Izindaba #21

Time for another weekly round-up of developer news that focuses on .NET, agile and general development content.  (Izindaba = Zulu for News).

.NET

1. Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework CTP - News from the BCL Team on the CTP and newly created Parallel Computing Developer Center.
2. ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing and ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 3): Passing ViewData from Controllers to Views - Scott Guthrie continues with his series on the new ASP.NET MVC Framework. CTP coming soon!
3. ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and Web Deployment Project Releases for VS 2008 - Scott Guthrie announces the updates that work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.
4. Should I (Still) Learn 1.0?  - Jesse Liberty reflects on whether it is worth learning Silverlight 1.0.
5. Improve your C#! Borrow from F# - Dustin Campbell shows how to create more elegant C# code by borrowing concepts from F#.
6. Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 Training Kit - Hands-on-labs, presentations and demos on all things new in VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  Great for getting your teams up to speed with the new technologies. 
7. A Detailed look at Overriding the Equality Operator - InfoQ shows how to implement this correctly.

Design

1. Deconstructing Software - Patrick Smacchia continues with another post that illustrates how to use NDepend to ensure that your code is really layered as it should be.
2. A Microcosm of Agile Design - Jeremy Miller goes about explaining and defending Agile Design principles.

SDLC

1. Do Dedicated Team Rooms Make for More Productive Teams? - InfoQ looks at answering the question.

SQL Server

1. New File Storage Mechanism for SQL Server - Some SQL Server news from InfoQ.

Software

1. VSTS Web Access Power Tool for Team System 2008 released
2. ADO.NET Entity Framework Beta 3 Released - New visual designer capabilities, bug fixes, performance improvements and feature requests.  Also see the list of breaking changes.
3. Expression Blend SP1 - Still no integration with TFS.
4. VisualSVN 1.3.2 - Bug fixes.
5. MbUnit V3 and Galileo alpha v1 - Andrew Stopford announces the exciting progress being made towards a major update to MbUnit.
6. TeamCity 3.0 Released - JetBrains announces a new version of this powerful continuous integration and build management solution for Java and .NET.  A free version is available for small teams.
7. Mono on OSX, Win32 - Miguel de Icaza announces some plans for improved Mono support on OSX.
8. MSBuild Wish List vs FinalBuilder Feature Set - Folks at VSoft Technologies illustrate that the excellent FinalBuilder already provides most of the features requested recently by MSBuild users.
9. Package your Own MSDN Library content - GUI Tool for making personalized e-books (.chm and .hxs format) from the MSDN Library or TechNet Library content.

Misc

1. Selection Criteria for JavaScript Frameworks
2. December '07 DevDiv Dogfood Statistics - Just in case you were worried about TFS scaling
3. Shuffling - Jeff Atwood looks as the most efficient algorithm for shuffling a deck of cards.

Happy reading