The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing Project Codename "Velocity" – Microsoft make a significant announcement at TechEd – they are about to enter the distributed cache market with their latest product, codenamed Velocity. From what I’m reading this is a very memcached type of implementation, and the first CTP is already released – I will be checking that out real soon!
• Prism: New drop published – Ezequiel Jadib announces the availability of the latest drop of Prism – the composite WPF application block from the Patterns and Practices team.
• Windows Installer 4.5 is now available! – The Windows Installer Team announce the final release of Windows Installer 4.5 with a number of new and improved features – more details in their post behind the link.
• ReSharper 4.0 Release Candidate – The JetBrains folks have released the Release Candidate for version 4 of their IDE enhancement tool

Information

• Reviewing Mass Transit – Ayende reviews Mass Transit – a lean service bus implementation, much like NServiceBus. Its very interesting to see how someone else evaluates software, and Ayende provides an interesting commentary.
• MVC Storefront: Dependency Injection – Rob Conery continues his series on constructing an online store using ASP.NET MVC. This part is a long one, and looks at implementing the dependency injection portion of the system, using Structure Map. I’m looking forward to having the time to watch this one (a train journey later in the week should provide that opportunity)
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 4 of N ROUGH DRAFT – Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA with a draft release of part 4. In this part he looks at the Four (+ a few) Tenets of SOA, what s service is, and a number of architectural patterns for creating services.
• Language Oriented Programming and Functional Unit Testing in F# – Matthew Podwysocki takes a look at DSLs and language oriented programming in F#
• Order of Construction – Jason Crease looks at the confusing issue of constructor order in an inheritance structure – a subject that often catches developers out.
• TechEd 2008 Keynote Summary – Jon Galloway provides a nice summery of the goings on at the TechEd keynote.
• Learning WPF with BabySmash – Configuration with DataBinding – Scott Hanselman continues his voyage of exploration into WPF, with a look at doing teh configuration badly, and also improved ways of doing it.
• "Try IronRuby" updated – The IronRuby Web Shell has been updated to the r113 Iron Ruby Engine.
• Using Postsharp for solving the inexisting multi-inheritance problem – An interesting article on simulating multiple inheritance using Aspect Oriented Programming techniques to automatically create the interfaces and inherited functionality at compile time.

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Mobile broadband connection is working nicely, although due to TechEd (I suspect) there is less content than usual about.

Software

• Released! Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework June 2008 CTP – The Parallel Framework Extensions team announce their second CTP release of the Parallel Extensions for the .NET Framework 3.5
• MvcContrib 0.0.1.117 released to match ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 – Jeffrey Palermo announces the availability of the latest release of MvcContrib – the community extensions for ASP.NET MVC. This release updates to ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 level.
• HydrogenCMS Released – Jesse Foster announces the first release of HydrogenCMS – a CMS based on ASP.NET MVC, and using Linq. The project is open source, and hosted on CodePlex.

Information

• Parallel Extensions June CTP – Jon Skeet takes a look at the latest Parallel Extensions release, and re-runs some of his previous tests
• Introducing BabySmash – A WPF Experiment – Scott Hanselman finds an excuse to have a play with WPF
• Introducing MonoRail NHAML – Mirvoda Sergey ports the HAML markup language to MonoRail
• CruiseControl.Net Tutorial – Part 1 – Matteo gives a nice step by step guide to setting up CC.NET – looks like this will be a good series to keep hold of as a reference.
• SOA: Making The Paradigm Shift Part 3 of N – Sam Gentile continues his series on SOA – this part defines SOA from architectural and business perspectives.

Community

• Agenda – DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day – DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day 7 is making an earlier than usual call for speakers

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I’m attending the Software Architect 2008 conference in London this week – if anyone knows of any interesting evening technology/geek events in the capital this week please let me know as I may be able to come along. Tomorrow’s Morning Brew will be at the mercy of my Mobile Broadband connection, but a quick trial over the weekend was successful so I have high hopes!

Software

• Sandcastle May 2008 Release (Version 2.4.10520) – An update to the SandCastle Documentation tool – looks like its mostly bug fixes.
• DSA 0.5 released! – Granville Barnett announces an update to DSA – a library of common Data Structures and Algorithms which are not in the .NET Framework

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• More parallelisation fun: Conway’s Game of Life – Jon Skeet continues to look a parallelism in .NET, this time using the Game of Life as a sample.
• How to Build Your Very Own Provider Model – Part 3 – Keyvan Nayyeri completes his series on building a Provider Model with the implementation. Full code is available to download.
• The Design Is Never Right The First Time – Phil Haack talks about doesign, and how it should be an iterative process, with some examples from the AP.NET MVC project
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 1 of N – Sam Gentile starts a series on SOA, and how you can get to the point of having a SOA infrastructure
• SOA: Making the Paradigm Shift Part 2 of N – And in Part 2, Sam Gentile looks at the business benefits of SOA.
• SQL Server Programming Hacks – A collection of SQL Server tricks and tips – first bit of content I’ve come across from the new community site LessThanDot
• IronRuby and Rails – John Lam announces a significant milestone for the IronRuby project – they are now able to run Rails un-modified on IronRuby
• ViewData "dot" Notation Expressions in ASP.NET MVC – Matt shows an alternative way of getting parts of your model out in the view via ViewData.
• Unit testing vs. Integration Testing : The Restaurant Analogy – Roy Osherove offers up a great explanation of the difference between Unit and Integration testing via an analogy.
• SubSonic: Update on 3.0 Plans – Rob Conery gives an update on what is to come for SubSonic in Version 3, and reminds everyone that a release candidate of V2.1 is just round the corner.
• ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 Tooling Updates And Updated NUnit Test Project Templates – The WebDevTools team talks about two neat features for ASP.NET MVC Preview 3 – firstly that it can be run in Visual Web Developer Express (It always annoys me the disparity between what will run in which IDE editions), and some new templates for NUnit testing
• What the &@$#* is a ‘Best Practice’ anyway? – Derik Whittaker talks about best practices, and how its not always necessary to use the latest and greatest best practices to be successful.
• Simple State Machine – Ayende reviews some code developed by a third party to implement State machines using Rhino DSL – an interesting example.
• Functional Programming – lessons from high-school arithmetic – Andrew Matthews looks back at some basic maths and explains how it relates to Functional Programming.

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