Reflective Perspective

A rather large post today, but hopefully that will keep your .NET appetites satisfied until Monday

Software

• NUnit 2.5 Alpha 2 Released - Charlie Poole announces the Beta 2 Release of Nunit 2.5
• Ease your SSMS experience: SSMS Tools PACK 1.0 is out! - Mladen Prajdic.releases version 1.0 of his free Sql Server Management Studio tools, including lots of nice to have functionality to make SSMS a little more bearable.

Information

• Your API Fails, Who is at Fault? - Matthew Podwysocki talks more about Design By Contract, looking at the passing of invalid parameters, and techniques for handling this in Erlang and Spec#.
• The Linq SelectMany Operator - Justin Etheredge looks at one of the less well know LINQ operators.
• Designing With Lambdas - Part IV - Sergio Pereira continues his series with a look at Lambdas being converted to expressions, and illustrates by showing how they can be used to convert objects to JSON.
• NUnit Best Practices - Scott White offers some introductory advice for unit testing with NUnit.
• Private Method Anti(?)-Pattern - Patric Fornasier discusses whether private methods are really an anti-pattern
• WPF, from this to that..Wow! - Glenn Block shows the difference a bit of UI design has made to the Prism reference implementation,
• Castle demo app: ActiveRecord basics and unit testing - Gojko Adzic shows how to use activerecord and some samples of how to unit test the database mapping layer. I look forward to further parts of the series.
• How to validate a method’s arguments? - Fredrik Normén shows a few different techniques for validating the arguments of a method.
• Building an F# powered indexing system - The first part of what I hope will be a really good series on using F# to produce some real functionality.
• MVC Storefront, Part 9: The Shopping Cart - Rob Conery continues his ASP.NET MVC Screen Cast Series with part 9, this time looking at spiking his shopping cart implementation to test getting things back into the database.
• Don’t wait for your Page_Load to finish if you don’t have to. - Albert Pascual shows how you can gain a performance boost in your ASP.NET by handling some of the support functionality in a fire and forget thread.
• Prism vs Framework XXX - Glenn Block asks people not to compare apples to oranges, and explains how Prism is different to most other frameworks
• Mock Framework Benchmarks - Aaron Jensen compares the performance of a number of mocking frameworks, and gets disappointing results from Rhino Mocks, however before I get round to posting he has already found the problem, patched it and re-run his tests, showing a marked improvement - another win for open source?
• Reserved words: what are they good for? (Absolutely nothing?) - An interesting discussion of the important (or lack of importance) of reserved words, and also a bit of information about how the VB team avoid creating lots of new reserved words during language upgrades
• Exception Handling - Do’s and Dont’s - A good roundup of exception handling best practices

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET May Meeting - Next Thursday (15th May 2008) marks the second official Liverpool.NET usergroup meeting -at which I will be giving an introductory presentation on F#