Finds of the Week – June 9, 2008

.NET/C#

• Microsoft project code named “Velocity” is a distributed in-memory caching platform that provides .NET applications with high-speed access, scaling, and high availability to application data. Download the Community Preview here.
• Danny Simmons enumerated various reasons for using Entity Framework.
• If your netMsmq WCF service shows signs of a handles leak, you may want to make sure you have .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 installed.
• Bryan wrote a timely article on TDD Tips: Test Naming Conventions & Guidelines.
• Microsoft announced the release of Microsoft Source Analysis for C#.
  “Source Analysis is similar in many ways to Microsoft Code Analysis (specifically FxCop), but there are some important distinctions. FxCop performs its analysis on compiled binaries, while Source Analysis analyzes the source code directly. For this reason, Code Analysis focuses more on the design of the code, while Source Analysis focuses on layout, readability and documentation. Most of that information is stripped away during the compilation process, and thus cannot be analyzed by FxCop.”

General Programming

• Warn the User when Caps Lock is On in web apps. By Scott Mitchell.
• Denis Gobo put together a very good and extensive list of SQL Server Programming Hacks. Many of the tips are not really “hacks” but still good to know nonetheless.
• Not sure how useful this is with most networks blocking everything these days, but it’s cool anyway: you can now access the Sysinternals tools on a fileshare directly at \\live.sysinternals.com\tools.
• Damien Guard released a new version of his Envy Code R monospaced font designed for programmers.

    

Tools

• The Query command line utility displays active Terminal Service/Remote Desktop sessions, among other things. This replaces the qwinsta utility.

Something Different

• 10 Amazing Chemical Reactions.