August 2011
Monthly Archive
The Morning Brew #921
Posted by Chris Alcock on 22 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- August ’11 TFS Power Tools are available! – Brian Harry announces the release of the TFS Power Tools August 11 release. This release includes all the things Brian outlined in his earlier post (Windows Shell Extension updates, Work Item search, Rollback in UI, Build Automation Utils, and much more) Brian also discusses their development release cycle, suggesting that there will likely be a new release in around 4 months time.
Information
- Swapping out JQuery with Fiddler – Eric Lawrence shares a neat tip for debugging JavaScript issues when using minified libraries like jQuery, using Fiddler to swap out the requests for the minified library with the non-minified version so you can easily debug.
- HTML 5 and jQuery – A Match Made in Heaven – Steve Wellens takes a look at using HTML5 data- attributes to decorate HTML content with hooks that jQuery can pick up upon and attach functionality.
- Building JavaScript MVVM apps in ASP.NET MVC using KnockoutJS – Shiju Varghese takes a look at the power of KnockoutJS for building ‘desktop like’ applications using the MVVM pattern in client side code in the browser, illustrating with an ASP.NET MVC backended sample.
- Fundamental MVVM – John Papa gives a nice definition of the MVVM pattern in a short piece for Visual Studio Magazine
- Silverlight 5 Incompatibility: Play by the Rules – Jeremy Likness shares the details of a backward compatibility issue between Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5, illustrating with an example of the issue
- A One File .NET Micro Service Bus for MSMQ? – Johan Danforth shares the details of a micro framework implementation of a Service Bus based on MSMQ. This simple framework shows that ‘big’ architectural concepts don’t have the be huge libraries
- Going Asynchronous – Chris Eargle continues on from his object oriented programming example twitter application, looking at how async operations can be added into the mix to resolve the issues of blocking the UI thread.
- Read only, frozen, and immutable collections – Andrew Arnott takes a look at the various options available for implemented readonly, frozen and immutable collections in .NET, defining the terminology looking at the options, and comparing them on a variety of factors.
Community
- F101- Behaviors, Configuration, and Runtime – Josh Arnold shares the recording of the re-run of hos Webinar on FubuMVC, where he explored routing, controller actions, action calls, behaviors, behaviour nodes, chains and graphs, IUrlPolicy and much more. Josh is keen to get feedback on these sessions and on how they can be included into the guides for FubuMVC.
- NxtGenUG – Event: NHibernate from the trenches – Richard Wilde is taking his session on NHibernate from the trenches to the Oxford NxtGenUG group on Tuesday 13th September, where he will be giving the lowdown on NHibernate 3.2 and its used in real ASP.NET MVC applications.
- Zen and the Art of Software, and How to Manage Your Manager – Scottish Developers welcome Mark Rendle for two sessions on Monday 10th October, delivering both his session on quality in software (titled Zen and the Art of Software) and also his well received ‘How to Manage your Manager’ session.
- NxtGenUG – Event: Jon Skeets’ brain dump – The NxtGenUG in Southampton welcome Jon Skeet for a peek inside his mind on Thursday 15th December, where there will no doubt be a plentiful array of interesting and complex ideas about C# and .NET.
- WPUG 21st Sept 2011 – Windows Phone 7 – WP7Dev – The London Windows Phone User Group are running their regular meeting on Wednesday 21st September 2011, in Juno Bar. The speaker for the event have yet to be confirmed, and the event will have a mmix of presentations app demos, Q&A and a chance to meet your fellow WP7 developers
- FREE Online Windows Phone Mango training August 23rd and 24th – Eric Nelson reminds us all that two days of free virtual training on Windows Phone Mango are available on the 23rd and 24th August, hosted by Rob Miles and Andy Wigley. The sessions are running on US time, so run from 4pm to midnight giving you a deep dive into WP7 Development.
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The Morning Brew #920
Posted by Chris Alcock on 19 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- TouchDevelop v2.1: integrated script bazaar – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Touch Develop 2.1, an update to the recent 2.0 release which brings integration of the Script Bazaar into the main application making it easier to discover and use scripts published by the community.
- Announcing YUI 3.4.0 and the new YUILibrary.com – The Yahoo User Interface team announce the release of YUI 3.4.0, along with the launch of the YUILibrary.com site. YUI 3.4.0 brings with it the first beta of the App Framework, Calendar widget, an overhaul of the Loader, a graphics module (in beta), along with promotions to GA status of a number of previously beta components.
Information
- Bug and Fix: ASP.NET fails to detect IE10 causing _doPostBack is undefined JavaScript error or maintain FF5 scrollbar position – Scott Hanselman discusses the ever increasing version numbers of browsers, and some of the problems this causes for ASP.NET 2.0 and 4.0 browser detection, causing some of the latest browsers to be assumed to be ‘down-level’ clients, meaning ASP.NET renders controls in a basic way for them. Scott highlights how you can update the detection using NuGet packages for individual project fixes, and using hot fixes for machine wide (which will be available soon).
- C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ReferenceEquals() method – James Michael Hare continues his series on C# and .NET little wonders with a look at the ReferenceEquals method, looking at the use of operators for comparing reference types, looking at how they may be overloaded, and how ReferenceEquals fits into this to help avoid circular calls to operators in their overloads.
