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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Yesterday I was a bit quick posting about the Reflector Update – so fast in fact that the upgrade hadn’t yet been made available. I’ve checked this morning and the Help-Check for Updates is now issuing V5.1. Thanks to Patrick for commenting yesterday to let me know.

Software

• EfTidyNet :- Dotnet Wrapper for Tidy library – An update to this HTML Tidy wrapper library, now with an x64 specific version
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 – Daniel Moth announces the latest ASP.NET MVC Preview
• Unity – Release: March 4 Weekly Drop – The Microsoft IoC project, Unity gets its latest weekly update

Information

• Unity IoC API Changes Affect Code Samples – March 4, 2008 Weekly Drop – David Hayden talks about some of the significant API changes in the latest update to the Microsoft IOC tool
• patterns and practices Complete Catalog – J.D. Meier gathers together a useful index of all the patterns and practices team’s wares.
• The Cost Of Breaking Changes – Phil Haack talks about why braking changes in a framework are bad – you might be happy to rebuild, but there is no way to be sure that all you 3rd party component vendors will do the same
• Silverlight Samples Update – Lutz Loeder updates his Silverlight samples to work with Silverlight 2 beta 1
• Virtual or non-virtual by default, do we really have to choose? – Hans-Eric Grönlund outlines a halfway house solution to this raging debate

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Software

• AvalonControlsLibrary v2 has been released ! – Announcing the latest release of this WPF controls library.
• .NET Reflector 5.1 – Lutz Roeder releases Version 5.1 of everyone’s favourite tool to view the internals of assemblies.
• VS Resource Refactoring Tool – Laurent Duveau highlights one of the Visual Studio Gallery offerings – the resource refactoring tool. I’m currently reading a book on internationalization, so this is an interest for me at the moment
• Zeta Resource Editor – Laurent Duveau points to another useful internationalization tool
• AJAX Control Toolkit – Release: 20229 – Version 3.0.20229 and 1.0.20229 have been released. This release contains a number of bug fixes, outlined on this page.

Information

• Is it important to declare your columns as NOT NULL – Simon Sabin talks about the importance of NOT NULL on your tables and the effects on indexing
• IEBlog : Microsoft’s Interoperability Principles and IE8 – Many are interpreting this post as being that IE8 will be completely standards compliant. While this is a change in policy from MS, I’m taking it as being that IE8 will be as standards compliant as they can make it, and that will depend on how much legacy from previous versions they keep
• Why do good programmers produce bad software? – Justin Etheredge considers the reasons why even good developers produce bad software
• Enabling Design Time Template Editing – Amr Elsehemy shows how you can create ASP.NET server controls with Template functionality
• Why I Love F#: Lists – The Basics – Dustin Russell Campbell covers the list functionality of F#
• StovellMocks – Paul Stovell dives under the hood of mocking, by making his own simple mocking framework as a learning experience
• Circular references with WCF: solved a different way – Ruurd Boeke shows a way of improving serialisation (over the XML from preserveObjectReferences) of circular references by creating surrogates on the fly.
• SQL Server 2008 for Developers – Utehn Sosraing points to a video by Christian Kleinerman about the new developer features of SQL Server 2008

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