Alvin Ashcraft’s Morning Dew

I’m catching up a bit after the birth of our third daughter, Rubina Mae Ashcraft, on Tuesday afternoon. My sincere thanks to everyone who sent their congratulations on Twitter and Facebook. Apologies to the many great blog posts that have not been included.

Congrats to all the new and renewed Microsoft MVPs this week too!

Silverlight / WPF

• How to Create Reflection Effect on Images Using Visual Brush and Opacity Mask in WPF (Anum Lodhi)
• WPF Multithreading: Using the BackgroundWorker and Reporting the Progress to the UI. (Brian Lagunas)
• Silverlight Coding Contest (Dino Esposito)
• Handling Events within Silverlight Control Templates – AutoCompleteBox Example (Dan Wahlin)
• Choosing Colors to Complement Your User Interface with Expression Design and Experimenting with User Interface Colors with Expression Design and Creating a Sample Icon using Expression Design (Silverlight Team)
• Silverlight 2 unit test framework binaries updated (Jeff Wilcox)
• Silverlight Application – Animal Testing Breaks Hearts (Pete Brown)

.NET / Visual Studio

• TweetCraft – A World of Warcraft Twitter client (Dan Fernandez)
• Updated TDD Productivity Plug-in for Resharper (Eric Hexter)
• "XNAVATARS" – PART 1 (Pedro Daniel Güida)
• Meffifying Windows Azure (Glenn Block)
• VSTS 2010 TMap Process Template 1,2 and 3 (Clemens Reijnen)
• Developing for the Windows 7 Taskbar – Jump into Jump Lists – Part 3 (Yochay Kiriaty)
• MCsla on the Olso May CTP (Rockford Lhotka)
• Pretty Code #1 – Building SelectListItems (K. Scott Allen)
• IronRuby 0.6 Released! (Jimmy Schementi)
• Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework Feature CTP 1 Post Beta 1 (Muhammad Mosa)
• Windows 7: Experimenting with Multi-Touch on Windows 7 ( Part 4 ) (Mike Taulty)

Design / Methodology / Testing

• How not to do Dependency Injection, in NerdDinner (Jimmy Bogard)
• “Controllerless” MVC: A high-level overview of my attempt (Erik)
• Which Unit Testing Framework? (John Resig)
• Agile Is NOT a Risk Management Strategy (Jurgen Appelo)
• Domain Driven Design: Conformist (Mark Needham)
• Is your Organization out of Alignment? (Mike Cottmeyer)

Web Development

• XHTML 2 Cancelled (Timothy)
• Restricting BlogEngine.NET Comments to Sueetie Registered Users Only (Dave Burke)
• SubSonic 3.0 is Released (Rob Conery) – Link of the Day

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• Successful Cross Platform .NET Development – Mono and Banshee with Aaron Bockover and The Art of Unit Testing with Roy Osherove (Scott Hanselman)
• Whirlwind Around .NET 4 (Eric Mork)
• Scott Ambler on the Agile Process Maturity Model (Carl Franklin)
• This Week C9: Speech Recognition, Army of 1, TweetCraft and more (Dan Fernandez)
• Blend 3 + Silverlight 3 = Luv (video demo) (Jose Fajardo)
• What’s New in Software Development: NeverFail Software Adopts Hyper-V (Bruce Kyle)
• Downloading Prism and 10 Things to Know About Silverlight Prism (Monica Mork & Erik Mork)
• Episode #123: Exploring Code Contracts: Taking a look at Object Invariant Conditions (Derik Whittaker)
• Herding Code 52: The Alan Stevens and G. Andrew Duthie Debate Continues! (Jon Galloway)
• Conversation with Stuart Halloway (Corey Haines)
• Three great screencasts on Silverlight unit testing (Jeff Wilcox)
• Using WPF in Office Add-Ins (John Wiese)

Community / Events

• AgiliTrain and Rachel Appel Announce New Classes (Shawn Wildermuth)

Database

• Automatically create a SQL Server table in a new database. (George Mastros)
• DRY SQL (Jamie Thomson)
• PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room and DELETE Documents from CouchDB (Jan Van Ryswyck)
• SQL SERVER – Disk Partition Alignment Best Practices (Pinal Dave)

