Mike Lorengo's Weblog

Blog Clippings #2

I was having lunch today when it occurred to me that I haven't blogged an entry in at least 3 months. Part of this has been due to my laptop going belly up, my new job, and just plain old fashioned laziness. So until I get the data off my laptop, this post will be in the spirit of laziness.

Powertoys for VS2005 Beta 2

From the Class Designer team blog... "The Design Tools Enhancements add-in provides a common set of features that can be used by both the Class Designer and the Distributed System Designers"

GTDTiddlyWiki

A simple html file based wiki. Simply download to your thumb drive and you have your own personal wiki. For those not in the know GTD stands for Getting Things Done, here's a wiki that talks about GTD.

Smell To Refactorings

When looking at code you begin to notice certain smells. This table organizes the smells, and proposes refactoring operations to clean up the smell.

Designing Great Frameworks

Brad Abrams presents a series of lectures on design guidelines for developing classes and components that extend the .NET Framework.

Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for Agile Software Development, Beta

This download contains the agile process guidance that will be shipping with Visual Studio Team System. MSF for Agile Software Development is a scenario-driven, context-based, agile software development process that utilizes many of the ideas embodied in Team System. This process incorporates proven practices developed at Microsoft around requirements, design, security, performance, and testing.

Nic Wolfe's Password Generator

Now only remember a single pass phrase yet still have highly secure unique passwords for all of your sites.

All Things Indigo - Indigo Resources I've Found

The big buzz coming is the March CTP Release of Indigo, one of the three two :) pillars of Longhorn. I'm going to be gathering some posts in this entry from around the blogosphere in hopes of relieving my brain of some more details. In addition I won't have to save these links on my machine which gets repaved every three months or so.

News Flash

The Beta1 RC of Avalon & Indigo has been released to the wild, thanks to Drew Marsh for the link, you can get the direct download here Supposedly it will be available via this page.*

Blog Entries

• Clemens Vasters creates a simple Hello World Indigo Application.
• Bruce Williams takes Clemens' Hello World sample and converts it into a Queued Service.
• Shy Cohen demonstrates Indigo's Duplex Channel and use of the config to set endpoint bindings.
• And of course Don Box talks about Service Contracts in Indigo.
• Clemens Vasters spends the weekend with Indigo (Part 1,Part 2,Part 3)

Indigo Blogs

• Don Box's Spoutlet (rss)
• Shy Cohen's Indigo Category (rss)
• Omri Gazitt's Web Services Category (rss)
• Kirill Gavrylyuk (rss)*
• Floren Lazar's Indigo Category (rss)
• Steve Maine's Indigo Category (rss)
• Andy Milligan's Distilled - Thinking In Indigo(rss)
• Doug Purdy's Blog (rss)
• Yasser Shohoud's Technical Category (rss)
• Mujtaba Syed (rss)
• That Indigo Book(rss)
• Richard Turner's On the road to Indigo(rss)
• Clemens Vasters Indigo Category(rss)
• Christian Weyer's Indigo Category(rss)
• Kenny Wolf's Indigo Category (rss)*
• Bruce Williams (atom)

Resources

• Channel 9 Indigo Wiki
• March 2005 CTP Release Notes
• Indigo Doucmentation for March 2005 CTP
• Indigo Portal in the Longhorn SDK
• Indigo Section in the Longhorn Developer Center
• Distributed Applications Using "Indigo" Services in the Longhorn Development Center
• Indigo MSDN Newsgroup

Articles

• Introducing Indigo: An Early Look by David Chappell (Feb. 2005)
• Inside "Indigo", Chapter 2: The Journey of a Message by Jason Clark (Feb. 2004)
• Codename Indigo: A Guide to Developing and Running Connected Systems with Indigo by Don Box (Jan. 2004)
• Creating Indigo Applications with the PDC Release of Visual Studio.Net by Yasser Shohoud (Jan. 2004)

Samples

• Indigo Transactional Web Services using Microsoft WinFX CTP March 2005* (April 2005) - Implementing WS-AtomicTransaction in Indigo. by Jamesqding

Podcasts

• .NET Rocks Mood Indigo* (April 2005) - Carl talks with Richard Turner and Anand Rajagapolan, Program Managers on the Indigo team to really dig into the Indigo experience.

