.NET community news bulletin issue 2

Yes, I do remember that I promised to write this bulletin at a regular basis, but probably due to my busy schedule and my occasional laziness, I failed horribly. Anyhow, here are some highlights from the last couple of weeks.

• Patterns & Practices have released a second CTP of a Visual Studio 2008-compatible version of the Service Factory : Modeling Edition. Fortunately it solves all bugs we have filed since the first CTP, and it introduces a very helpful Order All Data Members recipe.
• In addition to the new Service Factory release, two Dutch community members have written a nice introducing article on extending the factory. Check it out on MSDN.
• And if you have not seen me and Olaf Conijn co-hosting Don Smith's presentation on Building Your Own Software Factory on the 2007 TechED Developers in Barcelona, check out this MSDN spotlight.
• They've also released a new version of GAX and GAT (Guidance Automation Extensions and Toolkit). I suspect both the Service Factory and Web Client teams are waiting for this before they release their final VS2008 factories, since this version of GAX adds better support for it. Moreover, it finally allows installing without the need to first uninstall ALL software factories and guidance packages. We're near to the end of February, and Glenn Block, the product manager for the Web Client Software Factory promised us a new factory around the end of this month...
• It seems that P&P is very busy these days. In a first step towards Enterprise Library 4, they've released a first, but very promising CTP of the next installment of the ObjectBuilder dependency injection framework. It's called Unity and closely resembles other DI frameworks such as Spring and Castle Windsor.
• Scott Guthrie has released some of Microsoft's plans for building .NET client applications. Check out his blog post.
• Even though Visual Studio 2008 is not yet physically available in stores, Microsoft has already released a hotfix. Check out the details on Scott's blog.
• JetBrains have started releasing nightly builds of Resharper 4.0 for Visual Studio 2008. Check out the release notes to see what awesome new features have been added. Since we are using LINQ very heavily, I've started working with these early builds immediately. I must say, I'm quite impressed with the stability and the huge productivity boost it gives.
• While searching for more information on how to customize the Team Foundation Server reports, I ran into something that is called the Scenario Coverage Analyzer. It's a handy add-on that introduces an .NET Attribute that creates a relation between a particular part of your code and the corresponding TFS Scenario. Using a custom MS Build task it can generate a report providing statistics on aspects like code coverage, ordered by scenario.