Shorter post today, as I think everyone is off downloading and playing with SQL server 2008. Happy 08-08-08 day everyone.

Software

  • ANTS Profiler 4 Beta: The facelift is almost complete – Redgate announce the availability of a Beta release of ANTS Profiler 4. The beta release is free to download, but will only last until 17th August 2008, still should be interesting to see what that have planned for this release.

Information

  • Understanding Tail Recursion – Chris Smith looks at Tail Recursion, showing how it is crucial for creating efficient and safe functional code, explaining how the stack works and what can cause stack overflows, and then looking at how to avoid all this with tail recursion.
  • Visual Studio Theme Generator – Ryan Lanciaux has created a Visual Studio theme generator which creates .VSSETTINGS which can be imported into Visual Studio. Looks very simple to use, and I think I’ll be trying this out on my development machine later today
  • Crazy Extension Methods Redux (with Oxygene) – Colin Angus Mackay gets inspired by a feature from Oxygene (an object Pascak language which targets .NET) and shows how a similar effect can be created using extension methods.
  • Speedy C#, Part 2: Optimizing Memory Allocations – Pooling and Reusing Objects – Robert Paveza continues his series on Speedy C# with a look at what goes on with memory when you create and destroy objects, and what the Garbage collector gets up to.
  • Make the debugger show the contents of your custom IList class – Qwertie shows how adding a few simple attributes to your custom collections can help enhance your debugging experience.
  • Skinning the Cat with Fluent NHibernate – Robert Johnson looks at Fluent NHibernate and walks through its use with a quickstart which is based on the NHibernate quickstart for mapping the cat class.
  • Single instance applications – Matt Ellis talks about an alternative way (compared to Scott Hanselman’s recent post) of creating single instance applications using some old school COM methods.
  • Moving my Site onto a 64 Bit Server – Rick Strahl talks about his experiences moving his sites and applications onto a 64 Bit Windows 2008 machine, with some good tips for anyone who needs to run older 32 bit apps alongside 64 bit apps in IIS.

Community

  • SQL Server Heroes Unite Contest! – The External Links & References Blog has the details of a competition for anyone developing an interesting application on Codeplex using SQL Server 2008 – you will have to be quick though, the competition closes at the end of August