The Morning Brew

In case you missed it, and would like a taste of the Link Overload I suffered last week, I published an extra-ordinary (and rather late) ‘Afternoon Tea’post yesterday catching up on all the bits of //Build I had missed out so far, and also sharing a number of great (non-build related) links that got caught in the rush last week.a

Software

• PowerShell Version 3 Released for Windows 7 - CTP #1 - Doug Finke highlights the release of the first CTP of PowerShell 3 for Windows 7. This brings the same PowerShell that was included in the Windows 8 Preview to your existing Windows 7 machines.
• Windows Management Framework 3.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP) #1 Available for Download - The PowerShell 3 CTP is available as a part of the Windows Management Framework 3.0 CTP, which combines PowerShell with new versions of WMI, WinRM and PowerShell Web Services.

Information

• Inheritance and Representation - Eric Lippert explores the deeper meanings of inheritance by way of a reader question on generics
• Dependency Management in .Net: Using NuGet without Visual Studio - Derek Greer discusses how NuGet answers a number of his previously discussed dependency management problems, discussing its use from the command line, and looking at combining it with the Rake build tool.
• Why Can’t We Be Friends? Art and Function in Windows Phone Apps - Paul Laberge discusses some of the User Interface considerations you should think about when designing your Windows Phone applications
• The New Team Explorer in TFS 11 - Brian Harry takes an in-depth look at what is new in the Visual Studio 11 Team Explorer exploring its use in a number of common usage scenarios, illustrating the new features of the tooling.
• Want to know more about Becoming Agile, F# or WCF? Head to the MSDN Library… - Sara Allison highlights the availability of 2 free online copies of published books on MSDN and a series of articles , covering Agile practices, F# and Windows Communication Foundation.
• Looking Back at BUILD - Roland Weigelt reflects back on the //Build conference, discussing all aspects of the conference and sharing the key points he took away.
• Windows 8 and the up and coming Hardware Revolution - Keith Elder shares his thoughts and experiences with the Windows 8 Developer Preview, discussing the key features of the OS, the factors which will make or break it, and discussing the hardware upon which its would ideally run.
• My List of Must-See Build 2011 Videos - Pete Brown shares his key collection of sessions from the //Build/ Conference as links to the (excellent quality) video recordings of the sessions, so you can get the best conference experience without being there
• Windows Azure and Cloud Session Content from the //BUILD/ Windows Conference 2011 - Roger Jennings has collected together a page with all the sessions which discussed Windows Azure topics for those of you with Azure as a focus or just keen to learn (a lot) more.
• XAMLFinance - A Cross-platform WPF, Silverlight & WP7 Application - Colin Eberhardt shares a long and detailed article discussing the building of an application across 3 platforms (WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone) making the most re-use of parts of the application over the multiple platform versions.

Community

• Belfast - 1 Oct 2011 - Register - Registrations for the Developer Developer Developer conference to be held on Saturday 1st October in Belfast are now open. The conference is free to attend, and features 3 tracks of interesting .NET developer related content.
• NNUG Online - September 2011 - The Norwegian .NET Usergroup have their September Live Meeting event on Wednesday 21st September, starting at 18:00 local time (17:00 UK). This month’s event features Einar Ingebrigtsen discussing Command Query Responsibility Segregation
• Black Marble Events- Re-Build - Dev - Black Marble are hosting an afternoon developer focused event on Wednesday 12th October where they will be re-capping all the key announcements and information released at the //Build/ Conference. There is also an IT pro session being hosted that morning.

1 Comment »

Catching up on all the great posts from last week and the weekend with a heavy dose of //Build/ content, along with the non-build links that missed out on being included last week.

