The Morning Brew

Software

• Azure AppFabric Service Bus Explorer (with code) - Greg Duncan highlights a tool from Paolo Salvatori for examining the contents of an instance of the Windows Azure Service Bus, allowing you to see the information stored in messages. Full Source is available for this useful applet.
• VS11DP Microsoft Parallel Visualization Pack - Greg also highlights a nice Visual Studio 11 add-in which brings visualisations to the new Parallel Watch Window giving easier ways to view the data once you get more contexts.

Information

• In managed code we trust, our recent battles with the .NET Garbage Collector - Sam Saffron follows up on the recent discussions from the team at Stack Overflow about issues they encountered with the .NET Garbage Collector delaying requests, discussing how they noticed and isolated the problem, and the way they improved the situation.
• Is That a WeakReference In Your Gen 2 or Are You Just Glad to See Me? - John Robbins discusses the identification of the cause of problems with high memory usage in .NET applications, looking at how he diagnosed high memory use by weak referenced objects.
• Introducing Managed Bootstrapper Applications - Heath Stewart discusses the new Managed Bootstrapper Application (MBA), a part of the WiX 3.6 release, which you may have seen in use if you have installed the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. Heath discusses its capabilities and how it works under the hood in this first post on the subject.
• OpenWrap 2.0.1 - a better way to look at dependencies - Seb Lambla discusses the improved ‘List-Wraps’ command in OpenWrap 2.0.1 which helps make clearer the package dependencies of your projects as a part of his ongoing series of posts on the new features of this major version number release.
• Update NuGet Docs in the Browser with Github - Phil Haack discusses how the NuGet Team have moved their documentation repository to GitHub to take advantage of the in browser editing of MarkDown files to help reduce the difficulty of contributing to the documentation effort.
• Getting Started with JavaScript…again - Christopher Bennage urges you to embrace JavaScript again now that it has become ‘cool’ again, highlighting some good books, resources and principles to help you along the way.
• Lessons From A Review Of JavaScript Code - Addy Osmani discusses the value of Code Reviews for developing your skills, highlighting places that you can get your JavaScript reviewed by other developers, talking about the review process, and looking at some of the things to look for in reviews of JavaScript.
• Sharing session between ASP Classic and ASP.NET using ASP.NET Session state server - Li Chen takes a look at sharing sessions between ASP.NET and Classic ASP applications using the NSession project, discussing the installation and use of the library.
• Analyze your C# Source files using PowerShell and the Get-RoslynInfo Cmdlet - Doug Finke shares his efforts so far at bringing PowerShell and Roslyn together to allow you to analyse your source code from within PowerShell, illustrating it in use with the NuGet code base.
• Tip/Trick when working with the Application Bar in WinRT/Metro (C#) & Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target - Derik Whittaker continues his series of posts looking at WinRT development for Window 8, discussing the use of the Application Bar, sharing some tips, and also looking at how you can consume data from other applications in your WinRT applications.

Community

• My impressions of #GiveCampUK - Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of the first UK GiveCamp held little over a week ago in London - sounds like it was a splendid event, and I was very sorry to not be able to be there. Gary also highlights other posts from attendees. Work is already underway to plan next year’s GiveCamp, visit http://www.givecamp.org.uk/StayInformed to stay in the loop.

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Software

• Update 4.0.2 for the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 - Brandon Bray highlights the .NET 4.0.2 update which adds a number of new features and fixes, along with updated tooling releases.
• What’s new in MEF ‘version 2′ Preview 4? - Nick Alok highlights the 4th preview release of MEF ‘Version 2′, with an official release planned for inclusion in the .NET 4.5 release. This post highlights some of the significant new features, looking at the ue of Open Generic Parts, Convention based part registration, composition scoping enhancements, and much more.
• Unity 3.0 Preview for .NET 4.5 - Grigori Melnik highlights the 3.0.1026.0 Preview release of Unity which adds support for its use on .NET 4.5 with both WinRT and desktop profiles along with some other improvements.

