The Morning Brew

A little light on content today as this post was prepared the night before – hopefully by the time you are reading this I will be half way to the UK ‘Heroes Happen {Here}’ Launch Event in Birmingham.

Software

• Windows Vista SP1 Released to Windows Update – Vista SP1 is now available on Windows Update, although my machine isn’t showing it in the list of updates yet – although this post does outline some cases where the update isn’t available.
• IIS 7.0 Bit Rate Throttling Module Released – ScottGu unveils a bandwidth throttling library for IIS7

Information

• SQL Server 2008 and Unstructured Data – This post talks of the 2 new ways of storing binary data in the database – and also reminds us that IMAGE is likely to be removed in a future release
• Modifying LINQ Expressions with Rewrite Rules – A (long) article detailing a technique for changing queries dynamically at runtime
• A Set of Useful Extension Methods for DateTime – Fredrik Kalseth presents 11 extension methods for dates – with source provided too
• A Templated ASP.NET RSS Feed Reader Control – Stefan Sedich creates a control for reading RSS feeds using .NET 3.5

Community

• Liverpool Users of .NET – Second official meeting of the Liverpool.NET User Group is planned for 17th April 2008

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I spent far too much time last night getting bogged down in some XSLT using <msxsl:script> to write XSLT functions in C# – If I get it working nicely I’ll blog about it

Software

• RicherTextBox – A useful user control that extends the built in Rich Text control with some of the more common features that you often need to implement

Information

• ASP.NET MVC In-Depth: The Life of an ASP.NET MVC Request – Stephen Walther covers the lifecycle of an MVC request in detail – interesting reading, I always believe that you should understand how something works before using it
• Number of Types in the .NET Framework – Brad Abrams shows the size of the .NET framework over the past 5 releases. When you see some of the numbers it makes sense as to why it takes people a long time to get up to speed
• 13 Tips to Comment Your Code – Some excellent advice about commenting, translated from an original article in Spanish.
• MS Tests failing due to Security Errors – Rick Strahl encounters some slightly over zealous security getting in the way of his MS Tests
• Reduce Locks for DELETE and UPDATE Commands in SQL Server 2005 with TOP Clause – Keyvan Nayyeri shows a SQL 2005 trick to help avoid locks in tables for delete and update operations
• C# 3.0 Lambdas and Type Inference – Ian Griffiths shows a couple of tricks to work around some limitations in type inference with lambda expressions
• ASP.NET Ajax using a custom ViewManager to render paged data without updatepanels – A prototype of a way of displaying paged data using no Update panels
• Omea Pro Source (C#) Finally Available – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the source to the Omea Pro Feed Reader – its always insightful to read the code of a professionally developed application
• PowerShell Fortune – Tomas Restrepo recreates an old favourite in Powershell

Humour

• ClassNamer – Looking for inspiration for your latest class?

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Weekends go too fast…

Software

• IronPython – Release: 2.0 Beta 1 – Iron Python 2.0 has reached beta, with over 100 bugfixes since the last alpha release
• xUnit.net 1.0 RC2 Released – Brad Wilson announces the latest Release candidate of xUnit
• SonicFileFinder – A visual studio Add-in enabling fast finding of a file in your solution.
• Making PInvoke Easy – A tool to help create PInvoke signatures from C code

Information

• The method you didn’t know you needed – Mads Kristensen talks about date/time display in a rather in-precise way – I like this kind of thing
• Integrating IronPython into your applications – Using IronPython as a scripting language in your applications
• High Performance Multi-threaded Work Item / Event Scheduling Engine – First part of a series, this part deals with building a high performance scheduling engine – the end result of this series is a Massive Multi Player Online game
• Why I Love F#: A Refactoring Tale – Duston Campbell runs through an instructive refactoring in f#
• The (often non-) difference between Close and Dispose – Kim Hamilton discusses the possible differences between dispose and close in a few different contexts
• C# 4: Immutable type initialization – Jon Skeet has now given up numbering his C#4 wish list series, yet more good content here.
• Advanced mocking: mocks and stubs – Jimmy Bogard talks about test doubles and mocking

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