New and Notable 261

As Jon notes, the BizTalk course in NYC that he taught is over. I want to thank Jon for a great course. If you want to take the best BizTalk (or WF or WCF) courses around, you want to see Jon and Pluralsight. I also really enjoyed hanging out with Jon all week, and going to his NYC REST talk.

SQL Server 2008

• The big news is that SQL Server 2008 has finally been released. Today Eval Edition and Feature Pack became available
• However, there are issues. The biggest one seems to be that it wants to install an RTM version of .NET 3.5 SP1, which is in beta still until Monday the 11th. It seems prudent to wait. 

Silverlight

• I have been posting links on Silverlight for a long time now but I am currently spending a lot of time with WCF for Silverlight, both REST and SOAP style. As Damir notes, "Microsoft has announced that DataContractserializer in version net35 sp1 will no more require class attributes DataContract and DataMember (finally).
  However, it is intersting that DataContractSerializer implementation in Silverlight already does not require [DataContract] and [DataMember] attributes on classes, which have to be serialized." Personally, I think this defeats the whole "Boundaries are Explicit" tenet of SOA and the GOOD opt-in model but what do I know?

TDD/IronRuby/IronPython

• Typemock Isolater 4.3.2 has been released, mainly bug fixes but there is support for  ExactMagic's TestMatrix code coverage tool which I also use
• Part 6 of Justin's outstanding series IronRuby via C# is out