Information

• The Blue Book gets Mango’d! Rob Miles’ "Windows Phone Programming in C#" Blue Book updated for Windows Phone 7.1(5) And so do the lab’s and demo’s too! - Greg Duncan highlights an update to the ‘Windows Phone Programming in C#’ Blue Book from Rob Miles which updates all the content to the Mango Release, available from the Microsoft Faculity Resource Center.
• Windows Phone InfoKit for Public Sector Developers - Joel Reyes has collected together a comprehensive collection of links to help public sector developer get up to speed with Windows Phone Development, also of use to non-public sector devs too - Joel lists the various software components to install, training resources, Blogs and articles, and open data sets you can make use of.
• Building a Calculator using WP 7.1(Mango) - Niladri Biswas walks through the building of a simple Windows Phone 7 Calculator application using the Mango tools, working from File > New Project to having a working application
• Top 100 Utilities & Addins for Visual Studio 2010 & TFS 2010 - David Baliles shares his top 100 Visual Studio and TFS extensions and addins - for full details of the addins there is a spread sheet which includes the links to the project pages for each.
• Stop Asserting Arguments by Name - Sean Feldman discusses an annoyance in a number of areas of .NET Development where parameters take the name of an argument as a string. Sean shares a simple code snippet which alows you to get the name as a string yet keep your code strongly typed (and refactor friendly)
• InternalsVisibleTo, PublicKey and PublicKeyToken - Marko Apfel discusses the use of these three assembly level attributes which allow you to strong name and expose the internal members of one assembly to another.
• Best Practices for Getting Started with SVG - Jennifer Yu shares a nice introduction to the use of SVG graphics in HTML5 applications, looking at the various features of SVG, and how you can interact with it using CSS and JavaScript.

Community

• Free OpenWrap workshop, Cambridge, 5th of November - Sebastien Lambla highlights his visit to the Cambridge Developers’ User Group where he will be running an OpenWrap workshop showing how OpenWrap can be used to solve your dependency needs. The event is on Saturday 5th November

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Software

• OpenWrap 1.0.2 available - Seb Lambla announces an updated version of his OpenWrap package manager for .NET. This update introduces the features necessary to support compatibility with the future 2.0 release
• OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 v1.0 RTW! - Greg Duncan highlights the release of the RTM of the OData Service for TFS, providing a powerful API to get data from TFS onto other devices and applications.

Information

• Visual Studio 11 .NET Advances - Somasegar continues his series looking at the features included with Visual Studio 11. This part discusses some of the significant updates to the .NET Framework in the 4.5 release.
• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts looking at the Roslyn CTP release. This part explores the use of Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis illustrating the use of these techniques to look for ignored method return values ins some code.
• Building Visual Studio Extensions with Roslyn - Jonathan Allen is also exploring the use of Roslyn in a series of articles on InfoQ, and in this piece he discusses the various features and providers which enable you to bolt Roslyn powered functionality into Visual Studio, extending the IDE.
• MSDN Magazine November Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives his usual preview of the content coming in next month’s edition of MSDN Magazine, due out next week.
• Async messaging realities - Jimmy Bogard highlights a short post from Ayende which helps to illustrate one of the key concepts in message based architectures, discussing the concept, and how it can make migrating to message based architectures more difficult.
• Effective Techniques and Tools for Reducing Leaks in .NET (C#) - Chuck England discusses a variety of techniques and things you can do to help ensure that your code does not leak memory, ranging from coding standards o the use of profiling.
• Nokia’s First Two Windows Phones Are Here. And They’re Awesome. - The Windows Phone Blog highlights yesterday’s launch of Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 devices - the moment I and many others have been waiting for to jump on board the WP7 bandwagon.
• Using Windows Azure Regions efficiently - Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the notion of Windows Azure regions and how they map to particular data centres around the world, looking at how the choice of where to host affects performance and reliability, discussing the use of the Windows Azure Traffic Manager CTP, the Content Delivery Network and SQL Azure Data Sync.
• Tombstoning with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7 (and KnockoutJS) - Colin Eberhardt discusses handling the Windows Phone 7 application lifecycle states and transitions in HTML 5 / KnockoutJS based applications running on the phone within PhoneGap

