The Morning Brew

Software

• Ajax Control Toolkit November 2011 Release - Stephen Walther announces the release of the November 2011 edition of the Ajax Control Toolkit, available both as download and NuGet Package. This release includes a new Balloon Popup control and improvements to the tab control.
• SQL Server 2012 RC0 is now available. Here’s a download link round-up - Greg Duncan gathers together the download links for the RC0 release of SQL Server 2012, the latest pre-release release and a signal that the real release is getting ever closer.
• jQuery 1.7.1 RC1 Released - The jQuery Team have released a Release Candidate 1 release of jQuery, with the aims of the 1.7.1 release to customer address issues encountered with the initial 1.7 release.

Information

• Visual Studio 11 IDE Advances - Somasegar continues his series of posts on Visual Studio 11 and the .NET Framework 4.5, shifting focus over to the IDE and taking a look at a number of the developer productivity improvements that have been made there.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The EventHandler and EventHandler<TEventArgs> delegates - James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series, and his current topic on delegates with a look at the role of delegates in events and the use of the EventHandler generic delegates.
• Visual Studio Deployment Tutorial Series Published - Tom Dykstra highlights a new 12 part series on the ASP.NET website about the deployment features available for deploying you ASP.NET web applications to hosting providers
• A Few of My Favorite HTML5 and CSS3 Online Tools - Dan Wahlin shares his favourite HTML5 and CSS3 tools, taking giving an overview of what each does and why he uses them. Tools covered include HTML5 Boilerplate, Initializr, CSS Maker, Ultimate CSS Gradient Generator, and many more.
• Generating Mandelbrot fractals using HTML5 - CodeProject - Chris KMPP discusses the generation of Mandelbrot fractals un your browser using JavaScript and the HTML5 Canvas element - I do love a good MandelBrot, and this fun demo illustrates canvas use nicely.
• CSS speed typing for Visual Studio - Mads Kristensen shares video demo and a Visual Studio IDE extension which removes the need to type the { and } characters when writing CSS - something which isof great assistance for those on non-english keyboards.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #18: Using Sample Data - Jeff Blankenburg continues his series of 31 days of Windows Phone Mango with a piece about the use of sample data in the development process of building your Windows Phone Applications in Expression Blend.
• Mango Sample: Async Work & Mango Sample: XML Data - Jerry Nixon is pressing on with his explorations of Windows Phone 7 Mango with a look at performing Async operations and the consumption of embedded XML documents as resources

Community

• Share One Thing - The DevEvening User Group will be hosting a Share ‘One Thing’ event in Woking on Wednesday 30th November where there will be a collection of small 5 minute talks on things usergroup members are interested in / working on. Giving a talk is optional, but defiantly encouraged (plus a 5 minute talk is quite easy, and really good experience to get into usergroup presenting)
• W3C HTML5 Conference Videos Online - Typography, Modernizr, Graphics, Mobile and More, Oh My! - ‘jhealy’ highlights the first W3C HTML5 Conference held in Redmond recently. The great news is that lots of the sessions were recorded and are now available online for your viewing pleasure.

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Software

• MassTransit v2.0.1 Available - Chris Patterson makes the public announcement of MassTransit v2.0.1, actually released without fanfare back in the end of last month. This release includes fixes for issues which didn’t make it in time for the actual v2 release.
• NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Version 1.1 - The Windows Azure team announce the 1.1 version of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games, This toolkit contains libraries to help and samples to help you write networked games which utilise the Azure platform for hosting, including leaderboards, Authentication, profiles, invites and notifications, etc.

