The Morning Brew

At last Vista SP1 is on its way – maybe now I’ll be able to copy files quickly!

Software

DnDns – A .NET DNS Client Library (Resolver) – J. Montgomery releases a library to perform DNS lookups

LightSpeed 1.2 Released – MindScape announce the latest release of their ORM software

As Windows Server 2008 RTMs, Customers and Partners Adopting with Help of New Tools, Training – Windows 2008 hits the RTM status.

Announcing the RTM of Windows Vista SP1 – The title says it all, and as a Vista user it couldn’t happen soon enough.

Axosoft PureChat – Axosoft release a .NET based web chat tool – introductory prices are in play, with a 5 operator license for only $5, and unlimited license at $99

More Web Controls – jQuery – Mike gives us an easy way to add JQuery to our pages

Information

Are pre-defined release dates bad for Quality? – Adam Goucher debates the effect of fixed dates for releases on the quality of software.

Back to Basics: Count, Count, Count, Sum or how to Count – Everything there is to know about the SQL COUNT function – well worth knowing

Build Providers: Strongly typed page urls in ASP.NET – Dave Transom talks about a way of managing the URL’s within your code using a Build Provider.

Antlr 3 and the Dynamic Language Runtime – Dermot Hogan talks about getting started with the DLR

7 ways to do Performance Optimization of an ASP.NET 3.5 Web 2.0 portal – Tanzim Saqib explores the possibilities for improving performance of Web 2.0 style sites.

Ruby.NET is dead – IronRuby, the DLR, and the might of Microsoft win out as Ruby.NET gets an end of life announcement

Community

Proceedings of Alt.Net.Uk Conference – London 2nd February 2008 – altnetpedia – The write up of the UK ALT.NET Conference continues in a collaborative fashion. Interesting stuff in here.

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The world still seems to be shaking after Friday’s big buyout attempt.

Software

SubSonic: 2.1 Beta Is Up – Rob Conery announces the latest beta – with plenty of new features outlined in the post, I won’t bother re-iterating them.

SQL Query Generator – First Release – A code generator to create a strongly typed version of a relational database. Also allows custom querying using a fluent interface to build the SQL

TypeMock Insulator 4.2 Beta Publicly Available – Paulo Morgado announces the public beta of Typemock/Insulator 4.2 (Update: 2008-02-04 15:30: Michal Geva from TypeMock has corrected me – The correct product name is TypeMock Isolator)

MS Deploy – New IIS Web Deployment Tool – Scott Hanselman introduces a new command line tool to deploy to the web.

Information

Custom Username and Password Authentication in WCF 3.5 – Keyvan Nayyeri covers another new WCF feautre, allowing you to create custom authentication in .NET 3.5

Parallel Collection Operations – A technique for performing an action on a collection – in parallel.

When string.ToLower() is Evil – A performance tip about case insensitive string comparisons.

(Semi) Practical IronRuby – A quick sample of what is possible with IronRuby, DSL’s and the DLR. Micheal’s ‘getting started’ article (linked from this one) is also worth reading.

Blazing fast business object filtering. – Filtering collections of objects using an Indexable collection to improve performance.

Versioning Databases – Change Scripts – First of three posts this weekend in K. Scott Allen’s short series on database versioning.

Versioning Databases – Views, Stored Procedures, and the Like – Drop and recreate is the simplest method – however watch out for security permissions on objects as they get lost when you drop.

Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging – The final part in this series by K. Scott Allen

Community

MIX08 – ScottGu drums up support for MIX08 in Vegas

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Well, I’ve managed to complete a full January of posting the Morning Brew – I think putting it together is getting easier, however I’m concerned that I keep posting links to very similar articles (lots of beginning WPF type articles recently). I’m wondering if I need to be more selective about what I post here – but that would have the effect of reducing the number of items. As always your feedback on this or any other topic is very welcome. On to the links…

Software

7zSharp – Release: 1.0.3 – V1.0.3 release of this LGPL wrapper for reading and writing 7z formate archives (Along with zip, gz, bzip2, tar, and w whole host of others in a read only way)

Information

Versioning Databases – The Baseline – Following on from his last post, K. Scott Allen talks a little about database versioning

Microsoft Ajax Library Book Published – Brad Abrams gives a breif review of a new book on the Microsoft AJAX Library – I’ve spotted a few books on Javascript related technologies from Packt Publishing recently

Quiz – C# and .NET Secrets – Ten interesting questions with detailed answers – might make good interview questions

WPF 3D Primer – Using some 3D techniques in WPF

Test Data Builders: an alternative to the Object Mother pattern – Applying the Bulder pattern in place of Object Mother for testing

Expression Tree Basics – Charlie Calvert gives an interesting overview of Expression Trees within LINQ

The Vocabulary of Software Releases – David Starr rounds up a collection of software release jargon and gives his interpretation of what each name actually means.

Does your team have a Production Architect? – Paul Stovell discusses a role responsible for the continued running of your application

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