Summary 12.08.2009 – 14.08.2009

Architecture

Ayende has (yet) another really enlightening post about the issues with the classic three layers (tiers) applications.

DDD

Jonathan Oliver has another great post about storage of events.

C#

Eric Lippert has a very nice post clearing some of the doubts people might have around precedence operator and order of operations.

ASP.NET MVC

Joe Stagner points out a DotNetSlackers project that aims to clone StackOverflow.com. In the process they will use: CruiseControl.Net, NAnt, NUnit, RhinoMocks, NDepend, NCover, NDoc, ASP.NET MVC 2.0, LINQ to SQL, StructureMap, AutoMapper, Elmah, Velocity, MemCached. Keep an eye on what promises to be a very cool open source project!

Entity Framework

Alex James published two more tips:

• Tip 31 – How to compose L2O and L2E queries
• Tip 32 – How to create a database from SSDL – EF 4 only

Julie Lerman has a very nice article about table splitting as the opposite of entity splitting.

TDD

Daniel Cazzulino shows how the power of LINQ is integrated in the next version of Moq.

Summary 09.08.2009 – 11.08.2009

ASP.NET MVC

Simone Chiaretta dissects the DropDownList helper method.

David Hayden continues his post from yesterday showing how we can separate the validation annotations into a metadata class via BuddyMetadataProvider similar to how DynamicData works.

C#

Daniel Cazzulino shows how to achieve strongly typed reflection for generic types and methods by creating a delegate of the target method and using the delegate’s properties to get the corresponding MethodInfo.

The CLR team talks about IL Stubs Everywhere feature in C# 4.0 that allows the same IL stubs infrastructure for all marshalling on all platforms.

Bart DeSmet presents the new System.Linq.Expressions namespace in C# 4.0.

Design patterns

Jeremy Miller announces that the presentation patterns wiki is live!

DDD

Jonathan Oliver has an excellent post about distributing a single bounded context on different machines and dealing with optimistic concurrency.

Entity Framework

Julie talks about entity properties that we can take advantage of in EF 4.0 and that are designed for model first and dynamic data support.

RIA

Fredrik Normen shows how SubmitChanges mechanism works in .NET RIA Services.

Unity

Mike Taulty has a nice post about Unity’s features.

Summary 05.08.2009

DDD

Jan Van Ryswyck talks about fluent domain methods for setting up complex aggregate roots and for implementing behavior on domain entities.

Alex James also shows how to work with fluent interfaces and how to use fluent interfaces with extension methods.

Jérémie Chassaing shows how Service Bus pattern can help in DDD with code reusability.

Ayende talks about decomposing an application into features as a way for separating different application functionality and to allow independent development.

Entity Framework

Julie Lerman shows how in EF 4.0 the function mapping feature is improved as the conceptual space also gets the function allowing it to be called from the entity directly and not through EntityClient. She also points out a bug when using T4 template instead of EntityModelCodeGenerator for CustomTool mode. Another great article is about the major improvements in EF 4.0 for working with complex types.

The Entity Framework Design team talks about the Code Only enhancements that will be available in the next release.

Alex James how to use T4 templates for generating entities that have regular expressions applied to them. He also continues his tips series :

Tip 27 – How to Implement BeforeSave Validation

Tip 28 – How to implement an Eager Loading strategy

Tip 29 – How to avoid LazyLoad or Load() reader issues

Design Patterns

Don Smith has an excellent about the usage of Model View ViewModel (MVVM) pattern and how to cleanly separate the View from the ViewModel in different scenarios including data bindings, animations, commands and parameters.

Architecture

Sean Chambers has a great series about code refactoring.

T4

Oleg Sych talks about the customization of the TFS Process Guidance with T4.

Summary 18.07.2009 – 04.08.2009

Visual Studio 2010

The 28th episode on Channe9 talks about the new historical debugger while the 29th episode talks about the workflow web services.

C#

David Ebbo shows how to use the buddy class mechanism (associated metadata class) that we have in Dynamic Data applications with TypeDescriptor.

He also shows a C# compiler method overload problem that we might end up with when putting methods in global namespace and having a more generic method in a namespace declared using statements inside another namespace.

ASP.NET MVC

David Ebbo released the 2.4 version of his cool T4MVC. Among the changes in this release:

• separate settings file called T4MVC.settings.t4 that gets included by the main file
• support for views in subfolders
• support for [ActionName] attributes
• new parameter-less overload for all actions
• support for placing T4MVC.tt below the application root

ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 is out there! Phil Haacked, ScottGu and Scott Hanselman have all the details. Phil also has a separate article about the new Areas feature.

Rick Strahl shows how to embed resources inside a View using both reflection and Page object.

NHibernate

David Hayden announces the release of NHibernate 2.1. and NHibernate Linq 1.0.

