The Morning Brew

Well this week has been a busy week, and after a flurry of announcements it is now time for the community to get to work on exploring the new technologies released this week – I look forward to an interesting few weeks of posts going deeper into the specific technologies.

PDC

• PDC2008 Quick Video Link List – Greg Duncan gathers together the video and presentations for all the PDC sessions into one simple list, and even shows how he compiled the list using a bit of VB and the HTML Agility Pack – this is practically 2 posts for the price of one!
• C# 4.0 New Features Part 2.1 – default parameter intrigue – Justin Etheredge continues his series of posts looking a the new features of C# 4.0. In this followup post to part 2, Justin expands on a comment left on a previous post to explain why default parameters are implemented the way they are.
• A Quick Waddle Around Oslo – David Ing talks about his impressions of Oslo based on the sessions attended at PDC
• Windows Azure Back End – Dominic Green looks into what goes on behind the scenes with Windows Azure’s backend
• First Look at Windows 7 – Tejas provides a quick run through of some of the first things you notice about Windows 7
• Azure Services Training Kit – Now available – Neil Hutson highlights the availability of the Azure Services Training Kit PDC Preview release, containing 11 hands on labs for Azure

Software

• Add-in to attach ASP.NET debugger – Achintya Jha shares a simple Visual Studio Add-in which makes it a one click process to connect the VS debugger to the ASP.NET Worker Process
• Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack October 2008 Available For Download – SQLDenis highlights the availablilty of the SQL server 2008 Feature Pack release for October 2008. This pack conatins a huge array of goodies for anyone working with SQL 2008
• Generator Studio released on CodePlex – Ryan Schreiber announces the pre-beta release of Generator Studio, a code generator based on NVelocity primarly aimed at generating Castle ActiveRecord classes
• XNA Game Studio 3.0 is here! – XNA Game Studio 3.0 has not RTM’d. This game development tool now allows submission of games to Xbox LIVE Community Games, along with a host of other new features.

Information

• Update on LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities Roadmap – The ADO.NET Team explain the future Roadmap for Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities / Entity Framework, raising a number of concerns in the developer community (in follow up posts below and the comments on this post) that Linq to SQL may now be a dead end. Hopefully the situation will be clarified in the near future.
• LINQ To SQL Gets Kicked to the Curb… Needs A Good Home! – David Hayden talks about the ADO.NET Team’s announcement about Linq to SQL and Entity framework / LINQ to Entities, suggesting that ‘care in the community’ might be the best thing for Linq to SQL
• Microsoft kills Linq to SQL – Ayende responds to the ADO.NET teams announcement on the future of Linq To SQL and Entity Framework / LINQ to Entities
• My stored procedure "best practices" checklist – Aaron Bertrand shares his best practices for developing stored procedures covering both coding style (casing, formatting etc) along with some coding best practices (good use of NOCOUNT etc)
• Refactoring Service Dependencies to Separated Interface – Billy McCafferty talks about performing a refactoring to split out service dependencies to a separated Interface, along with a discussion of why you would want to do it and also a worked example of performing the refactoring.
• Bulk Data Operations With NHibernate’s Stateless Sessions – Davy Brion looks at how Stateless Sessions in NHibernate afford memory use benefits when performing bulk data operations.
• Authorization in ASP.Net MVC using XML Configuration – Jigar Desai looks at building a means of securing ASP.NET MVC actions behind authorised roles using XML configuration and an HTTPModule
• Enforcing Your Domain Model With Spec#: Part 1: Introduction And The Non-Null Operator – Lasse Eskildsen starts a series looking at Spec#, and how it can be used as a means of enforcing your domain model
• Ever Wonder Why You Never Get Full Code Coverage? – Jason Bock dives down into the IL to look at why 100% code coverage can be an impossible thing to achieve.
• Gotcha: ASP.NET and exceptions in asynchronous threads – J Kealey talks about how unhanded exceptions in asynchronous threads can cause devastating results in your web application, causing IIS to restart the application
• Visual Studio 2008 Regular Expression Editor – Anthony Grace talks about one fo the more hidden features of Visual Studio, a rudimentary Regular Expression editor
• WPF + M-V-VM + NHibernate + NHibernate Validator = Fantastic Four! – Paulo Quicoli talks about combining Windows Presentation Foundation, NHibernate, NHibernate Valdiator and the Model View ViewModel pattern to make great applications in this Code Project Article.
• Developing Custom Controls in Silverlight 2 – Imran Shaik gives a nice tutorial article on building Custom Controls in Silverlight2 complete with code in both VB.NET and C#
• If you’re going to reformat source code, please don’t do anything else at the same time – Raymond Chen talks about a common problem of developers reformatting code (which on its own is a good thing) along with making functional changes – this leads to a horrible experience for anyone reading the differences via version control, so please don’t do it!
• New Release: patterns & practices Acceptance Test Engineering Guide (BETA1) – J.D. Meier highlights the release of a new Guide from the Patterns and Practices team covering acceptance testing
• Distributed Agile Development at Microsoft patterns & practices (white paper) + Agile Development Showcase – Fernando García Loera talks about the release of another new Patterns and Practices guide covering Agile development in distributed teams.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – Neil Hutson highlights the announcement of Windows Server 2008 R2 release, adding a number of improvements over the original Windows 2008 in a number of areas. more details in the post and linked reviewers guide.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #213