The Morning Brew

Well, I knew it had to happen at some point, and infact does happen most days, but yesterday’s edition went out with a typo in the post title. I’m quite impressed with myself that it took over 240 editions before one did creep in, lets see if I can managed another 240 before the next!

Software

• Silverlight Toolkit – Release: Silverlight Toolkit December 2008 – The Silverlight Toolkit has been updated to a December 2008 Release. This release includes an update to the toolkit and associated documentation and samples.
• Google Chrome (BETA) – Google Chrome is officially out of beta, and will be pushed out via automatic updates within the product to existing users, new users can download from the link at the bottom of this linked post.
• SQL Server 2005 Books Online update (December 2008) now available – Aaron Bertrand highlights the availability of the latest update to SQL Server Books Online, and reassures us that despite different parts of the install, download and update reporting that its not the December update, that is really is.

Information

• CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool – A Channel 9 video meeting the team behind CHESS, and an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. Sounds interesting, although I confess I’ve not yet watched the video.
• Using Dynamic Data with multiple databases – David Ebbo explores using Dynamic Data to talk to multiple databases, providing a sample application that does just this.
• Visual Studio 2008 Tips & Tricks for Developers:- This includes some shortcuts and some hidden features in Visual Studio 2008 which will increase your productivity – A collection of Visual Studio 2008 tricks and tips for improving your productivity in the IDE. This is a 17 point list so there is bound to be something you could use on a regular basis in there.
• Units of Work – K. Scott Allen talks about the Unit of Work Pattern, and why it is important to know about how it works and how it should be applied.
• VB 2008 Keyboard Shortcut Posters — Download your copy today! (Lisa Feigenbaum) – Lisa Feigenbaum highlights the availability of updated keyboard shortcut posters for Visual Basic in Visual Studio 2008.
• New technical article on Visual Studio 2010 Language Futures – Eric Nelson highlights an article he commissioned to expore the language futures in Visual Studio 2010 looking at C#, VB, the DLR, F# and Parallel programming.
• The Ten Most Asked SQL Server Questions And Their Answers – SQLDenis takes 10 of the most common questions seen on SQL forums and gives nice answers to them – worth a look because I’m sure we’ve all ran into one or more of these common issues ourselves.
• Is F# faster than C# – Joseph Ferner explores the performance of a really simple program to sum numbers from 1 to n in both C# and F# looking at the reasons for the difference in performance
• SQL Server Rounding Methods – gmmastros shares a number of TSQL solutions to the different types of numerical rounding in common use
• Dynamic Sorting with Linq – David Fowler shares a lightweight technique for sorting business objects using Linq
• Testing WCF REST Services – Pablo M. Cibraro looks at testing WCF REST Services in two different ways, one as black box testing and the other by wrapping the WCF context behaviours.
• Twitter Conversations an Agile Case Study – Rod Paddock picks a real but simple problem and illustrates how using agile techniques and Testing can produce an end product in a real world case study.
• The database as a service anti pattern – Ayende explains why you shouldn’t consider the database to be a service, citing a number of good reasons to avoid this

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