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and EventStore @ E-VAN 25 October 2011 - Jan Van Ryswyck shares the recording of this week’s European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup event, featuring Jonathan Oliver discussing Event sourcing, CQRS, and is EventStore project.
• The Tablet Show - "Resist the Drama" - Dan Wahlin highlights a new podcast series from the chaps behind .NET Rocks (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) where they will be discussing all things tablet development, featuring Dan in show #2 discussing WinRT Development.

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Software

• jQuery 1.7 RC1 Released - The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.7 Release Candidate 1, available now via the jQuery CDN. The team would like you to make use of the release candidate and report any issues encountered back to them.
• Web Essentials - Mads Kristensen releases the next version of the Web Essentials Visual Studio Extension. Version 1.6 brings new features in the form of the Live Web Preview tool window, support for TODO comments in CSS and JavaScript and improves the performance of the extension.
• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 - now available on Microsoft Update - The Visual Studio Team highlight the inclusion of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Update, which will now be pushing out this update to developers who have not yet updated.

Information

• SemVer, NuGet, and Nightly Builds - Phil Haack discusses some improvements to NuGet to help support its use in internal and Continuous Integration Scenarios, and the introduction of support for SemVer versioning numbers, discussing how to version pre-release and continuous integration builds.
• When at last you await - Stephen Toub discusses a minor performance optimisation you can make with compositional code using the async / await keywords, showing two equivalent methods which have subtle differences in how they are actually implemented by the compiler.
• Assault by GC - Marc Gravell discusses some useful optimisations you can make to improve the performance of applications which are experiencing stalls caused by long running garbage collection processes within the framework which helped improve the performance of StackOverflow.
• Empty Charsets in IE 9 Causing JSON Parsing Errors - Rob Conery follows up from his previous post on issues with JSON parsing in Internet Explorer 9 when the charset was not set in the response, discussing the specification and Internet Explorer’s implementation.
• Updated Win 8 Dev Platform diagram - Rockford Lhotka also follows up his previous post with and update to one of the diagrams, now updated to include the Chakra JavaScript Engine.
• Entity Framework, The Five Years Plan, And Building Software on Future Features - Ayende looks back at the original aims for Entity Framework and how its ideas of Entity Data Model where intended to appear in the whole range of products across Microsoft’s development stack.
• Models for a view (some objects are more equal than others) - Peter van Ooijen discusses the model component of MVC applications looking at the flow of Domain Objects from the domain model to the view, and the dangers in the flow being the other way round.
• Rebuilding My Backbone.js Plugins With Modules, SRP and More - Derick Bailey discusses how he has been rebuilding many of his Backbone.js plugins using better JavaScript programming and development principles
• Beginner Guide to Page and Script Debugging with Chrome - Dave Auld gives a tour round the debugging capabilities provided for Web Developers in the Chrome browser, discussing in detail the use of all the different features.
• State of .NET Image Resizing: how does imageresizer do? - Bertrand Le Roy takes an updated look at the problem space of resizing images in web applications, discussing how the pure .NET ImageResizer.NET library compares to using GDI and WPF, and allows use in medium trust.

Community

• LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Unplugged, session 9 - Tonight (Wednesday 26th October) is the 9th Linked In .NET UserGroup open Question and Answer session with Scott Guthrie. The event kicks off at 9AM Pacific time and is hosted via LiveMeeting
• Re-Build: A Developer’s View of Windows 8 with Robert Hogg - The .NET Developer Network welcome Robert Hogg for a session on Tuesday 8th November at the University of West England, Bristol where Robert will take a look at Windows 8 from a developers point of view.
• "Web development with technologies that are still in the oven" with Steve Sanderson - The .NET Developer Network also announce their plans for their December event, to be held on Monday 5th December, where Steve Sanderson will discuss new and upcoming web development technologies, with a secret agenda until the actual event.

