The Morning Brew

Happy New Year Everyone, and congratulations to this years crop of Microsoft MVPs.

My 2008 in Review post on New Years Eve seems to have been well received and I’d like to extend my thanks to those who commented or emailed kind comments.

Today’s edition of The Morning Brew is the last of the late editions – The Christmas holidays are almost over for me, and things will be back to the usual earlier posting time from next week.

Software

• NH Prof is in public beta – Ayende gives us all a great New Years gift, the first public beta of NH Prof, a profiler for NHibernate has been released as a 30 day trial.
• Spark Language Package – Preview 1 – The Spark Language, which has had mention here before as a view engine for ASP.NET MVC gets its first installer which installs the DLL’s needed and adds registry keys to add colour and intellisense to .spark files in Visual Studio 2008
• ScrewTurn Wiki Version 3.0 Beta – The ScrewTurn tram announce the release of the Version 3 beta, a beta release they believe is stable enough for use on low traffic and non mission critical wikis – as always with beta software if you find a problem let the developers know.

Information

• Functional Programming Unit Testing – Part 5 – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series on Functional Programming Unit Testing with a look at refactoring in functional programming.
• Productivity: It Comes from Software Design Rather than Software Tools – Scott Bellware talks about how he believes that the productivity problems in software development are no longer caused by lack of suitable tools, and that now the bigger issue is that of the design of software.
• Hello LINQ in .NET 2.0 – Jan Van Ryswyck shows how you can gain Linq To Objects functionality in your .NET 2.0 code.
• Reflections on coding style – Kirill Osenkov talks about coding style, and looks at some of the benefits and disadvantages of this highly chained style.
• Turning Data Into Code With Expressions – Tony Rasa shows how he used expressions to solve the problem of an increasingly complex permissions model
• A Message For You – K. Scott Allen sends us a message using some Linq based code – see if you can guess what the message is from the code before running it
• Drag-and-drop sorting for our ASP.NET MVC list editor (in one line of code) – Steve Sanderson extends his ASP.NET MVC list editor to include drag and drop ordering, showing how easy the jQuery libraries make adding this type of functionality.
• Official response for Zune 30 Freezing Issue – Problems with the Zune arround New Year were caused by issues with the internal clock and leap years, highlighting how important it is for us developers to test the edge cases for our date routines, leap years, Daylight savings/British Summer time all have the potential to really mess things up, as this classic WTF shows.

Humour

• The Life And Times Of A Bug – Davy Brion takes an amusing look at the life of an NHibernate bug he has recently worked on.

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