Information

• Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr - Dan Wahlin discusses the use of Modernizr to help you to detect the different HTML5/CSS3 capabilities of the browsers your web applications are running in, and use it to load custom JavaScript to provide a stand in for the functionality.
• PolyglotPersistence - Martin Fowler discusses the Database Thaw and how increasingly organisations are looking at different types of persistence and data stores, often adopting more than one to cater for the different scenarios of modern software.
• C# Mini Course - Alfred Thompson shares a mini-course on C# as a series of recordings with supporting slide decks and documentation. This course is a great introduction to programming, aimed at college students, and contains 6-8 hours of video material
• Ready, set, scaffold! Build ASP.NET MVC 3 applications quickly with MvcScaffolding - Rachel Appel discusses the use of MvcScaffolding to get your ASP.NEt MVC applications up and running quickly, walking through the process of building some scaffolded functionality.
• Partial Application - Chris Eargle discusses the concept of Partial Application of functions, illustrating the concepts with examples and highlights how you’ve probably been doing this without noticing already.
• PhoneGap on WP7 tip #1: Handling Orientation - Glen Gordon kicks off a series of posts looking at building Windows Phone 7 applications using the PhoneGap library. This first part in the series looks at the detection of device orientation and handling changes in orientation.
• Updates to the August 2011 F# 2.0 Compiler Code Drop - Don Syme highlights the availability of an update source code drop for the F# 2.0 compiler. The latest changes allow the compilation of the compiler for use in in browser based Silverlight applications, and updates the TryFSharp sample.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #16: Isolated Storage Explorer &Day #17: Using Windows Azure - Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 days of Mango series continues with two more posts from guest authors. Samidip Basu discusses the isolated storage explorer allowing you to look inside the storage of the phone and Michael Collier discusses the use of Windows Phone with Windows Azure.
• Greatest Hits: Make IntelliSense Transparent - Visual Studio Tips and Tricks - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Zain Naboulsi shares an old but very useful tip about making intellisense tooltips and select boxes partially transparent in Visual Studio using the Ctrl key.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: Introduction to DDD - Ian Cooper will be visiting the Brimingham NxtGenUG for a session on Domain Driven Development and domain modelling on Tuesday 22nd November
• NxtGenUG - Event: Simple.Data + Nancy - Mark Rendle takes a trip to Hereford to visit the NxtGenUG group there on Monday 12th December, for a session looking at the use of the Nancy Framework and Simple.Data to create lightweight web based applications.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Relatively Speaking … - Dave McMahon will be presenting a session on Relativity and how its effects can be harnessed to boost the speed of computers at the Birmingham NxtGenUG on Tuesday 13th December.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Introduction to Android - The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG welcome Will Charles for a session on building native Android applications, discussing some of the bits of Java that can confuse .NET Developers along the way on Wednesday 14th December

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Software

• November release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit - Jeff Wilcox announces the release of the November 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. This updated release focuses on resolving customer reported issues, addressing issues in controls, issues with particular combinations of controls, and other reported bugs.
• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released - Terje Sandstrom announces the 1.1 release of Build Explorer, a TFS Visual Studio Extension which adds folders to the structure of the builds based on a naming convention, allowing you to more easily build groups of projects.

Information

• Time Warp - Jesse Taber discusses the complexities and difficulties of handling dates and times, especially when globalisation and daylight savings time are involved, and takes a brief look at the NodaTime library, a .NET Port of Joda Time a well-known Java library.
• Using the C# Interactive Window that comes with Roslyn - Filip Ekberg takes a look at the interactive REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) environments provided in Visual Studio for F#, and now C# when you have the Roslyn CTP installed.
• What’s new in .NET Framework 4.5? [poster] - Jouni Heikniemi highlights a poster illustrating the new features and improvements included in the .NET Framework version 4.5.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Preview Tab - Zain Naboulsi discusses another new feature of Visual Studio 11, available now in the developer preview. Preview Tab gives you a way of seeing the contents of your source files, without having to open them in your own tab, also providing a way of moving a preview to a open document.
• 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10) - Michael Crump is a little over half way through his series of posts looking at the features of Silverlight 5. This 6th part is the first of two looking at operating system integration with P/Invoke, multiple windows and file system access being explored in this post.
• Implementing 5 important principles of REST using WCF Services - Shivprasad koirala discusses 5 of the key concepts of REST, and looks at how you can implement a REST based service which complies to these concepts using WCF Services.