Miscellaneous

• Microsoft’s Free Windows 7 Training Resources (Blake Handler)
• Bringing a Bit of Twitter to Bing (Sean Suchter)
• The Blurring Lines of Languages (Justin Etheredge)
• MSDN / Technet Subscribers Get Windows 7 July 13th (Keith Elder)
• An Introduction to Functional Languages: Part Two (Ken Sipe)
• Who is developing the software profession? (Maggie Longshore)
• Microsoft File Server Migration Toolkit 1.2 available as a free download (Jose Barreto)
• The fallacy of the standardized developer machine/image (Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo)
• Announcing The Social Way To Get Things Done: Zoho Projects 2.0 (Rodrigo Vaca)
• How to display ads on your project from The Lounge – #045 (Sara Ford)
• Kodu Nears Xbox Launch and Want to Compare Search Engines? and Follow @Microsoft on Twitter (…and All the Rest!) (Sarah Perez)
• Windows 7 and Windows Installer Error “Another installation is in progress” (Jason N. Gaylord)
• All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions (Jeff Atwood)
• Building Remarkable Work And Play Environments – Part 3. (Rajiv Popat)

More Link Collections

• LINKBLOG for July 3, 2009 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Interesting Finds: July 3, 2009 (Jason Haley)
• The Morning Brew #382 (Chris Alcock)
• The Technology Post for July 2nd, 2009 (Jason N. Gaylord)
• CloudNews for 3rd July, 2009 (Mayank Gupta)

Book of the Day

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Just an FYI for readers, the Dew Drop posts are going to be interrupted for a day or two sometime in the next couple of weeks. We’re expecting our third girl on July 8th, but it could be as soon as today.

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Domain Driven Design Quickly (Ade Miller)
• Self-Organization and Complexity (Brad Appleton)
• The “collaboration” piller (version 1) (Brian Marick)
• Hungarian Notation – Use What Works Spit Out The Bones (Dave M. Bush)
• D3: Building Great Software is a Battle, Don’t Leave Any Assets on the Sidelines (Dan Simmons)
• UX Team of One (Frank La Vigne)
• Are You in a Claustrophobic Team? (Max Pool)
• Lessons in Software from Alok Srivastava (J.D. Meier)
• New DDDD Content (Jonathan Oliver)
• Threat Analysis & Modeling Tool – TAM 3.0 (Jossie Tirado)

.NET / Visual Studio

• MGraph Visualizer Plug-in for Intellipad! (Chris Sells)
• The void is invariant (Eric Lippert)
• Sticky DataTips: A new way to view variables in the Visual Studio 2010 debugger (Habib Heydarian)
• Explore C# 4’s New Dynamic Types and Named/Optional Parameters (Joydip Kanjilal)
• New CodePlex project: a simple Undo/Redo framework (Kirill Osenkov)
• How to execute a special build on TFS using Team Foundation Object Model (TFS APIs) – Part 1 (Subodh Sohoni)

Web Development

• AJAX Features in ASP.NET MVC (Dino Esposito)
• How we do MVC – View models (Jimmy Bogard) – Link of the Day
• ASP.NET WebForms vs. MVC (Michael Ceranski)
• Displaying SQL Server Messages using ASP.NET and ADO.NET (Malcolm Sheridan)

Silverlight / WPF

• Fun With Speech Recognition in WPF (Frank La Vigne)
• Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-4 (Faisal Hossain Khan)
• WPF Toolkit: Charting release (Jeff Wilcox)
• WPF3D Lighting and Shading (Jordan)
• Game Programming with Silverlight. (Mike Snow)
• Principles of Design Series: Learning about Points, Lines, and Form using Expression Design (Silverlight Team)

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• Prism Eventing (Eric Mork)
• Google I/O 2009 – AJAX APIs to Navigate User-Generated Content (Me)
• ARCast.TV – Windows Azure, A conversation with David Chappell (Bob Familiar)
• New Screencast: Working with Property Grids (Dan Rigsby)
• DimeCasts.NET Episode #122: Creating Custom Functions w/ NAnt (Derik Whittaker)
• Tales from the Toolshed (Jas Dhaliwal)
• Demo of SQL Server 2008 Data Warehousing Features – Configure DW Storage and Demo of SQL Server 2008 DW features: Configuring tempdb for Data Warehouse (Joe Longtin)
• The History of Microsoft – 1995 (Tina)
• Netcast #14 – Not Dead Yet (Todd O. Klindt)
• Software Engineering Radio Episode 139: Fearless Change with Linda Rising (SE-Radio Team)
• Toolshed Tooltip #15 – Intro from Episode 3, meet MVP’s Stan Schultes, Don Demsak and Jessica Moss. and Toolshed Tooltip #16 – Expression Blend 2 Video, Animation and VS Integration Intro (Russell Fustino)
• Prism’s Event Aggregator (Monica Mork & Erik Mork)
• Yochay Kiriaty – Windows 7 Developer Training Kit (Robert Hess)
• Ping 18: Ballmer apologizes, Paul Allens latest move, Surface fun, Security Beta (Laura Foy)

