The Morning Brew

500th Post Celebrations

(If you just want the links for today, skip down the page)

Today marks a major milestone in the publishing of The Morning Brew, being the 500th edition. I find it staggering that I’ve managed to produce this daily update every week day (minus public holidays of course) 500 times, it really doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing it that long. Of course, I’m not the only one to reach the 500 post milestone, but it still feels significant.

Since today is a milestone, I though it was a good time to do a little work on the blog as a whole, and since Tthe Morning Brew has somewhat taken over all the blogging here in the past 2 years I’m going make it the main feature here, and the observant of you (or those who read this on the actual site) will have noticed a few minor changes to the appearance of the blog, and most significantly the name of the blog is now ‘The Morning Brew’, and I will soon be migrating all the site over to being hosted at its new address of ‘http://www.TheMorningBrew.Net. The old address will be maintained in the form of redirects to the new address for all posts.

In addition to some name changes and a little bit of rebranding I’d also like to attempt a little marketing of The Morning Brew in the form of Blog Badges which you can place on your sites where you wish to link to The Morning Brew. These badges were produced for me by my friend and former colleague Derek Fowler almost a year ago, and I never got around to using them at the time, so a mix of ‘sorry’ and ‘thanks’ go to Derek for them.

If you would like to include them in your log, here is an HTML snippet for the general ‘I read The Morning Brew’ badges (they cycle randomly through different badges):

Which will display something like:

If you’ve had your articles featured in The Morning Brew you may wish to use the Contributor set of badges instead, in which case your HTML will need to look something like:




Which will display a badge looking like:

I’d be very happy to receive additional badges of the same dimensions, so if you have some design flair (which I don’t) and fancy having a go at creating a badge or two please feel free to send your attempts over and I’ll look at including them in the appropriate rotation.

There will be a few more changes to The Morning Brew over the coming weeks, including actual Morning Brew coffee mugs, a look at possibly including sponsorship / advertising, and a few other minor improvements. As always, if you have any suggestions or ideas please drop me a line.

Many thanks to the authors of the great articles I have the privilege of being able to link to, and to you for your readership over the past 500 editions. Here’s to the next 500!

Software

• LINQPad updated to support Data Services! – Chris Sells highlights a new beta release of LINQPad the tool which allows you to interactivly issue LINQ queries against a variety of backing sotres, and which as of this release now supports querying against OData powered services (such as WCF Data Services)
• ADO.NET Data Services Update for .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 now available – Greg Duncan highlights the release of an update to ADO.NET Data Services which extends the functioanlity of the .NET 3.5 SP1 release of ADO.Net Data Services. Packages are available for all supported Windows Versions (with Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 having their own special version)

Information

• Linq to NHibernate Progress Report – A Christmas Gift? – Steve Strong gives his latest progress report on his work on the full featured LINQ to NHibernate provider bring the good news that it now supports 100% of the test cases from the old provider, and adds a lot of extra abilities too. Steve also shows a number of example queries, along with encouraging you to give the provider a try, and gives some further setup assistance in his next post ‘Using the new Linq to NH Provider and migrating from the old one‘
• FREE MSDN Flash eBook of the best 13 technical articles of 2009 – Eric Nelson shares an eBook of the best 13 technical articles that have been featured in the UK MSDN Flash newsletter in the past year. The eBook is now available in XPS and PDF formats for you to download and enjoy over the Christmas holiday period
• Silverlight 4 demos from my PDC Keynote now available – Scott Guthrie prodices the downloads for the source to his PDC Keynote Silverlight 4 demo applications which demo some of the key new features of Silverlight 4 including webcam and microphone support, video effects, rich text editing and HTML hosting support
• Architecting Silverlight 4 with RIA Services, MEF and MVVM – Part 1 – Shawn Wildermuth begins a new series of posts looking at the architecture options and best practices behind building a Silverlight 4 application using the Rich Internet Application Services, the Managed Extensibility Framework and the Model View View Model pattern
• Building Hello MEF – Part III – XAP Partitioning (with the host’s permission) and the sweetness of recomposition. – Glenn Block continues his series on the Managed Extensibility Framework with a look at the support in MEF for Silverlight 4 and the dynamic loading of parts from different XAP files, exploring recomposition and how that can effect your application design.
• Thinking about the future of the Caching block – Christopher Tavares talks about the Patterns and Practices Caching Application Block, asking if, now that the framework has caught up with peoples requirements, the caching block may no longer be required in the Enterprise Library, and solicits your feedback on the subject.
• Unit Testing Strategy: Hiding Out In the Open – Tim Barcz examines some hard to test code which touches the file system, taking a look at what can be done to make this code more testable, along with having a look at ‘hiding’ a method by having it as a public method but not part of the Interface that the class is implementing.
• IronRuby @ RubyConf 2009 – Part 3.5: Embedding IronRuby – Jimmy Schementi is publishing his notes from RubyConf 209, and in this part of his series of posts looks at the embedding capabilities of IronRuby, showing how it can be embedded into your own applications, and sharing some sample applications which show this in use.
• The Common Principles Behind the NOSQL Alternatives – Nati Shalom posts on the subject of Not Only SQL (NOSQL) alternative database systems, looking at the common concepts behind all of their implementations, and how they aim to address scalability and performance.
• Codename "Dallas" Developer Portal Walkthrough – Roger Jennings takes a look at the Dallas Project using his newly recieved developer token for the service, giving us a sneak peek at the innards of the Developer Portal, and some of the data feeds available.
• Silverlight Advent Calendar: December 14th: The Local Connection API explained – Gill Cleeren, as a part of the Silverlight Advent Calendar series, takes a look at the Local Connection API which allows messages to be exchanged between different Silverlight controls on a web page. Be sure to check out the other informative posts in this series.
• Tracewriter App Available for Download on Code Gallery – ‘James’ on the Parallel Visualizer Team highlights the code release of a fun project from another team member (Ryan) which writes words in multiple threads viewable from the Parallel Visualizer
• Open Source Success Metrics – Ayende talks about some of the different metrics that can be used to help gauge the success of an Open Source project and how adoption of and contribution to open source projects are two very different things.
• Comparing Entity Framework 4 New Stored Procedure Support to LINQ to SQL – Steve Michelotti explores the Entity Framework 4 support for data access via Stored Procedure, and compares the level of support to that of LINQ to SQL.
• John Resig: "Testing, Performance Analysis, and jQuery 1.4" – Eric Miraglia shares the video taken from a recent BayJax event where John Resig spoke on the subject of JavaScript performance and Unit testing, along with the changes being introduced in jQuery 1.4

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