Community

• Tonight at F#unctional Londoners: Byron Cook: Proving program termination with F# - Don Syme highlights tonight’s (16th Nov) F#unctional Londoners session being held at Skills Matter, where Microsoft Research’s Byton Cook will be discussing formal analysis of software to prove that software does what it should
• WPUG Dec 2011 - Windows Phone 7 - The London Windows Phone User Group are meeting on Wednesday 7th December for their last meeting of the year. Details of the content of the meeting are not finalised yet, but the usual format is a talk (or two) along with time for you to demo and discuss the applications you are working on with fellow developers.

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Software

• Now Available! Updated Windows Azure SDK & Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK - The Windows Azure Team announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 / November 2011, along with the Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK and the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. The updated Azure SDK brings improved build and publish features, extensions to queuing and performance improvements to the emulators.
• Announcing YUI Compressor 2.4.7 - The Yahoo! User Interface Team announce an updated version of their YUI Compressor, a minification tool for CSS and JavaScript. This release brings with it a number of improvements to CSS Compression, including support for large data URLs, and improvements to HEX Colour identification.
• Reactive Extensions (Rx) v1.1.11111 (Experimental Release) - The Reactive Extensions Team have a new experimental build. Version 1.1.11111 is mostly focused on performance improvements, including improvements to query operators, query operator chains, an also addresses some known bugs. Full release notes can be found in the Release Notes for Reactive Extensions 1.1.11111 (Experimental Release)

Information

• Now Available - Windows Azure SDK 1.6 - Shaun Xu takes a look at what is included in the Windows Azure SDK 1.6, discussing side by side install with 1.5 and also running through some of the key changes.
• Compiling F# to JavaScript with Pit - Phil Trelford takes a look at compiling F# code into JavaScript using the F# feature ‘Code Quotations’ and looks at a new F# compiler community project called pit which performs the conversion / compilation.
• 15 Pragmatic JavaScript Tips for ASP.NET Developers - Jon Galloway shares the slides and notes from his DevConnections session on 15 Pragmatic JavaScript Tips for ASP.NET Developers, including discussion of the Ajax Toolkit, jQuery, the use of NuGet, IDE Features, and SignalR.
• Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture - ‘TheBeebs’ shares an article discussing and sharing what he learnt from Nicholas Zakas at Full Frontal 2011 on building application architecture for JavaScript based Applications, discussing a variety of concepts to help build a robust structure for your application.
• Fun with 3D transforms and rollovers - kittens in space - Christian Heilmann shows some neat tricks you can achieve with pure CSS 3 using 3D Transformations to implement pure CSS rollovers
• Laying out HTML with CSS Grids - Mike Taulty takes a look at laying out pages using the CSS Grids support in Internet Explorer 10, showing how easily you can achieve grid based layouts using simple CSS Rules.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #14: Using OData & Day #15: The Progress Bar - Jeff Blankenburg continues his series of 31 posts about Windows Mango with two guest posts, the first from Chris Woodruff on consuming OData in your applications, and the sceond on the use of the progress bar from Doug Mair.

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Software

• TouchDevelop v2.4: push notifications, updates, discussions,… - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Touch Develop 2.4. The new version introduces new integration of the gallery of scripts contributed by the community, including push notifications for a variety of gallery events, improved management of different versions of scripts, along with new APIs to allow access to contact information and live access to the camera enabling a whole range of augmented reality scripts to be created.
• Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx) - The Extensions for Reactive Extensions Team announce the release of version 1.2, with this version available for both the stable and experimental versions of the Reactive Extensions, across both .NET 4 , Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7. The team also provide some Labs and documentation to help you get to grips with the library.
• XNACPC - A PC & Xbox 360 Amstrad CPC emulator, written in C# and XNA - Greg Duncan highlights the release of an Amstrad CPC emulator written in C# and XNA and operable on both PC and XBOX written by Gavin Pugh. The article about its development makes for interesting reading, and the availability of source is great for those curious about what is going on under the hood.
• Released RequestReduce 1.5 Supporting Custom Minifiers and a Critical Performance Fix for v1.4 - Matt Wrock announces the release of RequestReduce 1.5, adding a significant performance improvement over 1.4 caused by a recompiling regular expression along with exception logging, tha ability to plug in custom minification routines, and the ability to exclude certain resources from processing.

