The Morning Brew

Software

• Good morning #NHibernate 3 … – Fabio Maulo tweets the release of NHibernate 3.0.0 Alpha1 available in both Binary and Source from SourceForge this version sees the usual bugfixes and improvements, along with new features such as Lazy Loading of individual columns, alias delimiting in generated SQL and improved support for DetachedCriteria use with IStatelessSession. There is also a breaking change in the handling of null values in maps / dictionaries
• An intro to what OpenWrap is – Seb Lambla takes the wraps off Open Wrap, his latest project and an answer to those package management problems we’ve all encountered. OpenWrap is designed to make obtaining the correct version of libraries easy be it at development, deploy or runtime.
• CSLA 4 release – Rockford Lhotka announces the official release of his CSLA 4 application framework which now in includes support for .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. This a major upgrade from the version 3 release, and as such includes a number of major new features and improvements, along with the occasional breaking change, so be sure to read the changelog.
• Web Farm Framework 2 Beta released – Chris Alexander highlights the release of the Web Farm Framework 2 Beta, a system which makes it easy to scale out your web applications in both configuration and deployment. The Web Farm Framework is based on the Web Platform Installer and Application Request Routing and handles the complex cases of deploying web applications across a farm of servers.

Information

• Solution Navigator: Killer replacement for Solution Explorer – Gunnar Peipman highlights one of the most popular components of the Visual Studio 2010 Productivity Power Tools, the Solution Navigator which gives an improved implementation of the Solution Explorer including search and filtering capabilities.
• Prototypes and Inheritance in JavaScript – Scott Allen writes about Inheritance and Prototypes in JavaScript on the Script Junkie section of MSDN, exploring the concepts behind prototypes and how you can construct objects using the new operator and constructor functions.
• Event-Based Components – Leaving the beaten path of canonical object orientation – Ralph Westphal discusses the difficulties in designing even a simple system using traditional Object Oriented design processes, and looks at the use of a more event based process for design.
• VS 2010 Keyboard Shortcuts for C#, VB, C++, F# Now Available in Letter (8.5x11in) and A4 (210×297mm) Print-Ready Sizes – Lisa Feigenbaum announces the release of a new set of Keyboard short cut cheat sheets for Visual Studio 2010 in a number of different language based editions. These new sheets are designed for printing on standard sized paper, and now include only the keyboard short cuts, no annoying clip-art images.
• Table Per Hierarchy Inheritance in Entity Framework & Mixing Table Per Hierarchy and Entity Splitting – Gil Fink on .Net – Gil Fink explores the Table Per Hierachy Inheritance approach available in Entity Framework illustrating with a step by step example in this CodeProject article, and follows up on one of the questions with a blog post looking at combining Table Per Hierarchy with Entity Splitting techniques into one model.
• Entity Framework 4 "Code-First": Custom Database Schema Mapping – Scott Guthrie continues looking at the Code First approach to Entity Framework with a look at how you can customise the way data is saved to the database by overriding the default persistence mapping rules with your own to allow you to use a custom database schema, illustrating with an example based on the Nerd Dinner sample application.
• ASP.NET MVC: Using dynamic type to test controller actions returning JsonResult – Gunnar Peipman looks into using the .NET 4 dynamic support to help test anonymous types returned as JSON data from ASP.NET MVC Controllers
• Degrees of reality in sample code – Jon Skeet highlights his latest article which looks at overloading in C#, and discusses the difficulty of creating good example code for articles, and how its important to define the scope of the example as to whether it is giving an example of a technique or showing a good example of its use.
• Rendering with XNA Framework 4.0 inside of a WPF application – Nick Gravely shares his experiments in including XNA based content inside of a WPF based application using public and supported APIs, sharing the code that achieves it.
• How do you test asynchronous code? Part I & Part II – Stefan Lieser writes about testing asynchronous code in your applications successfully, looking at the use of mocks to fake via constructor injection, and exploring the use of tools like TypeMock Isolator to mock using the profiler API when you don’t have the ability to control the method used.
• Principles 2: Principles of Software Testing – Ivo Manolov shares 6 less discussed high level principles for testing software (Hight Test Stability, High Test Performance, Minimum Dependencies, Fundamentals, Test Development Principles and Continuous Training), giving each an introduction and then fleshing out the definition with some interesting discussion.
• Technical Debt around release time – Mark Needham discusses technical debt management by way of a nice analogy from J.B. Rainsberger, comparing two different approaches to Cleaning the Kitchen and Cleaning the Garage.

Community

• Touch Me, Stretch Me, Squeeze Me: The Windows 7 WPF Multi-Touch Story – Guy Smith-Ferrier introduces his new usergroup talk on making use of the Windows 7 Multi-touch features in WPF applications, due to debut at VBUG Bristol on Wednesday 11th August, and also at the Cambridge Next Generation User Group on Tuesday 21st September
• mvcConf slides and code posted – Jimmy Bogard shares access to the slides and code from his mvcConf session on Refactoring your controllers into leaner implementations and John V. Petersen also shares his demo code and slides in his post Powerpoint and Code Demos from my MVCConf Presentation

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