Community / Events

• July Community Events (Eric Shupps)
• Events This Week – June 29th, 2009 and Microsoft Local Impact (G. Andrew Duthie)

SharePoint

• Want A Job? Learn SharePoint, Says Gary Blatt – 100% of the Federal Government has licenses, but they can’t find developers to implement their sites. (James Turner)
• Visio design templates for SharePoint 2007 (Joris Poelmans)

Database

• Approaches to "UPSERT" (Ken Downs)
• After disabling TDE you still requires the certificate to restore the database (Martin Bell)
• SQL SERVER – 2008 – Policy-Based Management – Create, Evaluate and Fix Policies (Pinal Dave)

Miscellaneous

• Do you need more than Windows 7 Home Premium? (Ed Bott)
• Musings About Project Natal (Frank La Vigne)
• AutoSave Adds Reassurance to Notepad++ Editing (Kevin Purdy)
• Get Firefox’s Ctrl+K Shortcut in Internet Explorer (The How-To Geek)
• The "Risk" of Open Source Software Support (Tim Barcz)
• Twitter: Let the Information Wash Over You (Scott Hanselman)
• Oracle Woos Microsoft OracleClient users (Julie Lerman)
• How to Contribute to Open Source (When You’re Not Exactly Scott Hanselman) (Sara Chipps)
• How to stop that annoying beep on your server (Simon Sabin)
• Survey of Surveys on IT Spend for 2009 (Mike Walker)

More Link Collections

• LINKBLOG for June 29, 2009 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Interesting Finds: June 30, 2009 (Jason Haley)
• Community Convergence LI (Charlie Calvert)
• The Morning Brew #379 (Chris Alcock)
• Silverlight Cream for June 29, 2009 — #624 (Dave Campbell)
• The Technology Post for June 29th, 2009 (Jason N. Gaylord)
• SharePoint: Recommended links June 2009 (Tobias Zimmergren)
• Daily Find #122 (Tim Boland)

Book of the Day

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.NET / Visual Studio

• Moving the Mouse Pointer Programmatically and Hiding the Mouse Pointer (Richard Carr)
• MSpec… for Boo! (Aaron Jensen)
• Creating audio signals in .Net (Coding4Fun)
• F#: Setting properties like named parameters (Mark Needham)
• Generating Code with Visual Studio’s T4 (Michael Ceranski)
• Changing Configuration Settings in a Desktop Client Application (Rick Strahl)
• Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 (Mike Walker)

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Using Agile methods to deliver on a fixed-budget, fixed-time commitment (Andy Singleton)
• Cloud Computing Design Patterns (Bob Nadler)
• Another Kata: Expression Tokenizer (Brett Schuchert)
• Elegant Code Project Structure Purse Fight (Chris Brandsma)
• It’s the subleties and Facilitation Antipattern: Repetitor (Steven ‘Doc’ List)
• Don’t Create Aggregate Roots (Udi Dahan) – Link of the Day
• Making your code easier to understand context/specification style unit tests (Ian Cooper)
• Microsoft ESB Toolkit (Mike Walker)
• Fighting Fabricated Complexity (Patrick Smacchia)
• A Craftsman sometimes has to create his own tool (Sergio Pereira)
• What Investing Can Teach You About Software Development (Part 2) (Jeremy Jarrell)
• Real World Refactoring (Joshua Flanagan)
• Simple Python testing in Silverlight with unittest (Jimmy Schementi)
• The Blurring Lines of Languages (Justin Etheredge)
• Yes… Agile Isn’t Project Managment… (Mike Cottmeyer)

