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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Software

• IPy RTW FTW! – Iron Python 2.0 has been officially released announces Harry Pierson, and already has had over 1000 downloads according to the CodePlex site. Congratulations to the development team.
• SubSonic 3 Alpha Updated – Rob Conery announces a bugfix release of the Subsonic 3 Alpha, and also runs through step by step getting started with the new version.

Information

• F# No Longer Vaporware – Chris Smith gives a humorous press release about F# becoming part of the Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 release. Don Syme has a more serous post with a good Q&A section on what this actually means.
• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 2 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Functional Programming Unit Testing with a look at QuickCheck for Haskell and its port FsQuickCheck for F# for testing the specifications of our code
• Accessing Azure storage with Raw REST API – Sergei Meleshchuk has been a busy chap and has published a number of nice how to articles on his blog. This one is about accessing Azure storage using REST, and there are others on Azure, tracing, along with older ones about Virtual Machines – well worth checking out.
• Microsoft Enterprise Library – What Do Customers Want ? – Grigori Melnik talks about peoples opinion of the Enterprise Library, its quality level, support and where the project is going.
• The Easy Way to Assemble Multiple Word Documents – Brian Jones looks at how you can easily merge word documents using the OpenXML SDK
• Value types and parameterless constructors – Jon Skeet explores issues arising from two StackOverflow.com questions about parameterless constructors on value types.
• Microsoft Ajax Client Templates and declarative jQuery – Bertrand Le Roy highlights a neat use of some of the ASP.NET Ajax technology to allow jQuery use in a slightly different way.
• Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC will expire Jan 1 2009 – Grant Holliday links to two tips (one foor Virtual PC users the other for Hyper-V users) which will allow you to extend the life of your Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 virtual machine beyond the 1st January 2009 cut off date – I’m not sure of the legalities of this so proceed with caution.
• Immutable Collections and Compatibility with Existing Frameworks – Jared Parsons talks about the interfaces he needed to offer partial implementations of in order to get compatibility with other parts of the framework for his Immutable Collections library.
• Heap Corruption: A Case Study – Carlo Colombo talks in detail about Heap Corruption. This article is not for the faint hearted as there is a lot of hex memory dumps involved.
• ADO.NET Data Services Framework (former – astoria) – Shahed Khan shares a nice collection of links and resources about ADO.NET Data Services, originally know by its code name of Astoria.

Community

• Inside everybody there is one book. How about one article for the UK MSDN Flash? – Eric Nelson is hoping to extend the set of contributors to the UK MSDN Flash Newsletter from being people at Microsoft UK to being people in the UK. To this end Eric shares the requirements for an article for the newsletter, and requests abstracts for the articles you propose.

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Software

• SubSonic 3: Alpha Is Ready – Rob Conery announces that SubSonic 3 is ready for Alpha release. This release represents a lot of work, and contains a number of great features, especially LINQ support. As this is an alpha, Rob requests that your log any bugs you find in their bug tracker so they can be fixed. Rob is also asking the community for some help with infrastructure and support for the Subsonic Project.
• Prism V2 Drop 7 Now Available – Bob Brum announces the latest drop of Prism the Patterns and Practices Composite WPF and Silverlight framework

Information

• Design and Testability – Jeremy D. Miller talks about his latest MSDN magazine article about Designing for Testability, and provides some more background and links to support.
• Code Coverage : Use It Wisely – Karl Seguin looks at code coverage and how as a metric you have to be careful about the conclusions you draw.
• Working with the ASP.NET AJAX Authentication Service – Mark Berryman of the ASP.NET QA Team talks about the authentication capabilities of the ASP.NET AJAX framework, and show show it allows you to create simple responsive forms based authentication
• Changing Terms from Mocking Framework to Isolation Framework – Derik Whittaker picks up on Roy Osherove’s term ‘Isolation’ instead of mocking and explains why he considers it to be a good term to use. Greg Duncan follows up with an agreeing post
• S#arp core overview – luisabreu takes a look at the S#arp project in this first part of a series article, exploring a number of the key concepts, interfaces and base classes of the framework.
• Attributes are lousy decorators – Jimmy Bogard talks about .NET attributes, and how due to their design they lack the ability to have behaviour, and how that means they are not a particularly good implementation of the Decorator pattern.
• Really Simple Testing for JavaScript – Bertrand Le Roy has constructed a simple Javascript testing framework for writing tests for any Javascript – this is really short and sweet code too, coming in at only 32 lines
• LinFu.IOC 2.0 in Five Minutes (Part 1 of n): Fun With Attributes. – Philip Laureano starts a series of posts on Code Project about the LinFu Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection Framework. In this first part he explores the attributes offered by the framework, and shows how to use the container to instance types.

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