The Morning Brew

Software

• Small Basic V0.9 is here! – The Small Basic team announce their 0.9 release, and also celebrate their 300,000th download. This new release of Small Basic includes a major overhaul of the compiler and runtime, along with music, shapes and control support added in this release

Information

• Why Do We Recycle Our Application Pools? – Davy Brion argues that we as .NET Web Developers need to spend more time focusing on Memory Management to ensure that our applications behave correctly at all times, and therefore remove the need for application hosts such as IIS to restart every 29 hours (by default)
• Windows Phone 7 Private Distribution, Marketplace Policies Unveiled at TechEd – Bruce Kyle highlights the various details of Windows Phone Distribution and the Marketplace released at TechEd North America last week
• Functional Alchemy: Making Silverlight synchronous – The folks over at DotNetSolutions pick up on an article linked from ‘The Brew’ last week and explore the use of the Reactive Extensions to make the Silverlight Async Event synchronous, introducing the concepts, an sample implementation, and a more generic approach.
• Pro ASP.NET MVC 2 Framework – Congratulations to Steve Sanderson, who announces the completion of the Second Edition of his excellent ASP.NET MVC book. The Second edition is fully updated to ASP.NET MVC2 and .NET4 / Visual Studio 2010, and includes a significant amount of new content beyond the first edition.
• SQL Server Index Types – Sharon Bjeletich gives the low-down on the various types of index provided in SQL Server 2008 R2, discussing the way the data is stored and referenced in each type, providing some useful insight to the way SQL Server works.
• Repositories and the Save Method – K. Scott Allen discusses the difference in philosophy between having save methods on repositories and adding entities to a unit of work via a repository.
• NHibernate tutorial #6 – Parent-Child Relationships – Bob Palmer continues his series of NHibernate Tutorial posts with a look at representing the Parent-Child relationship using NHibernate, and exploring the optimizations that can be made using the mapping files to improve the performance of this type of relationship.
• Silverlight Splash Screen In Action – Pedro Fortes looks at the implementation of custom Silverlight loading animations, and shows a useful trick using Fiddler to allow you to simulate slow network and see your loading screen in action during development.
• The Performance of Arrays – Chris Burrows takes a look at working with .NET array types, looks at how the performance of arrays of reference types can be suboptimal, and shows a neat trick using a value type to hold the reference which can speed up the performance of working with the array.
• Down the Functional Rabbit Hole – Chris Eargle continues his series looking at techniques to remove the use of out parameters with a look at the functional continuation-passing solution
• Localization with ASP.NET MVC ModelMetadata – Kazi Manzur Rashid shows off some of the extension methods in the MVCExtenions which provide functionality to help in the localization of Model Meta Data, and shows it configured via a fluent interface.

Community

• Effective specifications for agile projects – Gojko Adzic will be speaking in a Free Webinar on Effective Specifications for Agile Projects on the 15th July. The online event kicks off at 7pm UK / 11am PDT / 2pm EDT, and is free to attend (although registration is required)

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Software

• jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft – Scott Guthrie announces the release of Microsoft’s latest contribution to jQuery, a prototype release of a Globalization Plugin which hlps you to add globalization support to your JavaScript, including Globalization information for over 350 cultures, dealing with dates, numbers and currency, and providing means to hook into other jQuery controls
• PLINQO 5.0 – An ORM for 2010! – CodeSmith announce the release of PLINQO 5.0, their open source library of LINQ to SQL enhancements, now built against .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010, and including a number of new features and bugfixes