Information

• Eduasync part 15: implementing COMEFROM with a horrible hack - Jon Skeet’s Eduasync series returns from a bit of a break, and resuming on a slightly different track than planned taking a detailed look at some complex code involving the COMEFROM control structure. Careful reading of this article (possibly multiple times) is certainly required to get a full understanding.
• S#arp Lite: The Basics - Billy McCafferty gives a more detailed overview of what is inside his S#arp Lite application framework for ASP.NET MVC using NHibernate, exploring a sample application built with the framework to discuss its key features.
• Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime - Rick Strahl discsses the creation of instances of generic types at runtime, showing how you can obtain a non-generic type reference to a generic type and use that to make your actual instance.
• Solving the Shakespeare Million Monkeys Problem in Real-time with Parallelism and SignalR - Scott Hanselman combines forces with Stephen Toub to try to create some computer based monkeys to write some Shakespeare using genetic algorithms and the .NET Parallel Programming features, and then works with Paul Batum to take the monkeys to the Web using SignalR.
• Legacy ETL solutions - Ayende discusses some simple tricks you can use to make periodically pulling data out of legacy systems in ETL operations easier, discussing identifying rows and detecting modifications.
• Interactive, free and just plain cool, .Net Tutorial - Greg Duncan highlights a free .NET Tutorial delivered via an innovative Computer Based Training platform, both created by Motti Shaked.
• Using MEF 2 with ASP.NET MVC 3 - Nick of the BCL Team discusses the latest preview of MEF and takes a look at using its ASP.NET MVC functionality for building compositional applications on the ASP.NET MVC Platform, giving a walk through of the features.
• String.Intern() method implements FlyWeight pattern for better Performance and reduces MemoryFootprint - Santhosh Reddy gives a short introduction to the concept of Interning of Strings in the .NET framework illustrating with three examples.
• My Code Kata - A Solution Kata - Glav discusses his own Code Kata exercise, a somewhat larger and more complex exercise than the traditional Kata which he is terming a Solution Kata, sharing the problem statement and his solution to it.

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Software

• ReSharper 6.1 EAP for Visual Studio 11 - Hadi Hariri highlights an updated installer for the ReSharper 6.1 EAP which brings with it the ability to integrate the EAP release with Visual Studio 11.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Generic Func Delegates - James Michael Hare continues with this long running series of posts looking at various less well known features of the .NET Framework and C# Language. This post concerns the use of the Func<> Delegates, discussing their use in code, how Co/Contra-variance effects them, and examining some of their uses.
• PLINQ Queries That Run in Parallel in .NET 4.5 - Igor Ostrovsky discusses how and why certain PLINQ queries actually run sequentially, and how the .NET Framework 4.5 improves on the detection and ability to run queries in parallel.
• New in .NET 4.5: ThreadLocal.Value - Igor Ostrovsky also discusses the use of ThreadLocal<T> value container, available in .NET 4, and highlights a new addition to this type in 4.5 which allows access to all values ever stored in a ThreadLocal.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #10: Network Information - Jeff Blankenburg continues his 31 days of Mango series with a look at the NetworkInformation namespace which reveal information abou the network connectivity available and its state on the device.
• Mango Sample: Local Database Part 1 & Local Database Part 2 - Jerry Nixon also continues his series of Windows Phone Mango samples with a look at storing data in local database on the device, looking at using EF Code First and also at using the visual designer to create your data store.
• Jasmine-BDD: A Screencast On The Standalone Test Runner - Derick Bailey shares his second screencast on WatchMeCode.net, with this one looking at the use of the Jasmine JavaScript BDD Testing framework, running through the getting started aspects of using Jasmine in this 17 minute screencast.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Developer Event Simulcast Links - ‘alicerp’ highlights the availability of recordings of 7 sessions from the Windows Phone Camps events, covering development of Silverlight applications and XNA games for the device as well as looking at key concepts like push notifications, tombstoning and multitasking.
• Is Implementing Continuous Delivery the key to success? - Paul Stack discusses Continuous Delivery as a way of making sure your projects succeed, discussing the benefits, and potential dangers of early and Continuous Delivery. Good discussion in the comments of this one so be sure to read down.