Web Development

• Never worry about ASP.NET AJAX’s .d again (Dave Ward)
• Python Web Framework Series – Pylons: Part 4 Introduction For Database Support With SQL Alchemy. (Ryan Svihla)
• Principals, Code-Behind, & View Engines (K. Scott Allen)
• ASP.NET DropDownList with Custom Paging (Malcolm Sheridan)
• VS2010 Beta1 Web Application Project Database package and SMO options (Xinyang Qiu)
• ASP.NET 4.0 Enhancements to Data Controls (Mike Ormond)

Silverlight / WPF

• Silverlight Wrap Panel (Deepak Kapoor)
• YouTube video in Silverlight 3 (Corey Schuman)
• WPF discussions 090626 (Jaime Rodriguez)
• So Much Is Happening The Silence Is Deafening! (Jesse Liberty)

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• Windows Weekly 113: The Rural Juror (Paul Thurrott)
• ThirstyDeveloper #67 – Open Spaces and unmeetings (Dave Bost & Larry Clarkin)
• Toolshed Tooltip #14 – Developer Community Update by MVP Don (XML) Demsak from Episode 3 (Russell Fustino)
• Major Nelson Show #323: Geoff Keighly, Worms 2 and behind the scenes at E3 (Larry Hryb)
• SharePoint development: using SharePoint as an application development platform and SharePoint Web Content Management / Publishing – Episode 9 (Rob, Nick & Brett)

Community / Events

• Top 200 Blogs for Developers (Q2 2009) (Jurgen Appelo) – Congrats to Scott for making #1 and to Justin for his debut at #43!
• NDC09 Trip Report (Phil Haack)
• C’Mon Get Meta! (Jeff Atwood)
• Nayyeri.NET Turns Four (Keyvan Nayyeri) – Happy Blog-day, Keyvan!

SharePoint

• Community Kit For SharePoint (Dave Mann)
• How to Build a Change Control System in SharePoint (Dux Raymond Sy)

Database

• MVP Helps To Jumpstart SQL Server 2008! (Jas Dhaliwal)
• SQL SERVER – 2008 – Management Studio New Features and SQL SERVER – Maximum Number of Index per Table (Pinal Dave)
• Hyperlinks in custom reports (Simon Sabin)

Miscellaneous

• Firefox 3.5 coming June 30th, Fennec updated today (Brad Linder)
• The Five Best and Five Worst Mountain Dews of All Time (Curtis Silver) – Diet Code Red FTW!
• Organizational Chaos Followup (Jesse Liberty)
• 50 Free Resources That Will Improve Your Writing Skills (Smashing Magazine)
• Bing Toolbox (Sunshine)
• Review: "Programming Clojure", by Stu Halloway (Ted Neward)

More Link Collections

• LINKBLOG for June 28, 2009 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Interesting Finds: June 28, 2009 and Interesting Finds: June 29, 2009 (Jason Haley)
• The Morning Brew #378 (Chris Alcock)
• Interesting Finds: 2009 06.22 ~ 06.28 (yuanjian)
• Weekly Links #59 (Grant Palin)
• Links of the week #82 – “Back From Holidays in Croatia” Edition (David Vidmar)
• Links (6/28/2009) (Steve Pietrek)

Book of the Day

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.NET / Visual Studio

• Getting the Current Application’s Memory Usage (Richard Carr)
• Useful VS Key Sequences/Shortcuts (Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo)
• Effective EF with Oracle (Julie Lerman)
• F#: More thoughts on the forward & application operators (Mark Needham)
• Mapping WF 3 activities to WF 4 (Matt Milner)
• Work-Stealing in .NET 4.0 (Jennifer Marsman)
• D3: Fun with Concurrency and Model First – Part 1 and D3: Fun with Concurrency and Model First – Part 2 (Dan Simmons)

Silverlight / WPF

• Behaviors, Triggers and Actions snippets (Rudi Grobler)
• Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-2 and Creating NikeClone With Silverlight Part-3 (Faisal Hossain Khan)

Web Development

• The MVC T4 template is now up on CodePlex, and it does change your code a bit (David Ebbo)
• Adding Events to User Controls (Peter Vogel)
• A case of lost session variables when using out of process session state (Tess Ferrandez)
• Tip #84: Did you know… How to set a Start page for your Web Site in Visual Web Developer? (Reshmi Mangalore)
• ASP.NET – Creating a Custom Tag Cloud (Michael Ceranski)
• Is It Too Late To Change JSON? (Phil Haack)

