The Morning Brew

Yesterday was Service Pack 1 day – I think every other post I read this morning was people telling me that, so I suspect the first few links won’t be that new to you…

Software

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1 Release to Manufacturing – As outlined in the release timetable following the SQL 2008 release, yesterday was Service Pack 1 day for .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Peter Provost has the details from the press release and the download links to the key components. From what I’m reading it is well worth running the Service Pack Preparation Tool , and also bear in mind that you may need your original installation media for VS2008 too.
• ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 – Details of the changes to ASP.NET in .NET 3.5 SP1 – this is not a separate install, it comes as part of the SP1 install.
• NArrange .NET Code Organizer Adds StyleCop Compatibility – James Nies announces the latest release of NArrange, the code organiser. New in this release is support for StyleCop member ordering.
• A WPF taskboard for Scrum\VSTS – Andrew Stopford highlights a neat looking set of addins that enable Scrum in Visual Studio TS, including a really nice looking task board – shame I don’t run TS though

Information

• Representing dependencies in code – Kirill Osenkov talks about dependencies in code, and how they can be represented – interesting reading.
• A question of Scale – Ayende talks about when to scale and when not to scale, and the reasons to be wary of unnecessary scaling.
• Introduction to D3DImage – A number of major new feature in WPF were included in the .NET 3.5 SP1, and D3DImage is just one of them – this article runs through all the getting started aspects of D3DImage
• ASP.Net Load Testing and Optimization Toolkit – So you want to be a hero – A nice run down of 9 types of tool for performance and load testing and optimization, complete with recommended tools with a mini review.
• .NET Framework Assistant – Julian M Bucknall highlights one of the new features of .NET 3.5 SP1 for users who use FireFox 3 – now you get a helper for click once applications!
• ISO-11179 Naming Conventions – SQLDenis highlights the ISO-11179 standard for database naming conventions – might be worthy of consideration when creating coding standards documents.
• C# Refcard Available – A nice Reference Card for C# created by C# MVP Jon Skeet, covers all the important areas.

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Software

• SequenceViz – A neat tool for generating Sequence diagrams from your code, has just rached v0.7 (alpha), and is starting to look like a really useful tool.
• NUnit Test Case Code Generator – An interesting tool for automatically generating NUnit tests for your code based on inspection. I’m always slightly scared of automatically generated tests, but I suppose they are better than nothing and do provide a starting point for some real testing – that said they can give a false sense of coverage.
• Subtext 2.0 Released – Phil Haack announces the release of SubText 2.0, containing a number of new features and bug fixes

Information

• The Queryable Domain Property Problem – Mike Hadlow looks at the problems with tools like Linq to SQL (and other ORM mappers) when it comes to querying on a Domain Model Property which is in some way computed.
• Low-Latency GC in .NET 3.5 – Sasha Goldshtein talks about the use of Low Latency mode for Garbage collection in .NET applications.
• Beginners Guide To Threading In .NET Part 5 of n. – Sacha Barber continues his excellent series on Threading, looking at UI threading in Winforms, WPF and Silverlight
• New Web Developer Tips and Tricks Blog – Brad Abrams announces a new Tricks and Tips blog targeted at Web Developers
• ASP.NET Under Attacks – Keyvan Nayyeri talks about the latest round of SQL Injection style attacks which have been targeting a number of high profile .NET Bloggers (amongst others)
• Recent SQL Injection Attacks against Server – Rick Strahl has also been seeing these SQL Injection attacks, and shows the details of the signature of the attack and a simple way of mitigating by imposing query string size limits.
• Fluent NHibernate and those sweet LINQ repositories – Tobin Harris looks into Fluent NHibernate and talks about some one the nice things it includes – an in memory repository which uses LINQ and allows you to work disconnected from a database – ideal for tests.
• MVC Storefront Part 18: Creating An Experience – Rob Conery starts to wrap this series up with this episode, looking at some of the refactorings he has done, and then finally putting the initial application together.
• Patterns for using Distributed Hash Tables: Conclusion – Ayende concludes his series on Distributed Caching, after posting a swath of posts this weekend. All the posts are linked at the top of this one, and are all very interesting reading. Topics include Item Groups, Transactions, Locality, and much more.

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Shorter post today, as I think everyone is off downloading and playing with SQL server 2008. Happy 08-08-08 day everyone.

Software

• ANTS Profiler 4 Beta: The facelift is almost complete – Redgate announce the availability of a Beta release of ANTS Profiler 4. The beta release is free to download, but will only last until 17th August 2008, still should be interesting to see what that have planned for this release.

Information

• Understanding Tail Recursion – Chris Smith looks at Tail Recursion, showing how it is crucial for creating efficient and safe functional code, explaining how the stack works and what can cause stack overflows, and then looking at how to avoid all this with tail recursion.
• Visual Studio Theme Generator – Ryan Lanciaux has created a Visual Studio theme generator which creates .VSSETTINGS which can be imported into Visual Studio. Looks very simple to use, and I think I’ll be trying this out on my development machine later today
• Crazy Extension Methods Redux (with Oxygene) – Colin Angus Mackay gets inspired by a feature from Oxygene (an object Pascak language which targets .NET) and shows how a similar effect can be created using extension methods.
• Speedy C#, Part 2: Optimizing Memory Allocations – Pooling and Reusing Objects – Robert Paveza continues his series on Speedy C# with a look at what goes on with memory when you create and destroy objects, and what the Garbage collector gets up to.
• Make the debugger show the contents of your custom IList class – Qwertie shows how adding a few simple attributes to your custom collections can help enhance your debugging experience.
• Skinning the Cat with Fluent NHibernate – Robert Johnson looks at Fluent NHibernate and walks through its use with a quickstart which is based on the NHibernate quickstart for mapping the cat class.
• Single instance applications – Matt Ellis talks about an alternative way (compared to Scott Hanselman’s recent post) of creating single instance applications using some old school COM methods.
• Moving my Site onto a 64 Bit Server – Rick Strahl talks about his experiences moving his sites and applications onto a 64 Bit Windows 2008 machine, with some good tips for anyone who needs to run older 32 bit apps alongside 64 bit apps in IIS.

Community

• SQL Server Heroes Unite Contest! – The External Links & References Blog has the details of a competition for anyone developing an interesting application on Codeplex using SQL Server 2008 – you will have to be quick though, the competition closes at the end of August

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