//Build/ Related

• Windows Build/Windows 8: My Impressions - Change is a good thing - John Petersen reflects back over the //Build/ Conference discussing how the latest announcements fit in with the on-going bigger picture of the evolution of our platform.
• BUILD Day #3 in Review According to MVPs - The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - The MVP Programme Blog highlights a number of posts from MVPs discussing the events, announcements and experiences of the 3rd Day of the //Build/ conference.
• Why I’m Excited About Windows 8 - Dan Wahlin shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 Developer Preview, discussing the various aspects of the announcement, the technology, its likelihood of adoption, and what the consumer facing feature may mean for the Enterprise Developer.
• A Tale of Two Windows - Andrew Burst discusses the difficult problem that Windows 8 attempts to address, being all things to all people across user experience, Human Computer Interaction technologies and platforms.
• My thoughts about Build, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and Silverlight - Laurent Bugnion shares a nice discussion of the Windows 8 announcement, and the reaction to the proposed options for the development platform for Windows 8 Metro style applications, weighing up the various options presented in the different aspects of the //Build/ Conference.
• Windows Runtime - Dial in the right expectations before reading up - Samuel Jack urges us all to ensure we have the right expectations before you embark on looking at the new world of WinRT
• Real Native WinRT Development - Ian Griffiths drops down to the COM level and explore WinRT by looking at consuming it at this level using C++, revealing something of how WinRT actually works
• WinRT and .NET, WinRT and business apps & CSLA on WinRT (project start) - Rockford Lhotka discusses the announcement of WinRT, discusses its possible future use in Line of Business applications and outlines his plans for his CSLA application framework on Windows 8 / WinRT
• WinRT and .NET in Windows 8 - Sasha Goldshtein outlines the position of WinRT alongside the existing UI technologies like WPF and Silverlight.
• Microsoft’s New Mullet - Colin Blair looks at the now famous Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide from the //Build/ Conference discussing the UI technologies and their appropriateness for different types of application.
• A bad picture is worth a thousand long discussions - Doug Seven discusses the difficulty in creating a good marketing info graphic, exploring the Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide, sharing some details from discussions with members of the .NET Team and re-drawing the diagram to better reflect the intended reality.

Software

• Released: Project Silk Client-Side Web Development for Modern Browsers - Karl Shifflett announces the official release of Project Silk - a guidance package for the creation of rich web based experiences using modern web development technologies and techniques. This release comes on the end of a series of preview releases where we have been able to watch the team build the guidance package and the supporting sample application.
• Announcing Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta - Stathis Papaefstathiou announces the beta release of the first beta of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. The major features of this release involve integration of Kinect based functionality for improved Human Robot Interaction, and a Silverlight based CCR Programming model.
• Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.0 have been released! - Michael Washam announces the release of a new version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. This version 2 release adds a number of new and updated cmdlets for improving the Deployment, diagnostics capabilities of Azure from your PowerShell command line.
• Now Available: The Service Bus September 2011 Release - Clemens Vasters announces the September 2011 release of the Azure Service Bus. The new release improves capabilities in Pub/Sub messaging, enables load balancing capabilities for Intra Application messaging, supports Asynchronous Cloud Eventing and Event Driven Service Oriented Architectures
• WebMatrix v2 Beta is out… - Greg Duncan highlights the announcement from Simon Tan of the Beta release of WebMatrix V2. This release sees a significant development in the product, and brings with it a range of great new features for development using PHP, JavaScript, and .NET, including NuGet support, and improved data management options and features. Be sure to check out the linked New features document for all the new bits.
• PlayStation Suite SDK beta coming in November, offering new games in spring 2012 - Engadget highlights the forthcoming Sony PlayStation Suite which will support the use of C# to program games for the various Sony games platforms,