Community

• Test Driven Development (TDD) in Visual Studio 2010- Microsoft Mondays - Hosam Kamel highlights this Microsoft Mondays event where he will be delivering a session on Test Driven Development in Visual Studio. The session is on Monday 14th November, between 10am-11am GMT+3, and is being broadcast via Lync.

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Software

• WP7: Northern Lights WP7 Toolkit v0.0.1 - Bjorn Kuiper shares a library of helper and code examples for Windows Phone development in his Northern Lights Windows Phone 7 Toolkit. The library is available as both NuGet Package and as a direct download. Source is hosted on CodePlex.
• Announcing JesCov - JavaScript code coverage - Ola Bini announce the first version of JesCov, a code coverage tool for JavaScript. The tool integrates with Jasmine currently, but can be used from any testing framework. The tool is implemented in Java and uses Rhino under the hood.

Information

• Goodby jQuery Templates, Hello JsRender - Steve Wellens explores JsRender, the new templating option for jQuery. With the jQuery Templates library being discontinued and not being taken beyond beta this active project seems like a pretty good bet for your templating requirements in JavaScript code.
• Building a Slimmer jQuery - dmethvin discusses the growth of jQuery over the past 5 years, both in terms of features and file size, and discusses the areas of functionality which will be deprecated in coming versions, and the criteria by which the team decide functionality’s fate.
• Here’s why you should be happy that Microsoft is embracing Node.js - Matthew Baxter-Reynolds discusses the support of Node.js on Windows and IIS, the facilities that it provides for developers and application owners, and looks to the future for Node.js on Windows.
• Mango Sample: Isolated Storage, Input Scope, Consume Odata, MVVM & Chart Data - Jerry Nixon shares a series of posts which look at a number of different areas of the Windows Phone Mango release from a developer point of view, illustrating each with code samples, and links to relevant documentation.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #9: Calendar API - Jeff Blankenburg presses on with his series of posts on Windows Phone Mango functionality with a look at the use of the Calendar API in your applicaitons, allowing you to access and display the phone user’s calendar from within your applications.
• Windows Phone, Podcast App Starter Kit. Don’t leave your Podcast without it… - Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Windows Phone Podcast Application Starter Kit, a sample application which you can cusomise to create applications for podcasts, or to learn from by reading the MS-PL licensed code.
• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 3: NDbUnit - Thomas Weller continues his series exploring the testing of an Entity Framework backed applications. This 3rd part takes a look at techniques which you can use to fake data in the database for testing, especially useful with legacy applications.
• Your users don’t care if you use Web Sockets - Scott Hanselman discusses how choosing to use technologies like web sockets can, without implementing a backup mechanism, significantly impact the adoption of your applications, and highlights the concept of polyfills to fill gaps in browser implementations.
• Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy - Maarten Balliauw discusses the hosting of WCF OData services behind proxies or load balancers, and how the URLs contained in the feed won’t match the names expected, sharing a technique to re-write the URLs to the correct host names.
• Adding Output Caching and Expire Header in IIS7 to improve performance - Renso Hollhumer gives an overview of the caching settings available in IIS7 to allow you to control the cache-ability of the files and content that make up your web site, giving you a way to significantly improve the performance of your web apps.
• Exception Handling in TPL Dataflow Networks - Cristina Manu discusses the handling of exceptions in Task Parallel Library Dataflows, exploring a number of different scenarios and sharing some best practice guidelines.
• Putting back functionality left out of VB Core - ( If you can’t live without Mid when writing WP7 apps ) - The Visual Basic Team discuss some of the missing bits of functionality which are not in the VBCore used by Windows Phone 7 Applications, and how you can (at your own risk) use the availability of the framework and VB source to add the functionality back.