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Software

• .Net Framework 4.0.2 Release Information Rollup - Greg Duncan highlights a (rather confusing) set of updates to the .NET Framework 4.0 whcih add a few new features and address a few issues. The framework update is accompanied by updates to tooling to make them work with the updated version.
• WiX v3.6 Beta released - Rob Mensching announces the beta release of WiX 3.6. The team would like you to try out this latest release and feedback on the changes, including Burn a new bootstrapper, improved elevation support, patch slipstreaming,
• Released: RequestReduce 1.3 Now Runs on .net 3.5 and a Preview of Support for Third Party Javascripts in your Minification and Merge Process - Matt Wrock announces an updated release of RequestReduce. Version 1.3 includes some minor re-architecting with the SQL Server synchronisation code being moved to its own assembly, along with the ability to run RequestReduce on .NET 3.5, opening it up to a wider range of developers.
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (V1.3.1) is released - Avkash Chauhan highlights the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1. This updated release updates the Windows Azure Tools version to the 1.5 September 2011 release in the Azure Samples, updates to Windows Phone Developer tools RTW, makes use of the ASP.NET Universal Providers, improves the Blobs API and introduces two new samples.
• Enterprise Library community extensions ported to v5, released via NuGet - Grigori Melnik highlights the work of the EntLibContrib Project Team in porting the EntLibContrib project to Enterprise Library v5, and the release of the parts which have been ported as a NuGet Package.
• xunitcontrib-resharper 0.4.4 - dotCover support - Matt Ellis announces a new version of his xunitcontrib-resharper plugin which brings xUnit.NET to the Test Runner, and as of this new release also supports integration of the JetBrains dotCover code coverage tool.

Information

• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Syntax Rewriting with Symbol Information - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series exploring the Roslyn CTP release picking up where he left off last time with a look at using the SemanticModel class to rewrite calls to particular methods of a class.
• Scripting and Code Analysis using Roslyn - And a first look at Roslyn CTP - Anoop Madhusudanan looks at how you can embed scripting into your own applications using Roslyn, illustrating this very powerful concept with a simple example.
• Task.Run vs Task.Factory.StartNew - Stephen Toub discusses the introduction of Task.Run and its overloads in .NET 4.5 as a shortcut to the more complicated Task.Factory.StartNew method.
• JavaScript in the small - Ola Bini highlights a number of key concepts in usnig JavaScript well in your web applications, showing how even when you only need a little bit of JavaScript it is well worth using these techniques.
• A Fun Little JSON Murder Mystery With IE9 - Rob Conery discusses some interesting issues he ran into with JSON decoding in Internet Explorer 9 caused by some badly formed Server response headers. (As a warning, this article contains some strong language)
• SignalRChat - Using RxJS to add live notifications - Peter Moberg discusses a little use of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript to control the sending of status notifications from client to server when adding typing notifications to the SignalRChat application.
• Windows Phone Mango: Under the hood of Fast Application Switch - Abhinaba Basu takes a look at how fast application switching is implemented from a CLR point of view on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, discussing what happens and when which events fire, and how your application should respond to them.
• Windows 8 Development Platform Clarified - Rockford Lhotka shares a suite of diagrams produced by the folk at Magenic which aim to give a picture of the Windows 8 Development Platform, discussing the various different stacks which make up the overall picture.
• Using MongoDB with the Official C# Driver - Ercan Anlama takes a look at hooking an ASP.NET MVC Application up to the MongoDB NoSql database using the C’ Driver in this CodeProject article.
• Getting Started with the .NET Gadgeteer - Part 1: Background, Setup, and Hello World - Pete Brown kicks off a series looking at the .NET Gadgeteer project, an Open Source and Creative Commons licensed hardware and software platform based on the .NET Micro Framework which provides an easy way of prototyping hardware devices.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and EventStore on 25 October 2011 - This Evening (Tuesday) sees the Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup host a session from Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and his EventStore open source project. The LiveMeeting event kicks off at 7:00PM GMT (8PM BST)

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Software

• WP7 Skydrive API 1.0 Released - Mitchell Pronschinske highlights the release of the SkyDrive API 1.0 for Windows Phone 7, allowing developers to make applications which store data in the cloud using SkyDrive.
• Dropkick - Deploy Fluently & RoundhousE - Intelligent Database Migrations And Versioning - Rob Reynolds gives an overview of two of his projects - RoundhousE provides an easy way for developer to migrate and version their databases, and DropkicK provides a way to easily deploy your software using scripts written fluently in C#.