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 4: New template for web applications, ASP.NET MVC 4: New mobile web application template &ASP.NET MVC 4: Display modes - Gunnar Peipman explore the new ASP.NET MVC 4 application template, giving a preview of the layout, and discussing how it makes better use of CSS and HTML(5), and provides a mobile friendly version before moving on to look at the new Display Modes feature allowing you to conditionally render different views to mobile devices, discussing how you can simulate and test this behaviour using your desktop browser and looking at creating custom display mode rules.
• Demystifying the Windows 8 Grid Application - Bil Simser takes the wraps off the Metro Grid Application Template included in the Visual Studio 11 Preview release, exploring the structure of the template and how and what each part does.
• Windows 8 : Metro’s Grid Application - what, how and when ? - Jonathan Antonie also explores the new Windows 8 Metro Grid application template included in Visual Studio 11, looking at the UI Experience and exploring the creation of a sample application using the template.
• Metro .NET Framework Profile (Windows Tailored) - Sasha Goldshtein discusses the parts of the .NET API which are exposed to the new Metro Style applications, discussing what is in and out, some of the possible work around available to getting at other bits of the framework, and their effects of App Marketplace compliance.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Fetch and Lazy, SELECT N + 1 & Merge - Ricardo Peres continues his series focusing on some of the possible problems you as developer can run into using the NHibernate ORM with a look at the condusion around Fetch and he problem of Select N+1 when retrieving complex object graphs, and discusses merging entities back into the session and the backing data store from outside the current Session.
• Windows 8 - An OS of two halves - Colin Eberhardt shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 dual UI experience, from both a developer and end user perspective, discussing the confusion the two UIs may cause, and how we have to be careful to select the right UI for our applications.
• Using System.Reflection.Emit in a Windows 8 Metro style Application - Jason Bock discusses the use of Reflection.Emit in Metro applciation by way of including a .NET Class Library to do the reflection emit work, hard coding the reference to the class library assembly, and discussing the probable impact of this technique on your ability to get the Metro application into the market place.
• Creating Data-driven web apps using ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms - Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the new model binding functionality available in ASP.NET WebForms 4.5 Preview, looking based upon Damian Edwards session at //Build/
• Extending configuration in OpenRasta 2.1 - Sebastien Lambla discusses some changes to OpenRasta 2.1 which make extending OpenRasta’s configuration API easier and also support writing extensions for 2.1 which will continue to function in OpenRasta 3.0
• Effective Xml Part 1: Choose the right API - Pawel Kadluczka starts a series of posts looking at the different APIs provided for working with XML data and documents and looking at whcih approach is best suited to which scenario.
• The .NET Dictionary - Simon Cooper takes a look at the implementation of the humble .NET Dictionary class, looking at the internal structure used by the dictionary to keep track of items.
• Creating simple and complex animations with JQuery in ASP.Net applications - Nikolaos Kantzelis discusses animations using jQuery, sharing some samples which illustrate varying levels of complexity of animation
• What is the cost of try/catch - Ayende discusses one of the misunderstandings people commonly have with try/catch exception handling - that there is actually no performance penalty in using Try / Catch in your code unless exceptions are thrown.

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I’m planning an Afternoon Tea post this afternoon / evening to attempt to record all the great articles and announcements I have open in the (must be aproaching 100+) browser tabs which are currently causing my laptop to go very slow.

Software

• Visual Studio 11 ALM Developer Preview: Virtual Machine with Hands-on-Labs + Demo Scripts now available - Esther Fan highlights the availability of a Virtual Machine Environment for the Visual Studio 11 ALM Preview release, including demos and hands on labs, and the correct versions of all the bits and pieces all preconfigured.

Information

• Improvements in the CLR Core in .NET Framework 4.5 - Sasha Goldshtein highlights some of the many improvements made in the preview release of the new version of the .NET Framework, discussing Garbage Collection, JIT, NGen and other optimisations.
• What’s New For Parallelism in .NET 4.5 - Stephen Toub discusses the enhancements made to the .NET Framework which improve the support for parallel programming, disucssing the Task Parallel Library, PLINQ, improved support for controlling your workload via partitioning, reductions, timeouts, the introduction of Async support, and the improved tooling in Visual Studio.
• New Tools and New Content - ASP.NET, Visual Studio 11 Web and .NET 4.5 Developer Preview (with commentary) - Scott Hanselman discusses the new releases from the ‘Angle Brackets Team’ announced at //Build/, including their part in Visual Studio 11, the NuGet 1.5 update for VS 11, ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4 Preview, Web Pages 2 Preview, RIA for JS/HTML5, and the WCF 4.5 Developer preview. Lots of great stuff to play with.
• New CSS editor features in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - Web Development Tools @ Microsoft - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Van Kichline and Peter Spada of the VWD Dev Team share a look at the new CSS editor functionality available in the Visual Studio 11 product line, discussing the improvements, and showing how you can give feedback on the new features.
• Knockout.js - using MVVM in HTML & JavaScript applications - Dan Jones discusses the Knockout.js Javacript MVVM implementation from Steve Sanderson, highlighing some good resources for those interested in getting started with Knockout (which I’m sure I saw somewhere was included in the MVC4 Preview release).
• Running Windows 8 Developer Preview in a virtual environment - Steven Sinofsky shares a post from Sue Bohn, David Hicks, Cornel Lupu discussing the use of the Windows 8 Developer Preview in different Virtualisation Technologies, highlighting those know to work OK and those which have issues.
• Functional Fun: What’s new in C# 5.0 and VB.Net? - Samuel Jack discusses some of the significant new features of the C#5 and VB.NET releases included in the .NET 4.5 / VS 11 Developer Preview announced in Anders Hejlberg’s session at //Build/ including Windows Runtime, The Roslyn Project and Asynchronous Methods.

