Christmas is upon us, and this is the last pre-christmas edition of the Morning Brew. With Christmas falling on a weekend the public holidays are all offset here in the UK, so the next edition will be on Wednesday 28th December.

Have a great Christmas everyone!

Software

  • A cul utility library in Craig’s Utility Library v3 – Greg Duncan highlights Craig’s Utility Library V3, a huge collection of helper and extension methods covering a wide range of common tasks – well worth knowing about, and a huge potential time saver.
  • xunitcontrib-resharper 0.5.2 – ReSharper 6.1 support – Matt Ellis announces the release of a updated xUnit.NET test runner for ReSharper 6.1 (and 5.1.3). The release is mostly about supporting ReSharper 6.1, however it also includes support for running tests of derived test cases
  • Get Dropthings license by donating to charity – Omar AL Zabir has changed the licensing or his Dropthings Web2.0 AJAX portal which makes it easy to build personalizable dashboards using modern Microsoft technologies. The new license means you make a charitable donation and get a license to the software.
  • A holiday.js gift for Azure Node.js developers – Glenn Block highlights the release of a December Update to the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. This update, hot on the heels of the first preview, brings updates to the latest versions of various components and fixes a number reported issues.

Information

  • Shadowcasting in C#, Part Four – Eric Lippert continues his series exploring the development of an algorithm for casting shadows as used in classic games like Rogue. This post follows on from the last and looks at determining the bottom cell
  • C#/.NET Fundamentals: Unit Testing with Func<TResult> Generators – James Michael Hare resumes his C# Fundamentals series with a look at back at the subject of Generic Func Delegates and explores their use as a generator for unit testing.
  • Knockout 2.0.0 is Available – John Papa highlights the release of Knockout.js 2.0.0, recapping what is new and exciting in this release.
  • JavaScript as a First Language – John Resig discusses thoughts on using JavaScript as the first language to teach Computer Science students, highlighting some of the features of the language and learning challenges which makes JavaScript a good starting point.
  • Want to give feedback for Visual Studio 11 etc and receive cool gifts? – Charles Sterling highlights an opportunity for you to get involved with the Visual Studio Design Research Team to help them to build a better product by taking part in one of their research studies, and in return receive a software gift.
  • Will you have a Merry Christmas with your web browser? – Marcin Dembowski takes a look at the performance of the latest versions of various browsers when running the Internet Explorer Christmas Demo, discussing the demo and performance and also highlighting a little Easter Egg in the demo.
  • One Compile A Day – Alfred Thompson discusses how the performance of modern computers and our ability to compile code quickly has changed the way we develop software these days
  • 31 Days of Testing – Day 18: Baseline Datasets – Jim Holmes continues his series on Testing with a look at the use of baseline data sets in your testing, discussing what makes a good baseline data set, and providing advice on building such a data set for your applications.

Community

  • What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 4 webcast: 17 January – Simone Chiaretta will be presenting an online webcast event looking at ASP.NET MVC4 for Microsoft Belgium on Tuesday 17th January. The event will be presented in English and kicks off at 14:00 CET. Registration is required.
  • Win a Windows Phone in our latest competition – The MSDN UK Team are running a competition where you can win a Windows Phone device. The competition is a caption competition and features none other than Clippy. You have until 5th January to enter.

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