The Morning Brew

Thanks to those who responded to yesterdays incorrectly worded request about display problems with the feed. I think it might be down to some strangeness in the feed generated by FeedBurner – more investigation to follow.

Software

SQL Server 2005 Best Practices Analyzer – Released last week – this is the January 2008 update

Announcing Graffiti Beta 2 – Telligent release the latest beta of their new CMS software

Information

Defensive Coding best practice – Derik Whittaker talks about null reference exceptions and how you can help to avoid them by being defensive in your code

SQL Server Version Numbers – That @@version number means my SQL Server is running what SP? – Greg Duncan gathers together the different version number and their corresponding service pack numbers

Research Supports The Effectiveness of TDD – Phil Haack talks about the evidence to support TDD as an effectiveness enhancer for developers

Obtain System Information Using Windows Management Instrumentation Calls – A good overview of tools and methods for working with WMI to obtain information from Windows.

OpenID implementation in C# and ASP.NET – Mads Kristensen investigates Open ID and implements Open ID Authentication in ASP.NET

ASP.NET Personal Web Site Starter Kit – Ajax Enabled with .NET Framework 3.5 and VS2008 – Brad Abrams talks you through upgrading the Personal Web Site Starter Kit to take advantage of the new features of VS2008 and .NET 2.5

Community

Get Ready for SQL Server 2008! – Details of a free virtual conference to be held tomorrow.

Wanna Blog on ASP.NET ?? – weblogs.asp.net are after some new bloggers to join the ranks along side their well known bloggers

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I’m typing to improve the formatting of The Morning Coffee, If you are reading this in an RSS reader, and its not formatted well, please could you let me know what reader you use. Thanks

Software

F# Compiler – The F# compiler has been updated to version 1.9.3.14

Information

Increasing the Business Value of Software Using a Separation of Concerns Approach to Software Testing – Interesting slide deck, talking about the different types of testing, and giving some tips for each of them.

FxCop: Writing Your Own Custom Rules – A comprehensive FxCop resource detailing the construction of custom rules for FxCop.

Intellisense-like method selection pop-up window – A tutorial in creating AutoComplete selection lists in WPF

Two data types to represent a period of time with NHibernate usertypers – Two examples of classes to use for time periods, and how you can integrate them with you NHibernate persistence.

The Essential Agile Reading List – Patrick Kua gathers together some of the ebst books on agile development.

The One Minute Build – Peter Gillard-Moss talks about the imprtance of a quick build in your Continuous Integration setup.

Creating a Yellow Fade with ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit – Stephen Wright goes through the process of creating the famous AJAX ‘I’ve update this bit’ fade effect

Community

Geek Speak "Problems and Solutions When Implementing a Windows CardSpace Identity Provider" – Upcoming web cast event from MSDN featuring Barry Dorrans talking on real world CardSpace use.

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The Morning Brew’s subscriber numbers seem to have jumped quite dramatically over the weekend – I suspect that Jay Kimble has something to do with that – Thanks for your kind words Jay!

Software

Simple Column Chart Generator – A nice simple .NET column chart library with sample application

Idera SQL Job Manager – Get a free copy of this SQL Server Job manager – offer runs until 31st January. The tool looks pretty useful – especially if you manage lots of SQL Servers

Information

User Account Control Helpers Library – A very useful library to help deal with Vista’s UAC – giving help with embedding application manifests for specifying execution level, and working with UAC within your application when you need enhanced permissions.

WPF : A Beginners guide part 2 of n – Second part of this WPF introduction series.This part talks about how to structure your application in terms of XAML, code, references, extensions and resources.

SQL Server 2008 TSQL – Table Valued Parameters – Simon Sabin introduces a fantastic new feature of SQL Server 2008 – this is going to make life so much easier

How to use Reflection to test your code – This article highlights a number of Reflection techniques in order to build a simple testing framework application.

Window Tabifier – An interesting article (and demo project) dealing with window management. The sample application allows you to host many applications windows within it, in an interface much like the Terminals RDP client.

Compress Folders with C# and the SharpZipLib – A good sample application showing how to compress files with SharpZipLib.

Text to Speech Synthesis in 1 minute under .NET 3.0 – I love it when things are this simple – making you apps talk certainly looks that way in .NET 3.0

Humour

NDepend, Cyclic Dependencies, and the Shroud of Turing – Its amazing what detail NDepend can uncover!

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