PostSharp

PostSharp 1.5 is out!

ASP.NET

Simone Ince has an excellent post about monitoring the ASP.NET caching API behaviour.

If you are familiar to the way Dynamic Data template fields work, you might also find useful FormFields.NET.

DDD

Udi Dahan has an excellent article in MSDN Magazine about the Domain Model Pattern and how domain events can greatly improve the general architecture.

Architecture

Karl Seguin has an update to his excellent free ebook Foundations of Programming. He shows how to build better software explaining concepts like:

• Domain Driven Design
• Persistence
• Dependency Injection
• Unit Testing
• Object Relational Mappers
• Working with the Memory
• How to work with Exceptions

Don Smith talks about a new guidance project for Data Access. I think that providing guidance for this area will be very helpful.

Summary 14.07.2009

C#

CoNatural announces that both their DAL and asynchronous framework have been published to CodePlex. They have also uploaded a Visual Studio plugin for migrating stored procedures as CoNatural commands.

Justin Etheredge has a nice post explaining why LINQ is not LINQ to SQL.

Simon Segal shows an approach to be used in resolving a types property name using strongly typed expressions.

Kirill Osenkov presents his Undo/Redo framework.

Visual Studio 2010

John Robbins shows how historical debugging and multithreaded debugging work.

Channel 9 host a new episode about creating extensible applications with MEF.

Architecture

Jimmy Bogard shows how he does MVC in his current project.

Chad Myers explains how Front Controller should be implemented in MVC.

Entity Framework 4.0

Julie Lerman talks about model-defined functions and why work with ObjectStateEntities instead of the objects directly.

Matthieu Mezil writes about POCO T4 templates.

Entity Framework

Alex James continues his series of tips showing how to avoid database queries using Stub Entities.

Matthieu Mezil show how to implement EF4.0 IObjectSet<T> methods in EF1.0.

ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

Jonathan Carter shows how the new Sys.Data.DataContext and Sys.Data.AdoNetDataContext classes can be used to consume server side data from a WCF/ASMX or ADO.NET Data Service and how the change tracking and data persistence functionality of DataContext works.

ASP.NET MVC

Maarten Balliauw shows how to implement application-wide action filters.

David Hayden shows the MvcContrib Grid and Pager helpers.

ASP.NET

Simone Ince shows how to detect a Server.Transfer call.

Summary 08.07.2009 – 10.07.2009

DDD

Check out this webcast where Eric Evans describes what he had learned about DDD since the book was published.

ASP.NET MVC

David Reed aka Infinities Loop has a great article showing how ASP.NET Web Forms take back the HTML using a custom render control.

ASP.NET

Bertrand talks about having an include extension method instead of master pages similar to the Html.RenderPartial method in MVC and provides a simple implementation.

ADO.NET

The ADO.NET team announces that System.Data.OracleClient will be deprecated starting with .NET 4.0.

C#

If you have wondered what Wes Dyer has been up lately, go check out this webcast on Channel 9 about the very cool Rx – .NET Reactive Framework.

Entity Framework

The ADO.NET team continues the series of posts on EF 4.0:

• Using Repository and Unit of Work patterns with Entity Framework 4.0
• Entity Framework Feature CTP 1
• Self tracking entities
• POCO templates
• Code only

Summary 03.07.2009 – 07.07.2009

ASP.NET AJAX

Stephen presents the Lightweight Test Automation Framework which represents an effort to improve the quality of AJAX Control Toolkit.

Scott Hanselman has a very nice post about combining and moving ScriptResource.axd to static scripts. It’ll be great if the WebResource.axd scripts will also be put in a single file and even hosted on a CDN as Scott shows!

ASP.NET MVC

David Ebbo continues his experiments with T4 template. He shows the option of modifying the generated code directly using the Code Model API. He uploaded a first improved version and continued with another great release.

Scott does an excellent job in promoting David’s work on MVC T4 templates.

Enterprise Library

P&P Guidance announces that EL 5.0 will focus on IoC containers for configuration offering the possibility to use other containers such as NInject, Castle Windsor or AutoFac. Check also Grigori’s announcement about the completion of the refactoring.

Grigori shares his thoughts on improving the performance of Application Logging Block.

Go watch this great video on Channel 9 about the upcoming features in Enterprise Library 5.0.

DDD

Udi Dahan has two excellent posts about domain events and the creation of aggregate roots.

Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Web Developer Team has an end to end example for packaging a web application with its database with “Delete existing objects before creating” flag.

Entity Framework

The EF Design team shows how the model first approach works in EF 4.0.

Summary 11.06.2009 – 02.07.2009

ASP.NET MVC

Eric Hexter writes about a framework of input builders (part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4) which are expression based strongly typed input helpers.

David Ebbo has a great article about ASP.NET MVC T4 template doing generation at design time instead of runtime.

