The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 RTM – Now available for all! – Ben Armstrong highlights the general availability of Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, along with providing notes for upgrading to SP1 RTM from the beta or Release Candidates.
• Productivity Power Tools introduces Find, Organize Imports for VB, Enhanced Scrollbar, Middle-Click Scrolling and more! – Sean Laberee shares the details of the latest update to the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools VS2010 extension. This new update adds a number of new scrolling features, along with improved Find, multi targeting support and a fix for Cut / Copy
• Visual Studio 2010 International Survey Launched! – The Microsoft Global Developer eXperience team want your feedback on Visual Studio 2010 and have released a small (10 minute) survey available in 10 languages to gather your valuable impressions of the product and it use.

Information

• Versioning strategies for the sane – Jimmy Bogard suggests a very good use of the assembly version attributes to store the date and time of the build in the version number and how it meets all the version number requirements.
• NHibernate 3.0 Tutorial with Fluent NHibernate and Linq 2 NHibernate – ‘dan’ shares a getting started tutorial which walks through the process of setting up and getting started with the NHibernate 3.0 stack including looking at the use of Fluent NHibernate and Linq2NHibernate, building a sample console application which illustrates the key aspects of this process.
• C# ATDD on a shoestring (or the complete guide to SpecFlow & NUnit in Visual Studio 2010 Express) – Alister Scott shares a tutorial which explores the use of SpecFlow with NUnit to create Behaviour Driven Development style tests, and looking at how to integrate these tools into your build process.
• There’s Only One Valid Metric For Developer Productivity And Quality – Davy Brion discusses the complicated area of developer productivity and quality of code and how its hard to define a good metric for these factors.
• IE9 RC fixed the Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage error when running an ASP.NET application in Visual Studio – Jon Galloway highlights an issue with running ASP.NET application in Visual Studio when your browser is the Internet Explorer 9 Beta, sharing a workaround for the beta, and urging you to upgrade to the IE9 RC which no longer exhibits the problem.
• Executable Requirements – Mehdi Khalili explores the use of BDD to create executable requirements, sharing some examples based on the ATM machine problem space and discussing the benefits and costs of working in this way.
• Unicode 6.0.0 is [actually] released! – Michael S. Kaplan highlights the release of version 6 of the Unicode specification last week

Community

• ASP.NET mvcConf Videos Available – Scott Guthrie highlights the availability of all the session video content from the recent mvcConf virtual community event which covered all things ASP.NET related. This lists of sessions contains a vast number from very recognisable names in the community and will be a great resource if you missed the actual event.
• Pair programming – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group welcome Rachel Laycock and Sara Stephens with their session on Pair Programming on the evening of Wednesday 2nd March. This talk was well received at a recent new speakers event at the London .NET UG so should be well worth seeing.
• NxtGenUG Oxford – .Net on a chip! – The Oxford chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Ryan O’Neill to their group on the evening of Tuesday 1st March for a session looking at the .NET Micro Framework and the hardware available to run it.
• From Zero To Deployed Contest – Prizes Announced – Rob Reynolds, following on from his look at AppHarbor, is running a video/screencast based contest going from no code to a working database backed application deployed and running with some great prizes for best video and best time

1 Comment »