Dew Droplet – July 1-3, 2009

 

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