The Morning Brew

Software

• Building Parallel Applications using Axum - Somasegar announces the release of Axum, a new .NET language for building Parallel applications. According to Mathew Podwysocki, Microsoft has no yet decided if this project should be a real product, so want feedback.
• Service Pack 1 for SQL Server Express 2008 is Available - SQL Server Express team announce the availability of Service Pack 1 for SQL Server Express 2008

Information

• Isolation, Agents, and Message-passing in .NET - The blog for the Team producing Azum, and where all the Azum information seems to be centered at the moment.
• Making the untestable testable with Anonymous Methods and Dependency Injection - Karl Seguin looks at a technique which helps making untestable code more testable making use of DI and Anonymous Methods.
• TDD: How to supersede a single system library call - Richard Dingwall follow up on Karl’s piece looking at a formalisation of the technique
• Calling private methods from Unit Tests - Patrick Smacchia looks at using some features of NDepend to make it easier to test private methods
• Custom Controller Factory in ASP.NET MVC - Keyvan Nayyeri continues his series of ASP.NET MVC extension points with a look at the ability to provide Custom Controller Factories to the framework
• MEF and MAF Resources - Kathleen Dollard provides some good links to further information about MEF and MAF (which she will be talking about at Scottish Developers next month - see below)
• Using Behaviour-Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC Part 2 - Tim Ross continues his series on Behaviour Driven Development with a further look into the executable specifications for his sample project
• Integrate FxCop 1.36 & VS 2008 - Vadim Kreynin shows how you can integrate FxCop 1.36 into your Visual Studio 2008 Builds with some simple instructions.
• ASP.NET MVC book: Chapter 1: Plumbing - Jeff Putz shares a pre-release version of Chaper 1 of his book on ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of a Web Forms Developer
• Entity interface anti-pattern - James Gregory talks about interfaces like ICustomer, etc on entities which he considers to be an anti-pattern
• "XYZ Is Bad For Performance" - Sasha Goldshtein reminds us that when it comes to performance there aren’t hard and fast rules, and that it all depends on the context we are using something in.

Community

• SQL Usergroup starting in Cambridge - Simon Sabin announces the formation of a new SQL Server User group in the Cambridge area. The first meeting is scheduled in for the 20th May.
• Your Application in Pieces - MEF and MAF - Scottish Developers host a talk from Kathleen Dollard on the Managed Extensibility Framework and the Managed Add-in Framework on 23rd June - spaces for this session are going quickly, so sign up quickly if you are intending attending.