Videos

• BizTalk Server and Indigo* (May 2005) MSDN TV - Scott Woodgate shows a glimpse into the future with a working prototype demo illustrating BizTalk Server and "Indigo" working together.
• Indigo Security in a Nutshell* (April 2005)  MSDN TV - Doug Purdy provides an overview of the Indigo Security Programming Model.
• Introduction to Indigo* (April 2005) MSDN TV - Steve Swartz provides a brief conceptual overview of Indigo, walks through some code, and introduces you to his jackalope.
• Via Gene Webs blog entry:Indigo Webcasts including a) Programming Indigo 1, b) Programming Indigo 2, c) Indigo Security, d) Reliability, e) Tooling for Distributed Applications, f) The IT Pro Experience, g) Migration, Upgrade, Integration, Interop, h) Basics, i) Indigo Internals 1, j) Indigo Internals 2.
• Don Box - Final Part of Indigo Team Tour via Channel 9 (Sep. 2004)
• Don Box - Tour of Indigo Team via Channel 9 (Aug. 2004)
• Service Orientation and Today's Technologies via MSDN TV (Aug. 2004)
• The Road to Indigo Technology Roadmap

Conference Sessions

• Indigo Day at VSLive (Feb. 2005)
  Summary via The Server Side
  Eric Rudder showed of Indigo in the VSLive! Keynote
  Summary of  Eric Rudder's Keynote and Don Box's & Steven Schwartz's session on Programming Indigo via Mujtaba Syed
  The Videos are now online here

*Updated Entries. If you know of an Indigo resource or blog (preferably with an Indigo category, please send me a note. Also a comment was made that anything written prior to Feb 05 should be disregarded since these papers will have been written about a very, very different Indigo and may end up being more confusing than useful!

Argument Exception Handling Utility Classes

I just spent twenty minutes trying to track down this article in my blog clippings. I'm posting it here so I can find it a little faster next time. Nils Jonsson created a utility class for simplifying argument checking. The post that triggered my search for this article was K. Scott Allen's entry on argument checking in the Enterprise Library blog entry.

Microsoft Architecture Journal 4 Out Now

From the Blog Clippings Category The Microsoft Architects Journal 4 is now available here as a pdf. The table of contents lists these articles.

• Choosing the Right Presentation Layer Architecture
• Information Bridge Framework
• Benchmarking a Transaction Engine
• Enterprise Architecture Alignment Heuristics
• Razorbills
• Next Generation Tools for OOD

Blog Clipping #1

Well, I've been hard at work decorating my house for Halloween and spending a little less time on the Virtual Cellar project. But, enough new things have come by that I thought I should post them here.

New NUnit Iteration (2.2.1)

Via Roy Osherove, a new version of NUnit (2.2.1) has been released. I couldn't find it on the nunit site, but sourceforge has a copy of it. Here's a quick summary of the changes in this iteration

• Better VS2005 support. Code that fires events has been modified to ensure that controls are invoked on the correct thread. We believe this will solve many of the problems that occur when running tests under the VS 2005 debugger. NUnit can now open Visual Studio 2005 projects and solutions.
• An experimental extensibility mechanism is now provided, which allows users to create special types of test cases and suites, marked by their own attributes.
• Source code for NUnit reorganized into separate components. Both the gui and console runners are now dlls for those who want to link them with their own programs.
• Old style test cases ("Test....") are no longer recognized by default
• Added a protected constructor to Assert so those wanting to inherit from it may do so
• Numerous bug fixes

Read here for the full change log.

New Version of CruiseControl.Net

Via mnissen: CruiseControl.Net 0.7 released

• Some Source Control plugins can now automatically update your source tree for you (so no need for bootstrap builds)
• New 'triggers' system replaces old schedule
• Introduction of 'Working Directory' and 'Artifact' concepts (these are not fully utilised yet)
• More support for relative paths
• Preliminary support for cross-server project reporting.

Read more here.

Omondo Releases UML for Eclipse

I know this is a dotnetjunkies site, but I have to make a plug for a great UML tool for Eclipse and Java development, you can download the free version here. It now supports Eclipse v3.0.1. A Linux Journal review is here. Eclipse & Omondo make a great environment for Java development, including tight integration with Ant.

Virtual Cellar

I've laid most of the foundation now for the Virtual Cellar, I'm now beginning to flesh out the classes in the domain model. The two main classes are the Producer class, and the Wine class. Most of the work as of late is on the Wine class and gathering data for the different Varietals of grape. I'll post a little about that later today.