ASP.NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 beta is available on Codeplex!

Design patterns

Jeremy Miller has an excellent article on MSDN Magazine about Unit of Work Pattern and Persistence Ignorance. He also has two posts on the same subject on his blog: More persistence patterns on MSDN and Persistence patterns: cascading updates.

Entity Framework 4.0

The ADO.NET Team has another great post about Change Tracking with POCO.

Danny Simmons points to two excellent posts about producing a POCO repository with the EF and LINQ Expression Trees and the Specification Pattern. Danny continues his D3 development showing some great features of EF4:

• D3 release 0.0010
• Fun with concurrency part 1
• Fun with concurrency part 2
• Building Great Software is a Battle, Don’t Leave Any Assets on the Sidelines

Debugging

Tess has an excellent post about debugging .NET 4.0 dumps in Visual Studio 2010. She also points out a nice post about the debugging features coming in Visual Studio 2010.

Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Web Developer Team shows the changes in the Publish dialog in a web application and the updates to FTP publishing. They also show how the user can set the database package options in web applications.

Daniel Moth shows the Method View feature of the Parallel Stacks window. He also published 2 screencasts about Parallel Tasks and Parallel Stacks on Channel 9.

Moq

Bertrand shows how to can mock indexer setters with Moq.

RIA

Vijay has a very nice article about unit testing business logic in RIA Services.

DDD

Yves has an excellent presentation about DDD that basically sums up his articles so far.

C# 4.0

Sam Ng keeps posting about the new features in C# 4.0 talking about COM interop.

Summary 21.05.2009 – 28.05.2009

Team Foundation Server 2010

Brian Harry continues his posts about TFS 2010:

• Work Item Tracking
• Project Management

Amit presents the Lab Management inside TFS 2010.

Visual Studio 2010

The Visual Web Developer team has a nice post about the new features of ASP.NET 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010.

Channel 9 has published the 20th episode about Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. In this episode we can see how we can download and install Visual Studio 2010.

.NET 4.0

In addition to my previous post about the new features in .NET 4.0 and C# 4.0, the BCL team has published a list of new features in BCL in .NET 4.0.

The .NET Security team present the security changes in CLR 4.0:

• .NET 4.0 Security
• Security policy in .NET CLR 4.0
• Sandboxing in .NET 4.0
• Coding with security policy in .NET 4.0

Entity Framework 4.0

The ADO.NET team continues the Sneak Preview posts:Sneak Preview – Pluralization in Entity Framework 4.0. They also have a great article about POCO entities.

ASP.NET MVC

Maarten has an excellent post about creating a custom DomainRoute as a solution to scenarios where we have to deal with the domain and not only with the application path.

Architecture

Greg Young has an excellent article about what being always valid means.

RIA

Brad shows that we can have our custom metadata provider for entities on server side.

ASP.NET AJAX

Joe Stagner points out a very cool Firefox plugin for ASP.NET AJAX based on FireBug.

ASP.NET 4.0

Scott has a great article about the new features in ASP.NET 4.0.

Summary 10.05.2009 – 20.05.2009

Architecture

Justin Etheredge shares his thoughts about exceptions handling in .NET.

Dino Esposito has a very interesting post about the differences between testability and testing.

ASP.NET

Scott Mitchell has a very nice article about using the new routing module in .NET 3.5 SP1 without ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET AJAX

A new version of AJAX Control Toolkit is available. It contains three new controls (HTMLEditor, ComboBox and ColorPicket), HTMLEditor being one of the controls I have been waiting for a long time.

C#

Eric Lippert shows what is the semantic difference between null and empty. He also explains why we don’t have the ForEach sequence operator extension method.

Entity Framework

The ADO.NET Team continues the Sneak Preview series. Please find below the complete list of posts:

• Sneak Preview: Persistence Ignorance and POCO in Entity Framework 4.0
• Sneak Preview: Model First in the Entity Framework 4.0
• Sneak Preview: Deferred Loading in Entity Framework 4.0
• Sneak Preview: N-Tier development with Entity Framework 4.0
• Sneak Preview: Model Defined Functions
• Sneak Preview: Entity Framework 4.0 Testability Improvements
• Sneak Peek – Using Code Generation Templates with the Entity Framework 4.0

Moses has a very interesting post about his implementation for Entity Framework 1.0 of a eager loading mechanism similar to DataLoadOptions in LINQ directly to ObjectContext versus the default ObjectQuery<T>.Include(string) mechanism.

JavaScript

Betrand Le Roy has a nice post about the use of setInterval versus the use of setTimeout.

Visual Studio 2010

Jason Zender has a great post with all the details about the release of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 and .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1.

RIA

Nikhil shows how ViewModel pattern plays along with RIA Services in scenarios involving testability, server mocking and dependencies.