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Open Spaces at work (Larry Clarkin) – Link of the Day
• Unit Testing with .NET RIA Services (Brad Abrams)
• Making Blenders for the Blind is Like Making Software for Normal People (Chris Love)
• Fluent Interface for NH Facility – Take 1 (Tuna Toksoz)
• The Rush (Uncle Bob Martin)
• Enterprise Library 5.0 Focuses on IoC Containers for Configuration (David Hayden)
• Silverlight Geek – An interview with Jesse Liberty (Adam Kinney)
• When agile goes bad, slides and pointers (Sebastien Lambla)
• Iterators at the Summer Games (Eric Lippert)

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• "I’m a VB" Interview: Julie Lerman, Visual Basic MVP and "I’m a VB" Interview: Bill Wolff, Visual Basic MVP and "I’m a VB" Interview: Bill Vaughn, Visual Basic MVP (Beth Massi)
• This Week C9: Revolution 9 – The Future of Channel 9 (Dan Fernandez)
• 10-4 Episode 25: Fixing PIA Pains with Type Equivalence (Jason Olson)
• Herding Code 51: Greg Young on Our Grand Failure – Thoughts on DDDD (Jon Galloway)
• Show: Episode #3 It’s All About The Tools TV Show (Russell Fustino)
• Road Thoughts – Visible Metrics (Corey Haines)
• VSTO: How to Add a Button into the Office Ribbon (Jennifer Marsman)
• Collaborative Knowledge Sharing and Decision Making… (Clemens Reijnen)

Community / Events

• Ajax Survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are Almost Tied Among .NET Developers (Simone Chiaretta)
• Useful jQuery Tips, Tricks, and Plugins with ASP.NET MVC (Elijah Manor)
• Two VANs on Castle Project (Tuna Toksoz)
• Architecture Summit in Southfield, MI (Jennifer Marsman)

SharePoint

• Automated Builds with VSeWSS 1.3 (Paul Andrew)
• Belgian MVP Releases SharePoint Tool Basket on CodePlex! (Lorna Williamson)

Database

• DBA SQLCLR Procedures (Ted Krueger)
• SQL SERVER – Fix : Error : 17892 Logon failed for login due to trigger execution. Changed database context to ‘master’. (Pinal Dave)
• SQLDBCrypt – Open Source Database Encryption For SQL Server. (Rajiv Popat)
• Can’t depend on sp_depends? Try using sp_refreshsqlmodule and Adding time offsets passed in to a datetime to generate localized datetime (Denis Gobo)

Miscellaneous

• Download Free WebRadio Add-in for Windows Home Server (Blake Handler)
• Bing cashback 101 (Raju Malhotra)
• Firefox 3.5 coming June 30th, Fennec updated today (Brad Linder)
• Windows 7 versus Snow Leopard: How much do upgrades really cost? (Ed Bott)
• When Windows Home Server crashes… (Rockford Lhotka)
• Zoho: We’re launching something, sometime next week (Rodrigo Vaca)
• Download seven Windows 7 chapters (Devon Musgrave)
• 200 Twitter Mashups (John Musser)
• 11 Magazines This Magazine Likes (Jason English)
• Designing input for a script (Ed Wilson)
• WMI: Improving your WMI application performance in fan-out scenario (Andy Cheung)
• Create a Syslog Sender/Receiver Using the MS Winsock Control (Gustav Brock)

More Link Collections

• LINKBLOG for June 26, 2009 (Arjan Zuidhof)
• Interesting Finds: June 27, 2009 (Jason Haley)
• Silverlight Cream for June 26, 2009 — #623 (Dave Campbell)
• CloudNews for 26th June, 2009 (Mayank Gupta)
• New and Notable 335 (Sam Gentile)
• The Technology Post for June 26th, 2009 (Jason N. Gaylord)

Book of the Day

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It’s must-see web TV this week when Arnold and Dudley have to fend off Gordon Jump’s advances… wait… that was a diff’rent show…

Watch Dan Fernandez & company talk about Revolution 9, and the future of Channel 9 (as well as Channel 8, Channel 10, Coding4Fun and MIXOnline).

Good luck guys!

Alvin

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