The Morning Brew

Software

• Second Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download - Mozilla release their second Release Candidate of Firefox 3

Information

• Setting Up Velocity (Distributed Cache) - Scott Watermasysk goes through the process of setting up and starting work with Velocity, the newly announced distributed cache from Microsoft.
• Fun with the ResourceReader - Nikolai Tillmann uses Pex to test a complicated component - the ResourceReader - in this guide with plenty of screen shots and sample code.
• Getting Started with Migrator.Net and database refactorings - Sean Chambers talks about this castle project spin off which gives Ruby on Rails like Migrations which can target many different database backends to the .NET environment
• Failures of aimless large-scale refactorings - Jimmy Bogard talks about ways of refactoring to attempt to overcome a build up of technical debt
• "duplicate association path" bug in NHibernate Criteria API - Derek Fowler runs into an awkward NHibernate issue in the Criteria API, and offers a work around to mitigate the problem.
• TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines - Bryan gives some suggestions and best practices for naming and working with tests created during Test Driven Development.
• Loosely coupled communication - Prism style - Glenn Block highlights the work of Francis Cheung who has a series of posts on the communication techniques used within the Prism WPF composite application block.
• The First Spec You Should Write When Using Castle - Bil Simser shows how you can validate the Windsor configuration using a specification based test
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Goodies - Pete Brown talks about the ‘this week’ release of Silverlight 2 beta 2, giving a summary of the most interesting new features. The other good news is that there is a go-live for things developed with Beta 2
• TechEd2008 from your Couch - Brad Abrams highlights the TechEd 2008 Online site, a means of getting to see some of the TechEd presentations without actually being there.