Information

• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Introduction & Syntax Rewriting - Sasha Goldshtein kicks off a series of posts looking at last week’s CTP release of Roslyn, setting the background to the types of problem that Roslyn solves in the introduction, and starting digging into using Roslyn to rewrite syntax.
• Build Online C# Syntax Checker with Roslyn - Nandip Makwana takes a look at using Roslyn to create an online syntax checker for C# code, looking at using the Syntax Tree to parse the code, and obtaining the error information to return back to the user.
• Coded UI Tests for jqueryui - Mathew Aniyan discusses the use of Coded UI Tests with web user interfaces which make use of the jQuery UI library, discussing the types of test which work, and how you can work round some issues in testing some of the more complicated controls.
• Javascript minification patterns: Structuring for maximum compression - Anthony van der Hoorn discusses the process of JavaScript Minification, and highlights how the scoping of variables, and therefore the structure of your code can make a significant difference to how minified the code will end up.
• Implementing Programming Languages using C# - Christopher Diggins discusses the use of his Jigsaw library to help in the creation of your own programming language discussing the constituent parts of the library which are used to build your own language implementation, programmed in C#.
• Dynamic resolution rules joy - Ayende highlights a particular aspect of Dynamic Objects in .NET whereby they will always use actual property implementations over their Dynamic option (provided by TryGetMember).
• New Line of Business Features in Silverlight 5 - Using pInvoke - Dan Wahlin continues his series of posts looking at the features of Silverlight 5 which provide for the needs of the Line of Business application developer, discussing the use of PInvoke in Elevated Trust applications.
• ObjectStorageHelper<T> - A WinRT utility for Windows 8 - Jamie T shares a helper class which abstracts the saving of object data into the three different sandboxed folders available through Win RT.
• Moving to Azure: Worker Roles for Nothing and Tasks for Free - Michael C. Neel shares a useful tip for those moving to Windows Azure who need some limited provision of scheduled tasks where a full blown worker role can’t be justified (especially for cost), making use of the underlying OS features of a Web Role.
• High Availability On The Azure Platform - Jack Greenfield discusses some of the high availability features of Windows Azure within a single data center, discussing resource management, load balancing and partitioning of services.

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Information

• Roslyn CTP is available - Patrick Smacchia discusses this week’s CTP release of Roslyn a substantial effort from the Microsoft C# and VB.NET compiler teams to recreate the compilers in their respective language, and to add an incredible range of APIs for interacting with the various stages of the compile process.
• Using Roslyn to implement an MVC Razor view engine - David Ebbo takes a look at using Roslyn in ASP.NET to act as a part of a Razor View Engine implementation, replacing out the existing compilation processes, sharing the code of his sample.
• Roslyn Syntax Visualizers - Shyam Namboodiripad gives an overview of two of the samples included in the Roslyn CTP release - the Syntax Visualizer Tool Window and Syntax Debugger Visualizer
• In bed with Roslyn - Ivan Towlson takes the wraps off the Roslyn CTP and starts digging down into how it can be used o enhance your productivity by manipulating code at compile time to easily implement tiresome features like dependency properties.
• An update on Visual Studio performance - Larry Sullivan gives an update on the performance work being done on Visual Studio based on the feedback they are obtaining from users using PerfWatson.
• What’s new in WCF 4.5 - Tooltips & IntelliSense - Piyush continues looking at the new features of WCF in version 4.5 of the .NET Framework, discussing some of the improvements made with respect to configuration, discussing improved intellisense and tooltips when editing the various WCF configuration elements
• Coordinating multiple ajax requests with jquery.when - Joshua Flanagan discusses a jQuery 1.5 feature which makes the combining of results from multiple ajax results together with each executing asynchronously.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: Cool things in SQL Denali - The Oxford NxtGenUG User group welcome Andrew Fryer for a session on the new features of SQL Server Denali, the next major release of SQL Server on Tuesday 15th November.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Aspected Orientated Programming - The Southampton NxtGenUG are being visited by Yan Cui on Thursday 17th November for a session on Aspect Oriented Programming, looking at how AOP can mean fewer lines of cleaner, more concise and maintainable code.