- A Brief Introduction of Fundamental OOP – Chris Eargle gives a short introduction to some of the Ky Object Oriented Programing principles, discussing how and why they are important
- Calling ASP.NET MVC Action Methods from JavaScript – Phil Haack takes a look at calling ASP.NET MVC Action methods from JavaScript without the usual passing of URLS, sharing a proof of concept using JsonController and JsonRoute to wire things up, sharing the code and a demo.
- HTML5-Powered VNC Implementation noVNC Let’s You Access Remote Systems – Script Junkie – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Rey Bango highlights the work by Joel Martin on a HTML5 based VNC client which uses WebSockets and Canvas to implement the VNC Client allowing remote control of computers – Impressive stuff!
- A Look at Asynchronous Script Downloads – Jon Box discusses the use of the defer and asycn attributes on JavaScript declarations to improve the performance of resource loading on web pages, talking about defer, and focusing in detail on the use of the Aysnc HTML5 feature.
- Unit Testing a WCF RIA DomainService: Part 1, The IDomainServiceFactory, Part 2, The Repository Pattern & Part 3, The DomainServiceTestHost – Kyle McClellan kicks off a series of posts looking at the testing of WCF RIA Services Domain Services, discussing the design of the service and identifying service dependencies, looking at the use of the Repository pattern, and using the DomainServiceTestHost to test your services.
- Implementing your first project into a CI system – Paul Stack continues his series of posts looking at the introduction of Continuous Integration Systems into your development environment, discussing the actual build process, making it portable, automatic and quick to allow you to build as often as you need to in your CI environment.
Community
- A Developer’s Morning with Microsoft – Scottish Developers in conjunction with Microsoft are running a morning event at Microsoft’s Edinburgh office on Friday 9th September. The session will include content on Azure with Steve Plank, and Visual Studio with Steven Clark, a User Experience Researcher on the Visual Studio team. There will also e a keynote from Microsoft’s UK Managing Director Gordon Frazer.
- In The Brain of Kevin Ryan: Kanban for Lean – Skills Matter continue their ‘In the Brain of …’ series of events with a peek inside Kevin Rayn’s brain, looking at the use of Kanban and lean techniques for delivery of IT Solutions. The event, held in Skills Matter in London is free to attend, and runs on Thursday 6th October.
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The Morning Brew #919
Posted by Chris Alcock on 18 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew
Software
- The Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit is now available for "Mango" application development & Exploring the August 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit for ‘Mango’ – Jeff Wilcox announces the release of the August 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit which now targets the Mango edition of the phone OS. This release includes significant updates to a number of controls, adding new features and improving performance.
- New Ajax Grid Scaffolding NuGet Package for MVC 3 – Phil Haack hosts his first Guest Blogger, Stephen Halter, an intern on the ASP.NET Team who discusses the AjaxGridScaffolder package he has been working on which brings Ajax paging and sorting to grids of data easily in ASP.NET MVC 3.
- StyleCop 4.6 released – Tatworth highlights the release of the first alpha of StyleCop 4.6, an update to 4.5 bringing support for ReSharper 6
- Firefox 6 is here – Browser version numbers are shooting upwards, and the FireFox team are not to be left behind, releasing version 6 of Firefox yesterday. This version includes support for the <progress> element, along with touch events, server sent events and web sockets, along with a variety of smaller changes to HTML, CSS, DOM, networking, etc.
Information
- The easy way to set up NuGet to restore packages – David Ebbo highlights the work David Fowler has done in the creation of the NuGetPowerTools package which makes it much easier to set up NuGet use without committing packages to source control, providing a useful improvement on David’s earlier process.
- The Year in Review: W3C Web Performance Working Group – Jatinder Mann takes a look back at the work of the W3C Web Performance Working Group in its first year, giving an update on the specifications the group are working on.
- HTML5 Rocks – How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers – Tali Garsiel takes a fascinating and in-depth look at what goes on inside the modern web browser, discussing in detail the inner working os the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines
- Html 5 Controls for ASP.Net MVC – Saleth Prakash shares a collection of HTML5 ‘controls’ implemented as a comprehensive collection of extension methods for use in ASP.NET MVC views giving you an easy way of rendering these new markup elements.
- AppFabric Duplicate Message Detection – Alan Smith highlights a series of webcasts over on cloudcast.net on Azure AppFabric Queues, Duplicate Message Detection, and Messaging Message Expiration, and shares an article version which digs into the code for the duplicate message detection
- Underscore.js – K. Scott Allen highlights Underscore.js, a library which adds functional programming support to JavaScript without extending any built-in JavaScript objects, allowing you to write more functional style code.
- Making the most out of IIS compression – Part 1: configuring IIS 7 compression – Matt Perdeck starts a 2 part series looking at compression in Internet Information Services (IIS), beginning with part 1 looking at compression in IIS7, looking at the installation and configuration of the compression features.
Community
- NxtGenUG – Event: A Look at Powershell – Jimmy Skowronski joins the Coventry NxtGenUG on Monday 26th September 2011 for a session looking at the use of PowerShell from the ground up, exploring its use for developers and sysadmins alike, and looking at the extensibility provided by PowerShell.
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