The Morning Brew

I’m glad to see that we all survived last night’s GMail outage unscathed - I got the feeling that it was touch and go for a while for some folks

Software

• Rhino Mocks 3.6 - Ayende announces the release of Rhino Mocks 3.6, which collects together all the bugfixes and minor changes made on top of Rhino Mocks 3.5 which is now almost a year old.
• WSCF.blue Beta-2 - Santosh Benjamin announces the second beta release of WSCF.blue the Web Services Contract First extension for WCF services, which now features a standalone Data Contact Generator.
• Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP now available! - John Coyne announces the availability of a first CTP release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the new embedded systems operating system from Microsoft, based on te Windows 7 core.

Information

• Introduction to Data Binding in CTP2 - Shayne Burgess of the ADO.NET Data Services Team gives a tour of the databinding support in the latest ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria) 1.5 CTP2 release, walking through building a WPF application backed onto a data services service
• Dynamic Loading of .Net Assemblies - Ryan Svihla shows how you can control the loading of assemblies within your application providing an alternative means of deciding where to look by hooking some AppDomain events
• Debugging XML Transforms (XSLT) with Visual Studio - Steve Wellens highlights the debugging support for XSLT transforms in Visual Studio 2008
• Reducing ViewState Size - Davy Brion shows how you can replace the StateFormatter implementation with your own implementation to give you control over the output of the viewstate of an ASP.NET page, allowing you to do things like compression to reduce size
• PostSharp - 5th Anniversary of PostSharp - History and Prospects - Congratulations to the PostSharp project on its 5th Anniversary. This post talks a little about the history of PostSharp and also about the plans for the project for the future, including commercial releases in the Version 2 time frame.
• 7 Stages of new language keyword grief - Phil Haack looks at the different stages of reaction people have when they hear about a change to their favourite programming language, leading to final acceptance of the feature.
• Canvas gets a Spark - Karl Seguin talks about an update to the CodeBetter.Canvas project which aims to be a starting point for developers looking at ASP.NET MVC projects. This update includes upgrades to the latest versions of core libraries (NHibernate, Fluent NHibernate, etc) along with the introduction of the Spark View Engine
• GitSharp making progress - Miguel de Icaza highlights the work being done by Meinrad Recheis on a port of GIT to C#.
• Your very first NHibernate application - Part 3 - Gabriel Schenker continues his DotNetSlackers article series on building an NHibernate powered application, looking in this part at the AutoMapping feature of Fluent NHibernate.
• Up to 25% off many Microsoft Exams - We’re talking 74 exams that are 15%, 20% or 25% percent off (worldwide, but limited time offer) - Greg Duncan highlights a special offer on 74 different Microsoft Certification Exams, with discounts available until 31st December 2009 (or until supplies run out)
• TDD: Test the behaviour rather than implementation - Mark Needham reminds of the importance of testing the behaviour of our code and not the actual implementation to make our tests more refactoring friendly amongst other benefits
• .NET Best Practice No: 3:- Using performance counters to gather performance data - Shivprasad koirala explores the use of Performance Counters in your application to enable you to see what is going on inside the application when the application is in production.
• Acceptance testing in plain English with Concordion .NET - Gojko Adzic shares the video of his talk from the third Open Source .NET Exchange event from July, looking at acceptance testing using Concordian.NET to write acceptance tests in free from HTML.