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Software

• Roslyn CTP Now Available - Somasegar announces the release of a Generally Availability CTP of the Microsoft project codenamed "Roslyn". This is a re-write of the compilers for VB and C# implemented in the languages themselves, facilitating the use of the compilers from your own managed code, exposing them as a compiler as a service, and enabling a number of very interesting scenarios.
• The Roslyn Preview Is Now Available - Eric Lippert also shares in the announcement of the Roslyn CTP, discussing the state of the CTP release (remember this is essentially pre-beta software), and highlighting some of the existing limitations.
• Introducing the Microsoft "Roslyn" CTP & Introducing the Microsoft"Roslyn" CTP - The C# and VB.NET teams also share the announcement, discussing some of the history leading up to Roslyn as the latest evolution of the two main .NET Languages, highlighting resources, and also requesting your feedback.
• Announcing The Microsoft Roslyn CTP - Paulo Morgado shares a short getting started quide for the Roslyn CTP release, highlighting some of the additional features it brings to the Visual Studio IDE.

Information

• Implementing an Authorization Attribute for WCF Web API - Phil Haack takes a look at implementing ASP.NET MVC like Authentication Attributes in the WCF Web API, discussing some of the similarities between the two platforms, the parts that are similar to each other, and how WCF Web Api can run on top of ASP.NET.
• Capture, Transfer, and Rethrow Exceptions with ExceptionDispatchInfo [.NET 4.5] - Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at the ExceptionDispatchInfo class included in .NET 4.5’s Task Parallel Library, and how it can be re-used in your in your code to capture and assist in re-throwing exceptions.
• Build Your Own SKYNET with the Windows Azure Auto-Scaling Application Block (WASABi) - Part 2 - J Barnes continues this series looking at the Windows Azure Auto-Scaling Application Block (WASABi), exploring the rule type definitions and looks at s simple scenario of automatically scaling up (and back down) a simple Windows Azure Queue processing application.
• .NET and CoffeeScript: comparing Jurassic, Jint, and IronJS - Joe White takes a look at creating a .NET Desktop based application which can compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, looking at JavaScript implementations for the CLR to allow the JavaScript Based CoffeeScript compiler to be able to run in managed code, comparing 3 JavaScript Engines for the CLR
• Announcing Improved In-place Updates - DrewMcDaniel of the Windows Azure team highlights some recent improvements to the model for making in-place updates to existing deployed services, discussing the operations that can be achieved without at VIP Swap or complete re-deploy.

Community

• An evening of web and mobile app development - The South-West England Sencha Meetup based in Bath are meeting on Wednesday 30th November for an evening of talks on Mobile development, with sessions on Android and iOS development, along with a look at web based mobile development using Ext JS and Sencha Touch using the .NET Platform. Registration is required, and the number of spaces is limited for this event.
• HTML5 Webcast/Webinar for ASP.NET Developers - Wallace B. McClure is running an HTML5 webinar for DevProConnections Magazine on Wednesday 26th October at 10am PDT, looking at HTML5 for Mobile development using ASP.NET, and also looking at the use of the jQuery Mobile framework.
• Complimentary Two-Day ALM EXPO Virtual Conference - David Baliles highlights the complementary access to a stream from the ALM Expo at the Better Software Conference in Orlando which is running on the 9th and 10th November

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