The Morning Brew

Mix08 seems to have been like Christmas – lots and lots of new toys to play with! Other than people blogging about these toys, things are a bit quiet.

Software

• Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit – Beta 1 builds of Microsoft’s most standards compliant browser are now available for Windows 2008, Vista, XP SP2 and Windows 20003 SP2 in x86 and x64 flavours. If you want the developer readiness lowdown, check out the rest of this microsite
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 – The latest preview of the ASP.NET Model-View-Controller implementation.
• ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview – A combined release of ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, ASP.NET controls for Silverlight, ADO.NET Data Services, the Entity Framework and updates to ASP.NET AJAX.
• Silverlight Tools for VS2008 – Visual Studio 2008 support for working with Silverlight 2 Beta 1
• Microsoft Expression Suite 2 Beta – Get the latest beta versions of the Microsoft Expression suite
• Microsoft Expression Blend 2.5 March 2008 Preview – Latest preview of this Silverlight 2 beta 1 developer tool

Information

• SQL Server Data Services – SQL Server Data Services looks like Microsoft’s ‘Data storage in the cloud’ offering – free beta available
• Singularity RDK – Microsoft release the Singularity RDK 1.1, a source code release of the Microsoft Research Operating System built in managed code
• How poor IM communication killed the Developer – Derik Whittaker gets his frustrations with inter-developer communication via instant messenger off his chest – I have to say I find IM to be very slow for getting meaning across.
• A WPF Graph Control Library – Derek Bartram uses WPF to create an extensible graphing control
• Strings Don’t Add Up – Addressing the performance problems of string concatenation, and showing alternative ways
• LINQ to Life – An implementation of Life using LINQ
• Happy Rendering Trails with IE8 – Bil Simser looks at some of the new features of IE8

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