The Morning Brew

Thank goodness its Friday – the first week back after a long holiday is always harder work than it should be – now quite looking forward to the weekend.

Software

• Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta… Ohh and Windows 7 too… – I think everyone knows about Windows 7 beta being released today (and if you didn’t you do now), however this post also talks about Windows 2008 Server R2 Beta being made available to everyone (not just MSDN Subscribers) today too.
• Firebug 1.3 Final Release – Firebug, the firefox users tool of choice for DOM inspection, JavaScript debugging and network monitoring in the browser has finally reached its 1.3 stable release for FireFox 3 users.
• A Professional HTML Rendrer you will use – Jose M. Menendez Poó shares a very useful looking library which renders HTML to GDI+ graphics and controls. Based strongly round the CSS2 and HTML4.01 specifications this library looks like it could be very useful for rendering HTML Content – none of the examples show it rendering a standard web page, so I wonder how well it copes with something that complex.

Information

• Printing Microsoft Tags – Microsoft announced some new technology (and the MSDN blogs a buzzing with it today) – essentially 3D barcodes for transmitting URLs, vCards, text and telephone numbers. There are clients for a large range of mobile devices, and also a site for creating the tag images.
• Hanselminutes Podcast 145 – SOLID Principles with Uncle Bob – Robert C. Martin – Scott Hanselman’s latest podcast covers the SOLID principles which have been featured here in articles a number of time, I’m looking forward to listening to this one. There is also a comment on this post that is worth checking out (2nd one by Gates VP), there may be others later.
• ASP.NET MVC – Think Before You Bind – Justin Etheredge looks at the model binding in ASP.NET MVC, and how, if you are not careful, this can introduce security and validation problems. Justin moves on to look at alternative ways of achieving this functionality in a safer manner.
• Want the source code and unit tests for the managed Silverlight 2 controls included in System.Windows.dll, System.Windows.Controls.dll, and System.Windows.Controls.Data.dll? Here you go… – Greg’s Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of full source code and unit tests for the managed Silverlight 2 controls
• Project Euler 89: Converting to and from Roman Numerals – Samuel Jack has been exploring the Project Euler problems in Functional C#, and in this instalment looks at parsing and creating Roman Numerals
• RulesEngine – Martin Fowler introduces the concept of a RulesEngine, and looks at whether you should employ one in your applications.
• Creating database connections with Unity – Stuart Leeks looks at creating database connections to the right database and injecting them into your classes using Unity IOC. This article illustrates a number of the IOC features of Unity nicely.
• XML Comments: filterpriority – Scott Dorman explores the meaning of an undocumented XML Documentation tag which is used throughout the BCL source
• Processes in .NET Part 3 – Interfacing With Simple Console Programs by Example, Tesseract OCR – Rick Minerich continues his series looking at processes in .NET with a look at interacting with Googles Tesseract OCR, a console application from your own .NET code.
• Code is Always Sacred – Jason Bock argues that all code should be good code, and that it is not acceptable to have sample code in books, blogs or presentations which include bad coding practices such as not disposing streams, bad variable names, catch blocks which do nothing, etc/

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