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Software

• CoffeeScript 1.1.3 - The CoffeeScript team announce the latest version of CoffeeScript. Version 1.1.3 brings improvements to the formatting of the generated JavaScript, support for binary numbers, along with a number of other new features and bugfixes / improvements

Information

• Clean up after Visual Studio - Paul Sheriff discusses the many places which Visual Studio and .NET leave files as a part of your development, and talks about removing them to clean up your machine, free disk space and improve the performance of your machine.
• The Developer’s Guide to App Fabric November 2011 - Alan Smith highlights the November 2011 update to his ‘Developers Guide to App Fabric’. This update expands on the content regarding the Service Bus brokerd messaging features. The guide is available in both PDF and CHM formats
• Channel 9 Moves to the Cloud with Windows Azure - The Windows Azure team blog highlights the migration of Microsoft’s Channel 9 website onto the Windows Azure Platform and the discussion of the move in an article by Duncan Mackenzie where he discusses the process of the move and shares some of the lessons they learnt in the process.
• Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight - Part 2 CouchDB, Cloudant and Hammock - Erno de Weerd continues this series of posts looking at building an application to host in the cloud using AppHarbor, ASP,NET, Silverlight, etc. This part looks at storing data in the cloud using hosted CouchDB
• Rethink Your Data - Karl Seguin discusses the different way of thinking about your data that you need to have in order to make NoSql data stores work efficiently for you.
• Building a jQuery Mobile Application, Part 1 - Jorge Ramon kicks off a new series of posts looking at building mobile applications using the jQuery Mobile toolkit, looking at performing the build in a behaviour driven development approach using Jasmine.
• HTML5 App versus HTML5 Page - What’s the Difference ? - Joe Stagner discusses what he percieves as the difference between an HTML5 Application and an HTML5 page, and how thinking of them as Applications brings a more significant mind shift to what the future of web applications may look like.
• Working with Prism 4 Part 1: Getting Started - Brian Noyes kicks off a series of posts exploring the use of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism Toolkit for building composite applications in Silverlight, discussing some of the background to composite applications, and bootstrapping a simple application in a step by step work through.
• Secure Strings - AbhishekGoenka gives a short introduction to the .NET Framework’s SecureString class which stores strings in memory in an encrypted form so that the data contained in the strings in memory cannot easily be ready from outside the application.
• ConcurrentDictionary Performance Improvements in .NET 4.5 - Igor Ostrovsky discusses some of the performance improvements made to the concurrent dictionary which will be included in the .NET 4.5 release. The two optimisations brings anywhere between a 30% to 300% improvement in performance.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - Project Backward Compatibility (Round-Tripping) - Zain Naboulsi discusses one of the most requested features for Visual Studio, which is included in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview - the ability to round trip projects between the new and older version of the IDE.
• Typing with Speed and Accuracy in IE10 - Travis Leithead discusses the introduction of spell checking and autocorrect in Internet Explorer 10, using some of the OS features of Windows 8 (which includes spell checking across all applications), and how they will also be including these features for IE10 running on Earlier versions of Windows too.
• Charles shares his Windows 8 stream story (or How he learned to deal without most of file stuff in System.IO…) - Greg Ducnan highlights an article from Charles Petzold discussing his experiences in developing on Windows 8 and how he is now understanding why the System.IO namespace is so empty on Windows 8 WinRT applications.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #8: Contacts API - Jeff Blankenburg continues this 31 days of Mango series with a look at the Contact API which allows your applications to search and use the contact information already stored in your phone’s address book.

Community

• Progressive F# Tutorials 2011 - Phil Trelford gives an overview of the happenings at last week’s Progressive F# Tutorials event held at Skills Matter, discussing the sessions presented, where you can get the recordings, and talking about some of the code on show.

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