The Morning Brew

Software

• SQL Server 2008 RC0 - The RC0 release of SQL Server 2008 is now available for download by the general public.
• Open XML SDK v1 Available From Today - Mike Ormond highlights the availability of the Open XML SDK v1

Information

• BackgroundWorker Closure and Overridable Task - Patrick Smacchia looks at how you can cancel and run again on background workers for the situations where you have a background process that takes longer than a re-occurrence of the triggering event can.
• Northwind N-Tier Blueprint Application Using WPF/WCF/LINQ to SQL - A NorthWind sample application which uses much of the modern Microsoft Development Technologies in a multi tier fashion - I plan to have a read of the source at some point soon as seeing how this all plays together will be interesting.
• Too Loosely Coupled Code - Sean Feldman considers if it is possible to have code that is too loosely coupled - a couple (no pun intended) of interesting response in the comments.
• Visual State in Silverlight Control Templates - Ian Griffiths takes a look into the Visual State Manager in Silverlight 2 control templates
• To Cache, To Static, or To Session "When?" is the question - Jay Kimble gives an overview of how he decides where to locate data - in the cache, session or static members on classes.
• Stop Polluting the UI Thread - Use a ThreadBarrier - A very interesting article the ThreadBarrier pattern, which demonstrates a better way of doing multi threaded applications that interact with the UI. Samples are provided for both WinForms and WPF
• Help Decide Sandcastle’s Fate - SandCastle the .NET Code documentation tool has been removed from Codeplex as it does not publish the source code. This is bad news (compounding the bad news that NDoc is no longer developed)
• Zip method added to Dizzy - Jason Etheridge continues development of his ‘Dizzy’ High Order function library, with a multi list element combining method
• Performance Tip: Return Only Necessary Columns Using LINQ - Jason N. Gaylord offers a useful reminder about only retrieving the data you need - this applies to much more than just LINQ.
• What really went wrong ? Check the inner exception - Peter van Ooijen takes a look at the use of the Exception’s InnerException property in order to find out what really went wrong.

Community

• ICFP Programming Contest - Matthew Podwysocki highlights the 11th International Conference on Functional Programming Programming Contest - a language agnostic functional programming contest running until mid July.
• JBuilding A Solid Core - Your Future Is Right Ahead Of You - The Contest!!! - Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo is running a contest (of a similar nature to the one mentioned last week on another site). To enter you need to submit a short (true) story of how you have an impact on the personal and professional lives of the people you work with - full details on the site.