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Still struggling to keep up (or catch up) - there may have to be an ‘Afternoon Tea’ post this weekend to get back up to date.

//Build

• The Windows Runtime & Using WinRT from C# //build Demo - Harry Pierson discusses his involvement with the WinRT as a Program Manager on the Runtime Experience Team, highlighting some of the key features, pointing to //Build sessions about those features, and sharing some example code from his session on Using Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic.
• Learning about the Team Foundation Service Preview - Martin Woodward shares the key information about the Team Foundation Service hosted service running on the Windows Azure Platform, discussing the key features, where you can find more information, and how you can help give feedback.
• TFS Azure - Technical Access Preview Experience! - Tarun Arora discusses the TFS as a Service, sharing some key questions and answers, as well as giving a walk through the product by way of a series of screenshots with narrative.
• PowerShell v3 and JSON - Doug Finke highlights the release of PowerShell 3 as a part of the Windows Developer Preview, making note of two new commands which give PowerShell native JSON support
• Web API Preview 5 Is Now Available - Howard Dierking highlights the announcement of the 5th Preview release of the Web API at the //Build Conference. This new preview is a significant step forwards with a large number of new features along with some breaking changes. The release is also available via NuGet.
• New JavaScript editing features for Web development in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - The Web Development Tools blog highlights some of the new features for JavaScript in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, comparing the new implementation to what was available in Visual Studio 2010.
• WinRT demystified - Miguel de Icaza gives a nice discussion of the WinRT, looking at its origins, the problems it looks to fix, and discusses its use in building components
• Lots and lots of interesting //Build related posts being written still….here are a few:
  • Microsoft dev stack vNext from Build - Simone Chiaretta
  • OK, so I think HTML/JS for Metro apps is a good idea - Mark Rendle
  • BUILD: WinRT, Silverlight, WPF, XAML - Jeremy Alles
  • Build day 2: WinRT and managed languages - Bill Wagner
  • BUILD Day #2 in Review According to MVPs - MVP Award Program
  • SELA Blogs and Tweets @ BUILD - Sasha Goldshtein highlights //Build content from some of his colleagues.
• Download all the Build Videos with RSS - Michael Crump highlights the availability of RSS feeds including the links to the video recordings of //Build Sessions. Greg Duncan also has a useful tip for building a custom feed in his post Channel 9 Events / BUILD2011 RSS Feed Tip, Building your perfect, custom, filtered BUILD RSS feed -

