The Morning Brew

A longer than average post today due to SQL 2008 finally being RTM’d, although it seems that Visual Studio folks should hold off untill the 11th August when the RTM of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 will be made available.

Software

• SQL Server 2008 on MSDN Subscriber Downloads – SQL Server 2008 has arrived, and teh RTM release is available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads now!
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Release Notes – Get the low down on the SQL Server 2008 release, as there are a number of considerations when installing.
• Microsoft Sync Framework – Microsoft Sync Framework V1 is released, providing easy ways of adding sync support to applications. This release also includes Sync Services for ADO.NET allowing offline working against ADO data sources.
• SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP1 Released – Steve Lasker announces the release of the SQL Server Compact edition V3.5 SP1, which now supports the entity framework and 64bit support. This will also be included in Visual Studio SP1
• SQL Server 2008 RTM samples are up on CodePlex now. – A new SQL Server, and we also get some new Community samples on Codeplex
• SQL Server 2008….Finally – Some key dates for the other parts of the SQL 2008 release coming in the next month.
• Pex 0.6 Released – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Pex 0.6, which now supports installation on 64 bit Windows. along with UI improvements and some other new features.
• IronPython – Release: 2.0 Beta 4 – The IronPython team announce the release of Beta 4 of Iron Python 2, now featuring an MSI Installer, static compilation, some performance improvements over Beta 3, and a host of other features.
• Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net – A .NET port of the YUI Compressor Java Project, allowing compression of CSS and Javascript

Information

• Unused code is the worst of the 7 Wastes of Software – Derik Whittaker talks about why unused / not needed code is bad
• What Have We Been Up to? – The Visual Studio Extensibility Team share what they have been working on – looks like there are some good things just around the corner.
• Write your own NUnit constraint (in VB) – Part 2 – Andrew Stopford continues looking at NUnit Constraints, in the part looks at creating some nice ‘Syntax sugar’ to allow his code to say This.Is.EqualTo’
• On Documentation for (and by) Developers – Peter Bromberg reminds everyone of the importance of XML documentation on your code, and explains how to get that documentation when your code is referenced in another application.
• Documenting Coding Standards – Less is More – Andrew Tokeley offers some best practices for writing coding standards documents.
• Visual Studio .NET Platform Target Explained – Darren Stokes talks about the Platform Target choices available in Visual Studio, explaining what they actually do.
• A Practical Review of ASP.NET MVC – Joshua Charles talks about his experiences using ASP.NET MVC from the point of view of a Ruby on Rails user – interesting to see what people from the other side think.
• Log4PostSharp – AOP and logging – Michal Dabrowski shows how AOP can improve your logging with this article on the implementation of logging using PostSharp
• Rating of Open Source AOP Frameworks in .Net. – V. Gnanasekaran looks at how different Aspect Oriented Programming frameworks can be compared – useful if you find yourself needing to pick one.
• Always use Nullables for Dates: C# and VB.NET – Rob Reynolds looks at Nullable dates and show how and why you should be using them.
• The best feature in SQL Server 2008 – sqlps.exe? – Eric Nelson takes a look at the Powershell functionality included in SQL Server 2008 – looks good
• Static Compilation of IronPython scripts – Srivatsn talks about static compilation of IronPython scripts, a feature from the 1.0 version that has now been re-introduced into the V2 edition.

Community

• Bad News, Good News – stackoverflow – Stackoverflow, the new community from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky has entered beta, and there is a form you can fill in to get onto the beta linked from this post.

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