My first dnrTV episode went live today. I am talking with Carl Franklin about dependency inversion, dependency injection, and inversion of control. I demonstrate how to build a very simple IoC container. My intent is to show developers that it isn't any thing crazy scary. I talk about how IoC facilitates...

I was very happy to hear the news that Amazon will be providing Windows/SQL support on their EC2 cloud computing service . From the email announcement: We are excited to let you know that Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) will offer you the ability to run Microsoft Windows Server or Microsoft...

  A build automation tool... now with less XML... psake is a build automation tool written in PowerShell. It avoids the angle-bracket tax associated with executable XML by leveraging the PowerShell syntax in your build scripts. psake has a syntax inspired by rake (aka make in Ruby) and bake (aka...

I'm writing some integration tests around the .NET PetShop, which has no tests whatsoever. Since the architecture is tightly coupled, you can't really start writing unit tests effectively. You have to start applying Michael Feather's techniques for breaking dependencies. Before doing that...

I've written about the template method pattern before. For my money it's still a very useful pattern for building super lightweight frameworks and enabling the open-closed principle which states: Software entities (classes, modules, functions, etc.) should be open for extension, but closed for...

In Domain-Driven Design we turn to the specification pattern when we want to check whether an object matches some criteria. I think specification is the oft-forgotten bastard child pattern of the domain model pattern language. I know I frequently turn to queries -- sometimes query objects -- when I want...

I'll be one of the speakers at the Calgary .NET User Group this Thursday. First up is Daryl Rasmussem... Building ASP.NET/AJAX with Visual Studio 2008 by Daryl Rasmussem AJAX is now built into ASP.NET with Visual Studio 2008 – and because there’s no separate download to install, the fully...

This morning I was getting ready to record a screencast about ReSharper 4 EAP. To make it easier for people to follow along, I launched Roy Osherove's excellent utility, Keyboard Jedi . Rather than the expected result, this friendly dialog box greeted me: Living La Vida x64 My main development machine...

During my geekSpeak screencast last week, one of the attendees asked: Any recommendations for refactoring existing code to insert interfaces? (e.g., what's the best dependency to break first, the database?) Excellent question! Most of us do not have the luxury of working on greenfield projects, but...

Today at lunch* I'll be joining Glen Gordon and Lynn Langit on geekSpeak to talk about Taming Your Software Dependencies. Specifically I'll be talking about moving from tightly-coupled to loosely-coupled architectures using dependency inversion, dependency injection, and inversion of control...