The Morning Brew

The big news from the last 24 hours has to be the release of the beta of Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5. Lots of coverage of this, so much so that it gets its own section today!

Software

• NArrange – .NET Code Organizer – James Nies highlights this build time tool for organising .NET code. Looks like it might be useful on occasions – although I’d be a little scared of letting something like this loose on a project that was in source code control – imagine the diffs it would cause.
• dasBlog 2.1 Released – Eran Kampf announces the latest release of the dasBlog blogging engine.. V2.1 is a bug fix release, with a few new features added. More details behind the link.
• SoapBits is now open source! – Good news for those working with SOAP – saopbits the soap testing tool has been open sourced and renamed to STORM.

Information

• Trivial Projections Are (Usually) Optimized Away – Eric Lippert follows on from his last post, and gives an example of where the computer is not so dumb when dealing with LINQ
• Validation Across Class Hierarchies and Interface Implementations. – An example of how validation can be introduced into an object model.
• Thinking in Concurrently in .NET – Matthew Podwysocki looks at the .NET options for concurrent programming.
• Creating Views using XSL in ASP.NET MVC – Derek Fowler looks at using XSLT to create views in ASP.NET MVC
• Implicit Conversion – Jason Bock revisits an old c# trick for converting from one type to another.
• XLinq’n in the new world – Data access comparisons with Xml/XPath – Derik Whittaker compares LINQ to XML with the more traditional XPath method of dealing with XML
• Hacking IronRuby – An interesting way of trying IronRuby without installing anything, Oleg Tkachenko has implemented a web based shell for Iron Ruby allowing use of the interactive shell via a web page.
• Introducing Waegis : – Keyvan Nayyeri introduces his latest project, an Akismet like anti spam system written in .NET
• A Series on GPU-based Effects for WPF – Greg Schechter has started a series of posts on GPU effects in WPF – a new .NET 3.5 SP1 feature. 4 parts of this series were published today – the linked post is the index.

Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 Beta release

• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 Beta – ScottGu officially sets the ball rolling with his detailed announcement of SP1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5
• Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 "SP1" Beta – Brad Abrams looks at the best bits of this release from the point of view of Web Developers, Client Server developers, VB developers, C# Developers, Data Developers, and Service Developers.
• VS2008 and .Net 3.5 SP1 Beta – Should You Fear This Release? – Scott Hanselman looks at the fear factor of this beta release of SP1, and looks at the scale of the differences units NDepend
• Introducing the Third Major Release of Windows Presentation Foundation – Tim Sneath gives a detailed insight into the Windows Presentation Foundation release that is a part of the SP1 bundle for VS2008 and .NET 3.5
• .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta and Its Effect on MVC – Phil Haack talks about the Beta release of SP1 and how it relates to ASP.NET MVC. The significant thing is the inclusion of the URL Routing, however ASP.NET MVC doesn’t make it in. There are also details of some problems with SP1 and the Preview 2 of the MVC.
• WCF-related features in .NET 3.5 SP1 & VS 2008 SP1 – Christian Weyer summarises some of the new features of Windows Communication Foundation included in the SP1 release for .NET 3.5 and VS2008
• New XSD Functionality in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta 1 – The Microsoft XML Team give the details of their offing in Visual Studio 2008 SP1.
• Introducing JScript Formatting in VS 2008 SP1 – Another summary of some new SP1 functionality, JScript gets its own preferences of Colourisation, validation, intellisense and formatting.
• Notes from updating an Astoria project to the new SP1 Beta bits – Julie Lerman also shares notes on upgrading Astoria Projects to SP1 beta level.
• Notes from updating some Entity Framework apps to the SP1 Beta bits – Julie Lerman shares her notes on upgrading your Entity Framework applications to work under the SP1 beta.
• Error installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and Silverlight Tools Beta 1 – A warning for anyone who uses the Silverlight tools beta 1 – its incompatible with SP1. There will be a future beta 2 release which will work with SP1 – more details in the post.

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