Silverlight, Silverlight Media, Enterprise development with WCF RIA Services and designing workflows with WCF and WF4, along with the usual columns addressing a range of other topics
• Do Androids Dream of Modal :Sheep? – Rob Conery gives some back story on his new choice of tooling for .NET Development, involving the VIM text editor, Ruby based testing tools, building using Rake, and a desire to share the setup of these tools in a way that enables others to do the same. Throw in some tales of brotherhood competition and you’ve got a very interesting tale.
• ASP.NET MVC Tabular Display Template – Phil Haack builds on some work by Daniel Manes, walking through the building of a Tabular Display template for ASP.NET MVC. Sample code is available.
• ASP.NET MVC’s Html Helpers Render the Wrong Value! – Simon Ince talks about a by design behaviour of the ASP.NET MVC HTML Helpers which may catch you out when rendering fields for models after a HTTP Post.
• T4 Template error – Assembly Directive cannot locate referenced assembly in Visual Studio 2010 project – Lance Hunt talks about the problems he encountered with T4 Template not being able to find template referenced assemblies as a part of upgrading from VS2008 to VS2010, looking at a variety of solutions to the problem.
• Using Unity Application Block – from basics to generics – ‘nmarun’ rounds out a series on the Unity Application block, releasing this index post and the final two parts looking at using Arrays and Generics with Unity.
• .NET Memory Leak: XslCompiledTransform and ‘leaked’ dynamic assemblies – Tess Ferrandez talks about tracking down memory leaks caused by dynamic generation of assemblies (such as when using an XML serializer) which cannot be unloaded until the application domain exits, which can cause significant leaks of memory depending on your usage.
• Windows Phone Developer Training Kit, now April and VS2010 RTM Fresh… – Greg Duncan hlights the release of an updated Windows Phone Developer Training Kit, updated for the latest Windows Phone SDK release.
• Quantitative evaluation of office coffee machines – The folks over at DotNetSolutions apply evaluation techniques usually used for software or architecture decisions to the very important question of which coffee machine to purchase for the office. I couldn’t resist linking to this software meets Coffee article.

Community

• NxtGenUG Manchester – Refactoring! – The NxtGenUG Manchester celebrate their 1st birthday on MAy 19th with a rescheduled talk from Gary Short on Refactoring using free tools.

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Software

• Visual Studio 2010 – Help Viewer Power Tool BETA – Help Index and Standalone Help – Scott Hanselman highlights the release of the Help Viewer Power Tool Beta from the Visual Studio Help Team. This power tool give you improved choice about how the help content is presented, offering both browser based and standalone help application modes
• Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager (and the new VS 2010 PowerCommands Extension) – Scott Guthrie highlights the release of the Visual Studio 2010 PowerCommands extension which adds a number of useful commands into the Visual Studio IDE providing improved copy/paste functionality, better file management and much more. Scott also talks about managing extensions using the Extension Manager

Information

• Dependency Injection in ASP.NET MVC: Action Results – Jimmy Bogard continues his Dependency Injection with ASP.NET series with a look at extracting the common functionality from POST actions into a custom ActionResult implementation and providing these action results with the services they need via Dependency Injection
• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Refactoring a Game – Matthew Podwysocki puts the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript to a practical use looking at using them to refactor a simple existing JavaScript game to simpler reactive based code.
• Detection keys for .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010 – Heath Stewart highlights the official registry keys that should be used to detect the presence of the .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010
• C#: Does an IDisposable in a Halted Iterator Dispose? – James Michael Hare explores the use of Disposable resources within yield iterator blocks and looks to test his assumptions that the item gets disposed even when the iteration is halted early.
• .NET – How can debug=true extend the life time of local variable – Naveen explores the scope of a variable and when it will be garbage collected using WinDbg to examine the situation, and shows that the debug flags effect when the variable disappears
• Parallel Programming with .NET : A TPL Sandbox – ‘dashih’ takes a look at how you can sandbox plug-in functionality within your application to help prevent a faulting plug-in from pulling your whole application down, and shows how you can capture task exceptions from outside the sandbox.
• Coding: Make the mutation obvious – Mark Needham discusses mutation of objects and suggests that you may want to make it explicit that your method manipulates the content of an object by returning the object.
• Step by Step screencasts to do Behaviour Driven Development on WCF and UI using xUnit – Omar AL Zabir shares two screencasts introducing the concepts behind a BDD Testing and illustrating how you can use it to test WFC services and Web Forms applications using xUnit, Subspec, and WatiN.
• Silverlight and WCF RIA Services (1 – Overview) – Mike Taulty discusses the architecture that the Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services is intended to support, and shares a screen cast of one of his UK TechDays demos showing how quickly you can get up and running with RIA Services.
• Rhino Mocks: Recursion And Multiple Return Values From Stubs – Derick Bailey looks at using Rhino Mocks Stubs to provide multiple return values and support recursion using the Return and Repeat fluent methods.
• Document Databases are not Relational – Ayende follows up answering some questions he received about modelling data for document databases, looking at a case where there is a mix of Document and Relational databases, and how you have to think differently for document database.
• MassTransit Update – Chris Patterson gives and update on the plans for the Mass Transit Distributed Application Framework and Service Bus, discussing the move to GitHub, the 1.0 release and the documentation.
• FiddlerCore and the .NET Client Profile – Eric Lawrence talks about the move to the .NET Client Profile for Fiddler core, and talks about Peeking Fiddler’s Internals, looking at two new features which let you see a little more of what goes on under the hood.

Community

• Upcoming Script# Release and LIDNUG presentation – Nikhil Kothari will be speaking at the Linked In .NET Usergroup on the Script# library. This free webcast event takes place today at 11am PDT, which by my calculations will be 7pm BST in the UK

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