Information

• Checking For Empty Enumerations – Phil Haack looks at the most efficient way of establishing if an IEnumerable is null or has no elements, looking at a few solutions and discussing their performance characteristics, and finally providing a useful extension method implementation.
• Checking For Empty Enumerations – Ayende follows up on Phil’s post with a look at a situation where the extension method may not work correctly due to not being able to enumerate over the Enumerable multiple times, and provides an alternate implementation.
• Don’t repeat yourself; consts are already static – Eric Lippert takes a look at one of the great questions of our time, why const declarations do not allow the use of the static modifier when that is what they are.
• CQRS – Benefits – Dylan Smith summarises the feedback he received answering some of his questions about the benefits of Command Query Responsibility Segregation, and finds some more question marks.
• Code Contracts LiveTemplates for ReSharper – Kevin Hazzard highlights a collection of ReSharper Live Templates for Code Contracts compiled by Stuart Leitch which mimic the default code snippets that Code contracts provides in native Visual Studio.
• Functional Fun: Practical Linq #5: Guessing the language of a piece of text – Samuel Jack takes a look at language detection, inspired by Google Chrome’s ability to detect the language of a page, looking at the use of 26 dimension geometry along with some LINQ to provide a simple language detection routine you can use.
• SOLID By [C#] Example Or "Stop talking about SOLID and show me the code…" – Greg Duncan highlights some illustrating examples of the consituent parts of the SOLID Principles . These samples are mostly taken from various posts on SOLID from the chaps over at LosTechies.com, and show simple concise examples in source available from CodePlex.
• Localization of XAML files in Silverlight – Emiel Jongerius takes a look at the process of localization in Silverlight XAML files, walking through the process of building a simple sample, with full code available.
• .NET Framework Reference Enhancements Preview – Kimberly Wolk provides access of a preview area of the new MSDN .NET Framework Reference site, with a view to gathering feedback about the changes they are planning to make. If you have the time, take a look and give them feedback via the survey link in this post.
• Are daily stand-ups necessary? – Jimmy Bogard discusses the role, purpose and usefulness of the daily stand up meeting so widely used in software development, looking at both negatives and positives of the standup.
• Silverlight: Prefer synchronous web service calls – Andreas Hallberg looks at a way of calling web services in the standard synchronous way when working in Silverlight (although doing it on a different thread), looking at the advantages of working this way in terms of code simplicity and testability.

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Software

• TestDriven.Net 3.0 – All Systems Go – Jamie Cansdale announces the official version 3.0 RTM release of TestDriven.NET. The RTM has many improvements over the previous betas and release candidates, along with a host of new features, including .NET Framework Target Version detection, support for MSTest, NCover integration, Keyboard shortcuts and much more.
• Mash, minify, and validate your javascript, stylesheet, and dotless files with Chripy. The VS Extension that not only has a cute mascot but provides easy access to Google Closure Tools or YUI Compressor… – Greg Duncan highlights Chirpy, a Visual Studio extension which compresses, validates and combines JavaScript, CSS, and dotless files.
• The Best Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, Power Commands and Extensions – Scott Hanselman shares some of his favourite VS2010 Addins and extensions, and asks his readers for other recommendations.

Information

• ToC for the Book Club RIA Services Application – Nikhil Kothari highlights the release of the RIA Services Essentials project on CodePlex, and details what the sample code in that project demonstrates
• My favorite Expression 4 features – Somasegar looks at some of the best features of Expression 4, including publishing SketchFlow to Sharepoint, Code Free UI Development, HTML and JavaScript based add-ins for Expression Web, and SEO diagnostics
• IClock: A Test-Friendly Alternative to DateTime – Al Gonzalez looks at creating a DateTime interface and implementations to support production and testing use cases in a more friendly way than direct use of the DateTime static members.
• Capturing Rhino Mocks arguments in C# 4.0 – Jimmy Bogard looks at how Command Query Separation can make the use of Rhino Mocks and the testing of Indirect inputs and outputs fall into two types of use, and shows how these two classifications can be tested.
• Experiments in Wackiness: Allowing percents, angle-brackets, and other naughty things in the ASP.NET/IIS Request URL – Scott Hanselman takes a look at allowing ‘interesting’ characters in the URL part of a request on ASP.NET and IIS, discovering that it is possible, but involves some configuration and carries a few warnings.
• MEF or Managed Extensibility Framework and Lazy<T> – Being Lazy with MEF, Custom Export Attributes etc – Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at using the Lazy functionality of .NET 4 along with the Managed Extensibility Framework to provide lazy loading of MEF extensions, looking at the background of each and showing how the can be combined
• Don&rsquo;t Snub the Code Review – John Sonmez discusses the code review, and explains why he doesn’t like them, and how he prefers Pair Programming as a viable alternative to the traditional after the fact code review.
• Git: Oops. I Forgot To Add Those New Files Before Committing – Derick Bailey continues his look at common mistakes with Source Version Control Systems, and specifically how Git allows you to correct these common mistakes with a look at forgetting to add files to version control.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event List – The NxtGenUG folks publish a substantial list of events for June and July across their various locations (Manchester, Hereford, Southampton, Coventry, Cambridge, Birmingham, Oxford) all with great speakers and topics. If you are near of the their groupd go check them out.
• In The Brain of Janet Gregory: Creating and Sustaining Agile Culture – Skills Matter continues their ‘In the Brain’ series of evening events with Janet Gregory talking on changing the culture of an organisation to adopt Agile. This Free event, to be held at Skills Matter’s London offices on the 16th June, starting at 6pm.

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