The Morning Brew

BarCamp Manchester was a very enjoyable experience - thanks to all involved in setting it up.

Software

• Power Up your Visual Studio 2008 with the new, free and with source, PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008 - Greg Duncan highlights a useful set of command extensions for Visual Studio 2008
• IronRuby IDE - The Visual Form Designer - SaphireSteel show off their latest alpha release of their IronRuby IDE. The Personal Edition is free forever!
• Windows Vista Controls for .NET 2.0 - This windows Vista styled control toolkt has just had its 1.3.0 release made public
• Paint.NET v3.30 Beta 1 is now available - My favourite quick and simple paint program has had its latest beta released

Information

• How to Serialize a MailMessage - Keyvan Nayyeri shows how you can add XML Serialisation to things like the MailMessage
• Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework - Daniel Moth shows how you can make your code utilise multicore processors, using the Parallel Class and Linq
• Invoking a .NET program on Device Insert - Damon Payne shows how you can make your .NET programs become an option in the launch list you get upon plugging in a device
• Correct event invocation - This little tip looks like something that we should all consider in our multi threaded applications
• Virtual by default is better - Hans-Eric Grönlund talks about the differences between C# and Java in this long running argument
• 2008: Declaring and instantiating a value - Louis Davidson remarks on a wonderful change made in SQL 2008 - I often find that I type code this way, try and run it and get and error - looks like I will enjoy 2008
• Case Insensitive String Comparison is Teh Suck - Ben Scheirman talks about his dismay at the length of the code you have to write to do case insensitive string comparisons.
• Tricky Programming on Multi-Core Processors - Another Parallel FX example, this one shows how the quick sort and matrix multiplication can be made parallel