The Morning Brew

Software

• Minh T. Nguyen’s Mandelbrot Explorer 1.0 in Silverlight 2.0 with source code – I’m a sucker for a nice Mandelbrot Set, and Minh T. Nguyen has created a nice Silverlight application for exploring them, and provides details of how the application was created and full source too.

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• The Fat Controller – Ian Cooper explores a bad code smell in MVC projects, the Fat Controller Class (no, nothing to do with Thomas the Tank Engine), looking at how you can end up with Fat Controllers, the side effects and what you can do about them
• .NET Development on Linux – Eric Bergman-Terrell walks through the steps of getting up and running with developing .NET in Linux using a Virtual machine, and introduces some of the tools from the Mono project in this Dr Dobbs article.
• What make a good unit test? – Mark Needham explores what he considers makes a good unit test.
• The Private Life of a Public API – Jeff Moser talks about API design, best practices, and my favourite book (Framework Design Guidelines)
• Tip #32: Did you know… How to easily create your own project templates? – A nice tip about creating your own project templates in Visual Studio – had I know it was this easy I think I would already have made a bunch of my own
• The Weekly Source Code 28 – ASP.NET MVC Beta Obscurity – ModelState.IsValid is False because ModelBinder pulls values from RouteData – Scott Hanselman sees some weird behaviour in ASP.NET MVC due to the DefaultValueProvider, and goes exploring the source to see what is going on.
• Known Installation Issues With ASP.NET MVC – Phil Haack highlights two know installation issues with ASP.NET MVC and explains a work around in each case.
• F# + TestDriven.NET + xUnit.net = WIN – Matthew Podwysocki talks about some tools that he has been finding very useful when combined for developing F#
• Synchronization in WinForms with Lambdas – Patrick Steele shows a nice example of lambda expressions really improving the clarity of the code to deal with updating UI from different threads in WinForms applications.
• Isolation frameworks – lessons from the wild – Roy Osherove talks about some real world reactions to mocking / isolation frameworks based on his collection of students at a TDD master class. Some very good points raised here
• Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel: I Love it! – Chris van de Steeg talks about Fluent NHibernate’s AutoPersistenceModel which takes the pain out of object relational mapping using NHibernate by generating the mappings for you based on common conventions – looks really useful for quick projects.

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Today’s edition of the Morning Brew will be slightly delayed – a combination of factors (including me throwing my physical morning brew [mug of coffee] all over my desk, and the Ma.gnolia web service API timing out) have conspired against me this morning. If the WS doesn’t come back soon I’ll put the post together manually.

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• Where TDD fails for me – Jimmy Bogard talks about some of his current problem areas when working in a test driven way.
• Multi-tenancy part 1: Strategy. – Mike Hadlow talks about Multi-Tenancy in Web applications, and considers what strategy will work well for his ECommerce project. Mike and I talked at length about this subject at the UK Alt.Net conference, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how he goes about doing it – can’t wait for part 2.
• Introducing IronPython – Harry Pierson looks at IronPython in this introductory article, looking at how it differs from C# and VB.NET and yet still allows you to make good use of your .NET experience.
• XML Documentation File For Your .Net Project – It’s Important – Shahar Y reminds us about the XML Documentation Generation in Visual Studio and how that helps with working with the code in the IDE.
• Spike Code and Source Control – K. Scott Allen makes some good sense about not throwing away any code by keeping all your spike code in source code control for a number of very good reasons
• Emergent Complexity – Justin Etheredge talks about complexity in code due to interactions between classes, in the hopes of making people consider complexity when writing their applications
• Constructors and Inheritance – Why is this still so painful? – Tom Hollander talks about the pain points of having lots of constructors that you also want in implemented in subclasses

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