GuruStop.NET

“Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software” is a new eBook by Karl Seguin. The book does not say in its introduction that it’s all ALT.NET-ish, it starts by introducing what ALT.NET is, it’s goals etc, afterwards, all the topics the book covers are inspired by ALT>NET frequent topics. This includes Domain Driven Design (DDD), Dependency Injection (DI), Object Relational Mapping (ORMs), Mocking, etc…

Here’s what Channel9 had to say about it (which is how I originally found it too):

Karl Seguin recently released a great free 79 page eBook for .NET developers covering design patterns, unit testing, mock objects, memory management, object relational mapping, and more.  Get it while it’s free!

Now, if I did my job well getting your interest, then you may want to get to the best part:

Foundations of Programming, Building Better Software – EBook Download

IF you’re not interested yet, I know this must get your most interest in the book, the table of contents (highlighting chapter titles in bold):

One Line Statement

Microsoft’s IoC container Unity, hosted on CodePlex as an Application Block for Enterprise Library is now released in ver. 1.0.

Introduction

If you do not know what IoC is, you might want to check sample articles:

• The semi standard Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) article by Martin Fowler (Tip, read as much as you can from this guy’s writings – and thank me for suggesting it) [Warning: Not .NET Specific]
• Understanding IoC Container (Simple "down to code quickly" introduction by Sean Feldman)
• IoC Page on Wikipedia [Warning: Not .NET Specific]
• A sample DI and IoC presentation (By my friend Mohamed Nour)

I have been interested in Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) for few months, and I brought other guys interested too such as Mohamed Nour :D. I’m not going to discuss when I believe those strategies should be used, and how they relate to each others (at least not in this post).

The usual story

If you know about IoC, you’d know that there’re few big players in the field that are speaking .NET. I’ll not compare them here. I’m not even talking about them with relevance to time order, but I like to see how the "vendors / characteristics" map looks like.  For comparisons, check the end of this section.