Information

• WebMatrix and node.js: The easiest way to get started with node on Windows - Scott Hanselman highlights some great work by Tomasz Janczuk and Steve Sanderson which brings a use of WebMatrix as an IDE for Node.Js Development on the Windows Platform by way of some project templates and the IISNode for IIS Express project.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The String Remove() and Replace() Methods - James Michael Hare continues his series of less well known about parts of the .NET Framework and C# language continuing exploring some of the methods of the String class, looking today at Remove and Replace.
• Back to Basics: Big O notation issues with older .NET code and improving for loops with LINQ deferred execution - Scott Hanselman is also continuing his Back to Basics series with a look at the Big O notation for analysing the performance characteristics of code, digging through an example of a method in the .NET Framework, and discussing its performance, along with comparing how a LINQ based version would behave.
• A Step-by-step guid to creating your first Hello World Metro style app using Live Connect - Shelly Guo shares a walkthrough of building a Windows 8 Metro application which makes use of the Live Connect SDK (another new release at //Build) developed in HTML and JavaScript.
• My Pluralsight C++ Fundamentals course is live! (and free for a little while) - Kate Gregory highlights the release of her C++ Fundamentals course with the folks at Pluralsight, which is available to access during //Build for free.
• Zombies! RUN! (Managing Page Transitions In Backbone Apps) - Derick Bailey continues his series of posts looking at the Backbone.js platform and discusses some of the common problem developer can run into with event binding.

No Comments »

Lots and lots of good stuff posted yesterday - so much so I ran out of time preparing today’s edition so will include the good stuff over the next few days…

//Build Developer Announcements

• Announcing Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - Jason Zander shares the announcement of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview release - available now to MSDN Subscribers, and as general availability from Friday 10am PDT. Visual Studio 11 brings with it a number of new features (some brought in from successful extensions), and supports the full range of development, including Metro Apps, Games, new unit testing functionality, and support for the .NET Framework 4.5
• BUILD Conference: the Jason Zander interview - Julian Bucknall shares a DevExpress video interview wih Jason Zander where he discusses the new features of Visual Studio 11.
• New Features for Web Development in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - The Web Development Tools @ Microsoft blog discusses the new features of Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 for Web Developers including IISExpress as default, the new JavaScript Editor, LocalDB and much more.
• Get the scoop on the ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web Pages 2, and Visual Studio 11 Developer Previews - Jon Galloway shares a great collection of links about all aspects of the ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web Pages 2 and Visual Studio 11 releases, linking out to the official announcements of all the new features.
• ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview Released - Phil Haack announce the release of the Developer Preview of ASP.NET MVC4. This new release can run along side the ASP.NET MVC3 release, includes NuGet 1.5, is available in NuGet Package format, and includes lots of great features as outlined in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Release Notes
• .NET 4.5 now includes the core AntiXSS functions - Barry Dorrans highlights the inclusion of the AntiXSS functions from the version 4 of the AntiXSS Library in the ASP.NET 4.5 preview release
• F# 3.0 Developer Preview Now Available! - The Visual Studio F# Team Blog announce the release of F# 3.0 Developer Preview as a part of the Visual Studio 11 & .NET 4.5 Developer Preview Releases, discussing some of the new features of this major release of the language.
• JUST ANNOUNCED @ BUILD: New Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8, Windows Azure SDK 1.5, Geo-Replication for Windows Azure Storage, and More - The Windows Azure Team announce the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 and the Windows Azure SDK 1.5 at //Build. More details of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8 can found in ANNOUNCING the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows 8

//Build - General and Windows 8

• Metro style browsing: one engine, two experiences, no compromises & Metro style browsing and plug-in free HTML5 - Steven Sinofsky discusses more about the Windows Metro Experience in Windows 8 discussing the different modes of web browsing in Windows 8, looking at some of the features, and how it has been optimized to improve performance and battery life
• From Soup to Nuts: Using VirtualBox with Windows 8 Developer Preview - Michael Crump shares a Step By Step walk through of the process of installing the Windows 8 Developer preview inside the VirtualBox Virtual Machine platform.
• How to create a bootable USB flash drive to install Windows 8 Developer Preview - Habib Heydarian walks through the process of making a bootable USB Flash Drive to install the Windows 8 Developer Preview on a physical machine.
• Windows 8 Server: Screenshots + What’s new - Owen Williams shares some screen shots of the Windows 8 Server, showing some of the new features of the server version of the OS.
• A round up of the days summary posts from a variety of authors:
  • Sessions at BUILD Day 2 and Windows 8 - Sasha Goldshtein
  • BUILD conference - day 2 - Gabriel Schenker
  • //Build/ Day 1 Recap and Thoughts - Darcy Lussier
  • BUILD Day #1 in Review According to MVPs - The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog
• Windows 8, Metro and IE10: First impressions - Charles Young shares his intial impressions of the Windows 8 Developer Preview
• Thoughts on Windows 8 (part 2) - Mike Hadlow follows up on a post from a few month ago wich discussed the intial Window 8 Announcements, taking a look at what has changed in the Developer Story for Windows 8 applications.

