The Morning Brew

Well, this has been a busy week. Tomorrow I’m heading over to the first Manchester BarCamp for what I hope will be an enjoyable day. If you are a .NET Developer based in the North west of England, check out the link in today’s community section for another exciting community development.

Software

• Web Client Software Factory 2.0 shipped! – Glenn Block announces the release of the WCSF 2.0, now targeting Visual Studio 2008/.NET 3.5

Information

• Lead-Developer Compression Ratios – Larry O’Brien talks about the trade off of delegation of development work to more junior staff. Comment number 4 contains a suggestion of another way of achieving the same.
• Creating objects – round 2 – Ayende corrects a few numbers from last time, with the same conclusions
• IIS.net : Home : The Official Microsoft IIS Site – The portal site for IIS gets revamped for the IIS7/Windows 2008 era!
• EntLib/Unity roadmap – The Unity IoC library has only been about for a week or so, and in 2 weeks will be going RTM!
• To close or not to close, that is the question. – Justin Etheredge gives a well balanced argument for and against making your framework very open (protected and virtual), or close up shop (internal)
• ETL World Record! – Some interesting information about high performance Extract Transform and Load (ETL) using Sql Server Integration Services.
• The Inline SQL application – Six Months Later – Paul Stovell has an imaginary (I hope) discussion about some of the horrors of inline SQL

Community

• Liverpool .Net Users Meeting at Glow New Media (Tuesday, March 11, 2008) – Thom, myself and a few others have been discussing setting up a User group in Liverpool for .NET developers for a while now. If you are a .NET developer in Liverpool or the surrounding area this is hopefully something you will want to get involved in. The first gathering is really about meeting people and seeing what people would like to do. Email Thom if you are interested.

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The Microsoft ‘Heros Happen {here}’ launch events kicked off yesterday, so lots of people are talking about that. I have to wait until the middle of next month for the Birmingham, UK event

Software

• XML Pathfinder: a Visual Basic Utility – A usefult looking utility to help build XPath statements
• TypeMock Isolator 4.2 released – The TypeMock Team ship version 4.2
• Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition – February 2008 – Microsoft release the latest build of thiese resources to help build web services to best practices and patterns
• New: ShellRunas v1.0 Updates: Autoruns v9.13, Process Explorer v11.10, Sigcheck v1.52 – Updates of some old friends and a new release from the SysInternals team

Information

• Be Careful of Your Passion – David Starr talks about the dangers of getting carried away when writing the bits of an application that you find most interesting.
• Continuous Environment Validation – Some interesting thoughts on testing the environment your application is running in to ensure the best conditions for your application
• Creating objects – Perf implications – Ayende compares a few techniques for creating instances – interesting reading
• Prism is alive ! – Ohad Israeli announces Prism, a Composite UI Application Block designed specifically for WPF
• How should you layout code? – Tony Davis talks about code formatting and layout tools and best practices
• Sandcastle and API Documentation – Brian Peek shows how you can create good API documentation using SandCastle
• Common console commands for the typical ASP.NET developer – A collection of console commands to manage and work with IIS
• Retrofitting Code for the Web – Joel Ross shows how code can be refactored to make it usable in more than one situation – in this case making it possible to use on the web

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Today is a little short on links, I had a small internet outage which cut down the time available, and I also had a disturbed nights sleep, being work up by an earthquake so didn’t get up that early!

Software

• ASP.NET MVC Framework Scaffold Generator – Something to take the hard work out of CRUD in ASP.NET MVC

Information

• DLRScript Project – Revealed… – Jay Kimble starts talking about his latest project which helps make developers life easier by only needing 1 programming language for the whole stack – server and client side.
• Try/Catch Blocks Can Hurt Performance Significantly – The Try/Catch performance debate continues…
• Visualising the Mandelbrot set with LINQ – yet again – Jon Skeet demonstrates a slightly different use for LINQ
• What is the long-term support for the MS Deploy tool? – The IIS Team reveal the support plans for the Deployment tool released as a preview a few weeks back
• IoC and the Unity Application Block Once Again – Matthew Podwysocki covers Unity, Windsor and StructureMap in an IOC showdown.
• Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? – An interesting piece, suggesting that we should all taste some foreign ideas from time to time.
• My Commitment To Support Silverlight 2 Developers – Jesse Liberty reveals his plans for lots of educational Silverlight content once V2 is released – Looks like we will be bombarded with tutorials, tips, videos etc – Good stuff

Community

• You can take a horse to water, you can’t make it read the terms and conditions … – Phil Winstanley reviews last night’s Liverpool Geekup event – a very interesting talk on the Law and computers. If you are in the North of England, Geekup events are well worth a look (taking place in Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds)

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