The Morning Brew #166

Software

• SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services And Tools Now Available For Download – Denis Gobo highlights the three different releases of SQL Server 2008 Express, two of which have been releases in the last week.
• QuickGraph 2.0.30826.00 released – Jonathan de Halleux announces an update to QuickGraph, a Graph Data Structure and Algorithm library for .NET
• Report Builder 2.0 – RC1 Release – The SQL Server Reporting Services Team announce the release of Release Candidate 1 of their second version of a reporting building tool.
• xUnit.net 1.0.2 Released – Brad Wilson announces the release of a minor update to xUnit.net. The significant new feature is support for ReSharper 4.0

Information

• Throw Before You Yield – Omer van Kloeten looks at an interesting problem with failing fast and the yield keyword, and shows how you can work round the problem
• Testplan Checklist for Asp.Net – Federico Silva Armas of the ASP.NET QA Team shares a simplified list of the areas that have to be considered for testing for features and controls in the ASP.NET framework. Interesting to see the vast range of nonfunctional tests that these guys are doing to ensure quality.
• Unsubscribing events: How VB Handles it – Bill McCarthy shows how events and be unsubscribed in VB.NET easily using the WtihEvents keyword.
• To Bind or Not To Bind – Dynamic Expression Trees – Part 0 – Bart De Smet starts what looks like another interesting series, looking at dynamically creating expression trees at runtime.
• The .NET Client Profile – Mike Taulty has been exploring the different ways of distributing the .NET Framework and how it can be specified in installers, and shares his findings and thoughts in this post.
• MVC Storefront Part 20: Logging – Rob Conery releases the next part of this great screencast series, looking at implementing logging in the MVC Storefront. As usual, interesting watching, especially as Rob chooses to NLog rather than the more widely known Log4Net
• NHibernate 2.0 Wiki – Ayende points to a wiki version of the documentation for the latest NHibernate Release
• TDD and Windows Workflow Foundation – Ron Jacobs looks at applying test driven development to working with Windows Workflow Fountdation, and shows each of the test cases he would write for a simple workflow, and an overview of the whole TDD process.
• The big side affect of const versa readonly – Tom Fischer talks about the differences between const and readonly in C# and also highlights an interesting failure caused by the way the compiler handles consts.
• Maximize the use of CPU with parallel extensions (+ some WPF stuff) – Janne Mattila has a little play with some WPF and looks at how the Parallel Extensions can help make better use of the resource of your machine for compute heavy work with minimal code changes.
• New for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and FxCop 1.36 – Multi-targeting rule – David Kean talks about a useful FxCop Rule which is available in both FxCop and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 installations which support code analysis, which helps ensure that the code written does not depend on functionality out side the target framework version.

Humour

• Hug a Developer (We’re In Pain) – An amusing video expressing sentiments I think all developers will recognise.