Information

• A first encounter with Windows8 Development (C#, XAML, JavaScript) - Ioannis takes a look at the development experience for building Windows 8 Metro applications using Visual Studio, JavaScript, C# and XAML.
• Fiddler and Windows 8 Metro-style applications - Eric Lawrence discusses getting Fiddle up and running with Metro based Windows 8 applications, walking through the required configuration to allow Fiddler to intercept the web traffic of these applications.
• Using ACS in Metro Style Applications - Vibro.NET - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Vittorio Bertocci discusses in detail the use of the ACS apis in your Windows 8 Metro applications, highlighting the functionality included in some demonstration applications.

Community

• Maidenhead SQL Server User Group - The first meeting of the Maidenhead SQL Server User Group is happening on the evening of Tuesday 4th October. The event will have 2 presentations (stillTBC) and provide an opportunity to meet your fellow SQL professionals.
• "Functional Alchemy" and "CoffeeScript 101" - Scottish Developer welcom Mark Rendle for two sessions ‘Functional Alchemy: Tricks to keep your C# DRY’ and ‘CoffeeScript 101′ on Tuesday 11th October.

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Windows 8

• Welcome to Windows 8 - The Developer Preview - Steven Sinofsky announced the release of a Developer Preview of Windows 8 yesterday at the //build conference, available to download now.
• Windows 8 Developer Preview with tools available for download - SQLDenis shares the details of the various downloads of the Windows 8 Developer Preview and associated developer tooling generally available and those available for MSDN subscribers.
• Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) - Scott Hanselman gives a walk through installing the Windows 8 Developer Preview using the Boot from VHD functionality, allowing a dual boot with an existing Windows 7 installation.
• Experiencing Windows 8 touch on Windows 7 hardware - Steven Sinofsky discusses the touch hardware aspects of Windows 8, and some of the devices which are supported by the Developer Preview allowing you to get to grips with the touch aspects of the new OS.
• You need to have hardware virtualization enabled if you want to run Windows 8 in Virtual Box - SQLDenis also highlights the need for hardware CPU virtualisation support for running the Windows 8 Developer Preview in a virtual machine through VirtualBox, and show how you can verify your hardware does.
• How and where to download the Windows 8 Windows Developer Preview, watch the BUILD Day 1 keynote replay, access information, and much more - Eric Ligman shares a nice collection of Windows 8 links and some other //build related content, including fact sheets on Windows 8, Press Releases, Windows 8 Team blog posts and much more.
• Windows 8 Announcement Executive Summary & Some Thoughts on Windows 8 - Sasha Goldshtein shares an overview of the Windows 8 announcement, along with sharing some of his thoughts on the new platform.

//Build Related

• BUILDing the Future with Visual Studio - & Expression Blend for HTML - Somasegar puts a developer spin on the first day of the //build conference, highlighting the inclusion of Visual Studio 11 Express as a part of the Windows 8 Developer Tools and a new edition of Expression Blend for building HTML based applications.
• The Windows 8 Developer Ecosystem - Chris Eargle highlights a slide from the //build keynote discussing the developer eco system for Windows 8 Development showing how the various technologies fit together.
• Lots of people are writing up their experiences of the //build conference - here are some of them:
  • BUILD conference - day 1 - Gabriel Schenker
  • //build Keynote: The New App Platform and Tools - The UX Thread
  • Tuesday Keynote @ Build Windows 8 - Mike Kelly
  • //Build/ Day 1 - How to Create a Successful Metro App with Jensen Harris - Darcy Lussier
  • Bullet Points from Build - Day 1 and my thoughts - Michael Crump
  • //build conference in Anaheim: Keynote notes #bldwin - Laurent Bugnion
  • BUILD Day 1 Keynote / Reveal: First thoughts - Bill Wagner

Software

• jQuery 1.6.4 Released - John Resig announces the official release of jQuery 1.6.4, an update release, fixing some minor issues with the 1.6 release series.
• TouchDevelop v2.2: tutorial mode, improved code editor, events - Nikolai Tillmann announces a new release of TouchDevelop. Version 2.2 includes a nice tutorial mode which helps you get started with TouchDevelop, improves the code editor and brings support for events, allowing you to write event driven code.
• Windows Phone Power Tools - orena announces the release of ‘Windows Phone Power Tools’, an open source project (hosted on hich enables developers to access the phone, update developer xaps, and explore isolated .

