The Morning Brew

Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 – Phil Haack announces the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. New additions in this preview release include jQuery Validation support for client side validation, Areas allowing you to divide up your project more easily, model validation providers and metadata providers allowing you to support validation and metadata based on something other than the default of Data Annotations. This release is for VS2008 / .NET 3.5 Sp1 only.
• CruiseControl.NET 1.5.0 CTP Released – CruiseControl.NET – Confluence – The Cruise Control Team announce the release of the Cruise Control 1.5 CTP. This release contains a number of bug fixes, a new range of security settings to allow you to lock down control of the build server, support for a number of new source code control tools such as Git, Mercurial, etc and a number of new tasks.publishers. Looks good, but as its a CTP not recommended for production use

Information

• New features in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview – ‘Shaans’ explores a number of the new features of the latest preview release of ASP.NET MVC 2, including some sneak peeks at the VS2010 beta 2 version. UPDATE: This appears to be an extract from the MVC release notes available in full here in MSWord Format
• Code Contracts Preview: PostConditions – Dino Esposito continues his series over at DotNetSlackers looking at the Code Contracts Functionality, and in this article looks at PostConditions, looking at how they are implemented and how they work, along with comparing them to the use of asserts
• Why does char convert implicitly to ushort but not vice versa? – Eric Lippert dives back into the past to discover why it is that you can convert from a char to a ushort but not the other way round, explaining how and why such a decision was made
• Lazy<T>: On Demand Construction in .NET 4.0 – Bill Wagner talks about one of the less publicised features of .NET 4, the ability to make object construction an on demand process by the use of Lazy<T>
• An Engineer’s Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Carlos Bueno, a software engineer on the Yahoo Mail project has written a good article looking at network bandwidth with a particular slant for developers. I always feel it is important to understand the process between your code and yor users, and this article seems to fill in a number of those gaps
• Mike Chaliy: Code-generation DSL with T4 (Text Templates) – Mike Chaliy takes a look at T4 Template generation using a DSL and T4 Templates to easily build configuration section reading code. A nice short understandable example of these sometimes confusing concepts
• Generically Constraining F# – Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Generic Constraints in F#. This part continues on from the previous looking at the remaining constraints that exists, including Constructor, Delegate and Reference constraints.
• Perspective camera animation on a cube in WPF 3D – Razan Paul Blog – Razan Paul has a number of posts on interesting animations created in WPF with full sample code provided. This one is the spinning cube, and others include roll down, wheel and circle animations, so be sure to take a look at them too.
• Strive for Functional Cohesion – Chris Eargle talks about Functional Cohesion, and the important decision developers are making all the time about where to place certain functionality in your object mode.

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This will be the last of the late editions for a while, my summer break is over and its back to work for me tomorrow so The Morning Brew should be returning to its more usual 8-8:30am (UK) publishing time.

Software

• Spec# and Boogie Released on CodePlex – Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of Spec# and Boogie on CodePlex under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (MSR-SSLA) and Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) respectivly.

Information

• Default Templated Views – Phil Haack explores a good implementation of Templated Views providing a common scaffolding within your ASP.NET MVC Views.
• Tracking Dangling Object References In Silverlight – Davy Brion shares a technique for tracking the objects you create to help identify dangling object references in Silverlight, although the concepts apply anywhere
• An introduction to UI Automation – with spooky spirographs – Samuel Jack explores the UI Automation features introduced in .NET 3.0 which allow you to explores and interact with the user interface of Windows and any programs running within it
• Parallel Extensions and I/O – ‘dashih’ looks into using the Parallel extensions to provide parallelism in IO operations, along with highlighting some of the things you have to consider around thread safety.
• Exceptions: The Airbags of Code – Joey deVilla talks about Exceptions, looking at the common division by zero example, and argues that exceptions should not be considered a catch all, and that defensive programming should be used in the first instance, with the exceptions being the last resort. Some good comments on this post too.
• Analyzing AutoMapper performance – Jimmy Bogard looks at the performance of his AutoMapper project, and talks about the optimizations performed to make the times more respectable.
• Business Apps Example for Silverlight 3 RTM and .NET RIA Services July Update: Part 18: Custom Linq Provider – Brad Abrams continues his monster series with a look at how any Linq providers can be used with the RIA Services, and looks at making a custom Linq provider
• Unflattening a list, or"How to ask ‘how to’" – Kyle Baley asks for suggestions about how to unflatten a list and gets some really good responses in the comments
• Coding4Fun : Todo: You stuff on your desktop – Clint Rutkas runs through the creation of a simple WPF based To-Do list manager project as a part of the Coding4Fun series – full source and binary of the project are available
• Using Reflection to enforce your conventions – Derik Whittaker talks about how he used reflection to verify that all his cross process boundary types had a Serializable attribute applied, by using the naming convention, allowing these classes to be identified before runtime.

Community

• Microsoft PDC09 – Microsoft PDC 2009 to be held in LA is now accepting registrations, and until 15th September will be offering a $500 discount

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Last night I gave a presentation to the Liverpool Geekup group about NHibernate, thanks to everyone who came along – you were all a very nice audience. The slides from the presentation entitled Getting a Good Nights Sleep – ORM with NHibernate are available as a PDF, here. There are a number of links in the slides, but here is a more comprehensive list of links that people may find useful or interesting

• NHibernateDataSource: A DataSourceControl for ASP.NET 2.0
  The Article and code for the 2 way databinding library of NHibernate objects
• NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET, 1.2nd Ed.
  A good source of information about using NHibernate within web applications
• NHibernate Reference Documentation
  The official documentation for NHibernate
• TheServerSide: NHibernate
  Excellent Introductory article from TheServerSide.NET covering most of the basics of NHibernate
• NHibernate Query Analyser
  NHibernate query analyser allows you to work interactively with your NHibernate Mapped objects
• Ayende@Rahien – Presentations
  A collection of great NHibernate presentations, covering lots of the more advanced functionality

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