The Morning Brew

Update: Fixed the typo in the title of today’s edition

Software

• What is SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT)?, What’s new in SQL Server Data Tools CTP4? & Download Available: SQL Server Data Tools CTP4 (SSDT) – The SQL Server Data Tools Team discuss the SQL Server Data Tools, highlighting their use in on and offline development, discuss the new features of the new CTP 4 Release and discuss the availability of the release.

Information

• Using MVVM on the Web with KnockoutJS – Shawn Wildermuth discusses the use of KnockoutJS to create MVVM based applications in the browser, giving his perspective from the point of view of someone who has already done lots of MVVM on Silverlight.
• KsigDo Task Pad – Real-Time UI View Model syncing across users with ASP.NET, SignalR, Knockout MVVM and EF – Anoop Madhusudanan shows what combining 4 powerful frameworks can achieve with a little of your own code in creating a cracking sample application showing off their power, with full source code available over on CodePlex.
• Using Templates to Display Boolean Values as Yes/No Options – Scott Mitchell discusses the templates used by Html.EditorFor and Html.DisplayFor in ASP.NET MVC views, showing how you can tap into this to provide your own templates.
• Adding Personality with CSS3 Transitions and Animations – Ted Johnson discusses the internet Explorer 9 and 10 implementations of some of the CSS3 Transitions and Animations features which are still at the specification stage of becoming standards.
• PhoneGap on WP7 Tip #2: Script interaction – Glen Gordon continues his series of posts on using PhoneGap to create Windows Phone 7 applications, discussing bridging the gap between the phone application in HTML and the underlying host application.
• Nokia Developer Program: Tons of New Resources for WPdevs! – Daniel Egan highlights the new Nokia Windows Phone Developer Resources which include code samples, documentation, tools and videos.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #22: App Connect – Jeff Blankenburg’s series of posts on Windows Phone Mango continue with another guest authored post, this time from Matt Eland. In this post Matt explores the App Connect functionality which allows you to combine your applications with others via search, instant answers and Quick Cards.
• Mango Sample: External Data & OAuth2 & Live Id – Jerry Nixon continues his series of Mango samples with a look at consuming external data from a simple WCF service and discusses making use of authentication in your applications using Live Id and OAuth2.
• YUI Theater – Douglas Crockford: "Crockford on JavaScript – Section 8: Programming Style & Your Brain" (67 min.) – The Yahoo User Interface blog shares the video from Douglas Crockford’s YUIConf 2011 keynote session on the JavaScript programming style. This session makes up the 8th part of the Crockford on JavaScript series. Its also well worth checking out some of the other recent posts on the blog for more video sessions from the Conference.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Postponement: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on Nancy on 22 November 2011 – Due to busy schedules and illness the European Virtual Alt.Net event for tonight (Tuesday 22nd November) has been postponed. I shall endeavour to include the re-scheduled date in the Morning Brew when it is announced.

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Software

• Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.0 – The team behind jQuery Mobile announce the official Version 1.0 release of the project. This release targets jQuery 1.6.4, and brings a high quality mobile user interface to your web applications with most mobile browsers at A-Grade support level. The team have focused on performance since the RC3 release, bringing about some quite significant improvements
• Chutzpah – Chutzpah 1.3.0 Released – Matthew Manela – Farblondzshet in Code – Matthew Manela announces the release of Chutzpah 1.3.0, bring support for Jasmine tests, and test timeouts to this JavaScript Test Runner for Visual Studio. This release also contains some bug fixes addressing known issues.
• Getting closer – Castle Windsor 3 RC 1 – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the slightly delayed Castle Windsor 3 Release Candidate 1 release. The release is available as NuGet Packages and will be available on the website as a binary download shortly. This release includes new features to have specific properties ignored / required in the registration API.

Information

• Why IL? – Eric Lippert discusses the role of the Intermediate Language versus Low-Level Virtual Machines in terms of the implementation of Roslyn
• Roslyn CTP – A Walk Through The Syntax Tree – Part I & Part II – Sankarsan takes a look at the Roslyn CTP release, exploring the compiler API and exploring the use of syntax trees to allow you to explore code programmatically, looking at an example to show how you can use it for code analysis by looking for uses of singletons in your code.
• When should you use NHibernate? – Ayende sparks some debate about the use of ORM and specifically NHibernate with a short post on the subject.
• When to use NHibernate – Jimmy Bogard follows up the discussion sharing his view point and the persistence technology he is looking to use in difference scenarios.
• I Just Don’t Like Object Mappers – Karl Seguin also discusses the use of Object Relational Mappers, and Data Mappers and how he has a growing dislike of them.
• To ORM or Not to ORM. That is the question… – Patrick Liekhus discusses the question of ORM use, and looks at some of the features in some of the common choices in this area.
• Introduction To Composite JavaScript Apps & Is There An Idiomatic Command Pattern Implementation For JavaScript? – Derick Bailey discusses the concepts behind building composite applications in JavaScript using the module pattern and an event driven architecture. Derick also discusses the command pattern calling on the community to suggest a good implementation. Comments on both of these are well worth reading too.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #19: Tilt Effects, Day #20: Creating Ringtones & Day #21: Sockets – Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 days of Mango series continues with three guest posts, the first from Doug Mair looking at working with tilt effects, Jerrel Blankenship on creating custom ring tones, and Parag Joshi on the use of sockets in your applications.
• Mango Sample: Detect Theme – Jerry Nixon is also pressing on with his series of posts on Mango with a look at detecting the theme of device on which your application is running and having your application respond correspondingly.

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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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