Information

• CPU Throttling for ASP.NET Asynchronous Scenarios in vNext - Jose Reyes discusses a features coming in ASP.NET vNext which will allow you to control the CPU use of requests to better handle high load while maintaining throughput.
• Windows Developer Preview: The Third IE10 Platform Preview - Dean Hachamovitch announces the 3rd preview release of Internet Explorer 10, included in the Windows 8 Developer Preview, highlighting new and updated demos which show off its capabilities.
• Resources For, And How I Learned Backbone.js - Derick Bailey answers a number of questions from Mark Muskardin about how he got to know backbone.js, the resources he recommends and other useful advice for those looking to get started with Backbone.js.
• The PowerShell Magazine Launches - Doug Finke highlights the launch of PowerShell Magazine, a new free publication for which his is both a founder and editor which will focus exclusively on PowerShell.
• Differences in JavaScript Performance Across IE9 Document Modes - Chris Jackson discusses the performance of JavaScript code in Internet Explorer 9 in the different document modes

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Software

• jQuery 1.6.4 RC1 released - The jQuery Team announce the release of the first release candidate of jQuery 1.6.4, hoped to be the final 1.6 release this one addresses a number of bugs from previous 1.6 versions , and the team are keen for you to try it out.
• MVVM Light V4 beta1 - Laurent Bugnion announces the first beta release of MVVM Light v4, a toolkit for easing the creation of MVVM based applications on WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone. The V4 release will be a significant one, with a series of major changes included.
• Microsoft Solver Foundation v3.1 Released - Nate Brixius announces the release of version 3.1 of the Microsoft Solver Foundation, with th express edition available for download, with MSDN MSDNAA and Enterprise versions available soon. This release brings improved LINQ bindings better performance, and numerous solving improvements and new features.
• Sync Framework now Open Source! - EGolpe highlights the release of the Sync Framework as an open source project, under mixed Apache 2.0 and MS-PL licenses (Client / Server)
• Announcing Windows Azure Autoscaling Block preview - Grigori Melnik announces the preview release of the Windows Azure Autoscaling application block. This first release is available via NuGet and provides a way of automating and control the scaling of your application. This preview release has very little documentation, although the team are working on improving that

Information

• Web Forms Model Binding Part 2: Filtering Data (ASP.NET vNext Series) - Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the features of ASP.NET and Visual Studio vNext, continuing the exploration of the new Model Binding capabilities of ASP.NET WebForms, exploring the filtering of data
• Implementing a simple HTTP server in .NET Microframework - Laurent Ellerbach discusses the creation of a simple HTTP based server, implemented in .NET Micro Framework and able to run on a Netduino
• Trying out OpenWrap 2.0 - Seb Lambla gives an update on the progress being made on the v2.0 of OpenWrap his package manager project, and available now as an alpha release, which Seb encourages you to try out and join in with the development by submitting bug reports or joining in with the coding.
• Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser control and target="_blank" - Dan Crevier discusses an awkward issue with links in web pages which use target="_blank" to open new windows, something which causes links to not work when using the WebBrowser control, sharing a slightly ugly workaround.
• Fun with enum - Derek Fowler discusses some of the issues with parsing values into Enums, looking at the use of Convert.ChangeType and Enum.IsDefined to help with the conversion in a TryParse Implementation.
• The Rise of F# - Phil Trelford takes a look back over the F# language’s rise in popularity discussing some of the key points and events which helped make F# the language it is today.
• Castle validator component for Beginner - Henry He shares an introduction to the Castle Validator project, introducing the attributes used for validation, discussing how the validation works from an architecture point of view, and looking at the implementation of custom validation rules.

