The Morning Brew

There is nothing worse (or sillier) than being ill with a cold when the weather outside is fair and sunny – but that’s been my weekend – feeling a bit better now though (thankfully)

Software

• Silverlight 2 Beta2 Released – ScottGu gives the lowdown on the new Silverlight 2 Beta 2 release, along with Expression Blend and Visual Studio tools to support it.
• ScrewTurn Wiki Version 2.0.32 + Other News – Latest update to this .NET powered Wiki Engine – This is the last significant release of the v2 line (except for bugfixes)
• Paint.NET v3.35 BETA is now available – Latest beta of Paint.NET, the MS Paint replacement written in .NET.

Information

• Refactoring Legacy Code – Part 1: Dealing with Static Cling – Sendhil Kumar R starts a series on legacy (code without unit tests) code, and in this first part looks at techniques to help work round static code.
• Where to start a new program – Chris Brandsma talks about where to start on a new project, outlining a number of possible ways to get started.
• Upgrading to Silverlight Tools Beta 2 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta – BradleyB gives some detailed instructions for installing the new Silverlight beta on different versions of VS2008
• MVC + Facebook == Wonderful Development Platform – Nick Berardi has been experimenting with the ASP.NET MVC with a view to creating FaceBook applications with it
• LINQ through PowerShell – Bart De Smet takes a look at consuming LINQ through PowerShell – I really need to spend some time playing with PowerShell there is so much good stuff it can do.
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 7 of N – Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA, with a look at SOA using Web Services and some of the web service standards.
• Functional C# Revisited – Into the Great Void – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at Functional Programming in C#, and runs into issues with the way Void is handled.
• Scratching an itch: NMemcached – Ayende has a go at implementing a native .NET version of Memcached – source available
• The Art of Assembly Versions – Tony Rasa talks version numbers, and why its important to ensure that they get updated.
• Why Developers should Do Testing – Soon Hui talks about the importance of getting developers to do a bit of testing to make them a better developer.

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Glad to be back home again – I enjoyed and took away lots of useful stuff from Software Architect 2008. My train journey back last night was aided by Rob Conery’s latest part of the MVC Store Front Series. – it helped pass the time wonderfully.

Software

• SubSonic 2.1 Release Candidate 1 – Eric Kemp announces the availability of SubSonic 2.1 RC1 – this release is considered to be quite stable in terms of interfaces, and seems to have tackled a good list of issues/features.
• Managed Extensibility Framework Preview Available – Brad Abrams announces the availability of the first CTP of the Managed Extensibility Framework – a means of providing extensibility to your systems and reducing coupling.

Information

• .NET Database Migration Tool Roundup – Ben Scheirman looks at the range of choices in tools for database migration, and give a few short reviews of each.
• Beginners Guide To Threading In .NET Part 2 of n – Sacha Barber continues his series on working with threads in .NET. This part addresses the threading lifecycle, the places where you can use threading, and some of the common pitfalls of threading.
• SubSonic: Using Migrations – Rob Conery looks at how you can use Subsonic Migrations to upgrade your databases. Plenty of code and a screen cast give a nice overview.
• Silverlight Grid Control – DevExpress AgDataGrid Suite – DevExpress announce the forthcoming Free-Of-Charge release of AgDataGrid for Silverlight – this is excellent news, as I think that the availability of good quality controls will be a crucial success factor for Silverlight adoption.
• The Great Devlicio.us Giveaway – Sergio Pereira announces a competition with some great prizes (some excellent books, and $10K’s worth of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite). The competition is story based, looking for stories about software project success where introducing new techniques or tools saved the project.
• Making the Paradigm Shift Part 5 of N ROUGH DRAFT – Sam Gentile continues his series with part 5 – this part looks at some of the specific patterns that are crucial to implementing SOA.
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 6 of N – The Current State of SOA and How to Make the Paradigm Shift – ROUGH DRAFT – Sam follows up with part 6 of this series (in draft again), this part looks at the current state of the SOA universe and gives a couple of principles to help you to get to SOA.
• Visual Studio and .NET Framework Developer Documentation Survey – Brad Abrams highlights a survey by the User Education Team at Microsoft about .NET and Visual Studio documentation – go fill it out to help them improve the documentation.
• SubSonic: RIP? – Rob Conery attempts to clear up any confusion about the future of SubSonic

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Software

• Second Firefox 3 Release Candidate now available for download – Mozilla release their second Release Candidate of Firefox 3

Information

• Setting Up Velocity (Distributed Cache) – Scott Watermasysk goes through the process of setting up and starting work with Velocity, the newly announced distributed cache from Microsoft.
• Fun with the ResourceReader – Nikolai Tillmann uses Pex to test a complicated component – the ResourceReader – in this guide with plenty of screen shots and sample code.
• Getting Started with Migrator.Net and database refactorings – Sean Chambers talks about this castle project spin off which gives Ruby on Rails like Migrations which can target many different database backends to the .NET environment
• Failures of aimless large-scale refactorings – Jimmy Bogard talks about ways of refactoring to attempt to overcome a build up of technical debt
• "duplicate association path" bug in NHibernate Criteria API – Derek Fowler runs into an awkward NHibernate issue in the Criteria API, and offers a work around to mitigate the problem.
• TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines – Bryan gives some suggestions and best practices for naming and working with tests created during Test Driven Development.
• Loosely coupled communication – Prism style – Glenn Block highlights the work of Francis Cheung who has a series of posts on the communication techniques used within the Prism WPF composite application block.
• The First Spec You Should Write When Using Castle – Bil Simser shows how you can validate the Windsor configuration using a specification based test
• Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Goodies – Pete Brown talks about the ‘this week’ release of Silverlight 2 beta 2, giving a summary of the most interesting new features. The other good news is that there is a go-live for things developed with Beta 2
• TechEd2008 from your Couch – Brad Abrams highlights the TechEd 2008 Online site, a means of getting to see some of the TechEd presentations without actually being there.

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