Another bumper edition today, and I completely ran out of time preparing the Brew this morning so with all that is left over from today I’m sure that tomorrow will be even larger !

Software

  • Silverlight Tools – The Visual Studio integration for Silverlight has hit a final release, including support for both Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer 2008 Express
  • Enterprise Library 4.1–October 2008 – There is a new release of the Enterprise library – Version 4.1 (or October 2008). This release supports both VS2008 and VS2008 SP1, and also includes the Unity 1.2features.
  • Silverlight Toolkit – The Silverlight Toolkit was announced in yesterday’s PDC keynote, and provides a number of controls, components and utilities which aren’t included in the main Silverlight release. This is the CodePlex site for the library where there are samples of the 12 new controls, along with access to the binary download and source.
  • Announcing IronPython 2.0 VS10 CTP – Mohamed Meligy highlights a release of IronPython specifically for use in Visual Studio 2010 CTP, allowing you to try out some of the new dynamic language interoperability features.
  • WPF Toolkit is live – DataGrid, Ribbon, and Calendar preview versions – As announced in the Keynote yesterday, there is a new WPF Control Toolkit, including a DataGrid, Ribbon and calendar controls. The Toolkit requires .NET 3.5 SP1
  • Announcing Sync Framework v2 CTP1 – Rob Tiffany announces the release of the first CTP of the Wync Framework V2 – a framework providing easy means to synchronise data using providers, with providers for file system, ADO.NET and Feeds provided. This release contains a number of new feaures, as outlined in this post.
  • SonicFileFinder 2.0 released – Jens Schaller announces the release of SonicFileFinder 2.0, a free add-in for Visual Studio which provides quick searching for files with some useful actions on the found file.
  • SQL Server 2005 SP3 Beta Release – Nosheen M Syed announces the beta release of SQL server 2005 SP3, for those who like to live on the cutting edge, as this release is intended for testing use only.

Information

  • PDC 2008 – Looking at Future – Keyvan Nayyeri provides a nice summary of yesterdays Day 2 Keynote talking about Windowws 7, Developer tools, the Live Framework and Office 14
  • Live Mesh : Welcome to Beta – Live Mesh, a tool from Microsoft which allows you to easily access your data and services in a variety of ways, along with synchronisation of data to the cloud is going into beta this week. The significant new feature in the beta is the inclusion of Windows Mobile and Mac Clients.
  • Welcome to Live Services and the Live Framework – One of the significant announcements yesterday at PDC was the new Live Services and Live Framework which sit on top of Windows Azure
  • Windows 7 Developer Guide Is Now Available – The Windows 7 Blog for Developers announces the release of the Windows 7 Developer guide which highlights significant new features (including the SEcnic Ribbon, Multi Touch, etc). More details in the post and document – I think this blog might be one to keep an eye on over the coming months.
  • A first look at Windows 7’s pre-beta PDC release – Ed Bott of ZDNet provides some details on what is coming in Windows 7, along with a nice collection of screenshots
  • Named and Optional Arguments in C# 4.0 – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the new C# 4 features, and how they interact with F#
  • My View of C# 4.0 – Omer van Kloeten gives his impressions of the new C# Features, and isn’t entirely convinced about a number of them.
  • Oslo – Martin Fowler talks about his impressions of Oslo, Microsoft’s Model Driven Software implementation. Interesting reading
  • MVC Storefront Preview 1 Available – Rob Conery has taken some time to package up a preview release of his MVC StoreFront project which is the source for his great screencast series. The preview requires VS2008 and ASP.NET MVC Beta 1
  • Letter from Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft – This email (sent to the Industry Executive subscribers) from Steve Ballmer about the new Azure platform (mainly marketing spiel) is being blogged about all over the place,
  • New Silverlight controls suite delivered by Microsoft #PDC08 – Laurent Bugnion shows the new Silverlight Controls released yesterday at PDC, and talks about getting up and running with them in your SIlverlight 2 projects.
  • Closure Tip – Peter Ritchie looks at at some of the dangers of mutable variables when combined with closures in both C#2 and 3
  • New Release: patterns & practices App Arch Guide 2.0 Beta 1 – J.D. Meier announces the release of the Patterns and Practices Application Architecture Guide 2.0 Beta 1, a 5 part, 24 chapter guide to help you to make good architectural and technical choices, along with choosing the correct patterns and practices.
  • Using Intellipad to create your first M model – The Intellipad Team Blog show how Intellipad can be used to create "M" models. This is also the first set of screenshots I’ve seen with any quantity of "M" code. The Intellipad IDE was previously described as emacs.net, and glancing at the other posts in the team blog looks like it could become a very useful tool.
  • "Oslo" Modeling Language Team Blog – The Oslo Modelling Language, Codenamed "M" now has its own blog, yet another one to keep an eye on post PDC
  • LukeH’s WebLog : F# on Windows Azure – LukeH shares Visual Studio templates for F# cloud services using Windows Azure allowing you to use F# to create Azure services easily