Community

• Live BUILD Keynotes Available Online - The Swiss MSDN Team Blog highlights the live streaming of the //build conference Keynote addresses today and tomorrow, starting at 9am PDT.
• Windows Phone User Group comes to Manchester, UK - ChrisNTR - Chris Hardy higlights the first Windows Phone Usergroup meeting in Manchester, being held this evening (Tuesday 13th) at MadLab in Manchester

No Comments »

I’m expecting a busy blogging week this week with the // BUILD conference this week….

Software

• Package validation in NuGet Package Explorer - Marcin Mikołajczak of SymbolSource.org shares a useful extension for the NuGet Package Explorer allowing you to validate your symbols packages for your projects ensuring that your packages contain all the correct symbols for your assemblies.
• "Mouse without Borders" utility from Microsoft Garage (Software KVM + Shared Clipboard + Files) - Greg Duncan highlights ‘Mouse without Borders’ a tool that allows you to share a single mouse and keyboard over multiple machines, as well as providing clipboard synchronisation and drag and drop file copy between machines.
• Chutzpah - Chutzpah 1.2.0 Released - Matthew Manela announces the release of Chutzpah 1.2.0, his JavaScript test runner which can be run from the command line and Visual Studio. This new release is available as NuGet packge, source on Codeplex, and also in the Visual Studio Gallery and provides a way of running JavaScript tests in command line and browser.
• Sync Framework Toolkit now available for download - Sreedhar Pelluru announces the release of the Sync Framework Toolkit which provides easy means for creating disconnected applications with data synchronisation supported over multiple platforms

Information

• New Release of SQL Azure - Shaun Xu discusses the latest update to the Sql Azure Platform, looking at the version increase and the new features of the management tooling.
• A Lap Around the New Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Visual Studio - Richard Seroter takes a look at the newly released Amazon Web Services Toolkit for Visual Studio which brings a number of great features for working with AWS services to the Visual Studio IDE
• Asynchronous Programming in JavaScript with ‘Promises’ - Matt Podwysocki and Amanda Silver take a look at the use of promises (or deferreds) in JavaScript to make asynchronous programming easier, exploring their implementation in jQuery and Dojo.
• Why I Prefer JavaScript Over CoffeeScript - Davy Brion shares his opinions on the use of CoffeeScript to write JavaScript versus writing JavaScript natively
• HTML5 Platformer: the complete port of the XNA game to <canvas> with EaselJS - David Rousset shares and discusses his efforts in porting the XNA 4.0 platformer game sample to HTML 5 using canvas for the rendering, discussing some of the interesting points in the code, and sharing the full code.
• Automating Azure 1.4 Packaging using MSBuild and CSPack- via Iain Hunter - Eric Nelson highlights a series of posts from Iain Hunter discussing his work migrating an ASP.NET MVC 3 application to the Windows Azure platform, discussing the decision to use Azure, working with SQL Azure, and looking at automating package creation for your application to make it easier to deploy to Azure.
• Writing Maintainable Code - Michael Williamson discusses the art and science of creating good maintainable code discussing some principles which can help, illustrating with examples.
• Mapping a Route with Directions using the Bing Maps WPF Control (Beta) - Brian Lagunas continues his exploration of the Bing Maps WPF control with a look at using the routing and directions web services and combining them with the map display, building a working sample.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Lazy Properties and Closed Sessions &Entity Refresh - Ricardo Peres continues his series of posts looking at common pitfalls developers may fall into when using the NHibernate ORM, taking a look at problems using Lazy Loaded properties when the session is closed, and looking at refreshing entities with up to date data from the database.

Community

• First RavenDB webinar is now on YouTube - Ayende announces the availability of the recording of the first RavenDB webinar session on YouTube (in multiple 15 minute chunks)
• Functional Programming eXchange 2012: Call for abstracts - Rob Pickering announces the call for abstracts for the Functional Programming eXchange 2012 to be held at Skills Matter in London on Friday 16th March 2012

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