December 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #1005

Posted by Chris Alcock on 19 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Castle Windsor 3.0 is released - Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official release of Castle Windsor 3.0. This release features no major changes over the previous Release Candidate release, with only bugfixes and a few improvements being included. The release is available both as a NuGet Package and also as standalone .ZIP download.
  • Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit - Lee Stott highlights the release of an update of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit containing updates to labs made at the //Build conference. The kit is available as a web installer or full offline package, and the contents of the training kit can also be viewed online on MSDN.
  • December 2011 TFS Power Tools Release - Brian Harry announces the release of an update to the TFS Power Tools. This December 2011 release focuses attention on those interacting with TFS from other environments, including updates to the Eclipse integration, 64 bit MSSCCI provider support as well as a few improvements for those working in Visual Studio.
  • Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI - first public CTP availability - Avkash Chauhan highlights the first public CTP Release of the Windows Azure Service Bus Enterprise Application Integration and Electronic Data Interchange, providing improve B2B integration and allowing connectivity between private cloud and public cloud service bus instances.

Information

  • Node.js For Dummies - Davy Brion gives a nice introduction to some of the key concepts behind the ever increasingly popular Node.js, highlighting where Node.js is different from many other technology stacks.
  • Composite JavaScript Applications With Backbone And Backbone.Marionette - Derick Bailey continues his series of posts on BackboneJS with this post announcing his Marionette BackboneJS library. Marionette enables a number of composite application structures for your Backbone applications.
  • A Case For Using CoffeeScript - Justin Etheredge discusses some of the points raised in ‘A case against using CoffeeScript’ (article linked in the post) discussing some of tbe bad parts of the language, along with looking at debugging and the comprehension of CoffeeScript code.
  • Hadoop Streaming and F# MapReduce - Carl Nolan discusses the use of MapReduce in F# and the new support for Hadoop Streaming , exploring the implementation of a simple example and the testing of it
  • Continuous Delivery Project - Making MVCMusicStore Testable - Eli Weinstock-Herman continues his series on Continuous Delivery, takjing a look at adding tests to the MVCMusicStore application, covering a variety of techniques for testing. These tests will be included into the CI build in the next post
  • A Simple Multi-Page Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap Example - Colin Eberhardt gives a nice tutorial on using PhoneGap to create multi-page applications for Windows Phone, including discussion of enabling the back button, disabling pan and zoom and implementing a splash screen.

Community

  • NxtGenUG - Event - Web Caching 101 - Seb Lambla visits the Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG on Wednesday 18th January for a session exploring web caching and how it can make your websites quicker and more scalable.

The Morning Brew #1004

Posted by Chris Alcock on 16 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Another short edition today I’m afraid.

Software

  • Nocco.cs - Nocco is a port to .NET of Docco, the code documentation tool discussed in one of the articles linked to in yesterday’s Morning Brew. Not sure if this is a new project or not, saw a link to it yesterday and thought others might find it interesting.

Information

The Morning Brew #1003

Posted by Chris Alcock on 15 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Short edition today due to bad traffic :(

Software

  • IE 6/7/8 XP/Vista/Win7 VHD’s Refreshed - Greg Duncan highlights the release of updated Application Compatibility Testing Virtual Machine images fro Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8 running on XP/Vista/Windows 7

Information

  • Using-blocks and asynchronous operations - Fredrik Mörk discusses the using block and how it acts as syntactic sugar in our code to make working with IDisposable easier, and discusses the interplay between the new C#5 async/await functionality and using blocks.
  • Manage Your Dependencies with Rake and NuGet - Josh Bush continues on from his last post on using Rake and Albacore to build your .NET projects, and in this post turns attention to working with dependencies in your Rake builds using NuGet 1.6
  • Code signing for the independent developer - Tim Heuer discusses the process of applying and obtaining code signing certificates for signing your Silverlight Out Of Browser applications.
  • Annotated Source Code As Documentation, With Docco - Derick Bailey discusses the importance of writing documentation as well as commenting your code when working on open source projects, and takes a look at using Docco to add annotation to code as a valuable part of a bigger documentation
  • .NET Programming for Absolute Beginners [Free Video Series] - Suprotim Agarwal highlights two introductory video series on Channel9 which aim to teach the basics of C# and VB.NET. Valuable resources next time someone asks you what they should do to start to learn either language.
  • Starting a Continuous Delivery Project - Eli Weinstock-Herman kicks off a series of posts looking at the process of working on a project running as a continuous deliver project. This first post sets the scene for the project, with 6 further posts planned.

Community

  • Official RNIB Accessibility Hackathon! - The London Android Group are joining forces with the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) for an event which will focusing on accessibility hacks and APIs. The event is planned for the weekend 11th February (but may be put back to the 18th) and will be spread over the 2 days of the weekend.

The Morning Brew #1002

Posted by Chris Alcock on 14 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Nuget 1.6 - NuGet 1.6 has been launched, bringing with it a number of significant advances, including support for Semantic Versioning and Pre-release packages, built in capabilities for restoring packages so you don’t have to put them in version control, the ability to install packages for item templates and the ability to disable package sources.
  • Install-Package Roslyn - Kirill Osenkov highlights the release of the Roslyn CTP as a NuGet package making it ever easier to include this exciting new functionality in your own projects.
  • Released RequestReduce.SassLessCoffee: Now have RequestReduce compile your .less, .sass, .scss and .coffee files before minifying and bundling them - Matt Wrock highlights last Friday’s release of RequestReduce.SassLessCoffee which brings support for .less .sass and ,scss files to be compiled by RequestReduce prior to them being cached minified and bundled.
  • dotPeek is Back with New Early Build - Jura Gorohovsky of JetBrains annoucnes their latest early access build of dotPeek their free .NET decompiler and assembly browser. This new version brings opening from explorer, resource decompilation, References hierarchy and much more.

Information

  • Cleaning Up Your Git Repository For NuGet 1.6 - Nick Berardi discusses the NuGet 1.6 package restore functionality discussing how you should clean out the packages directory from your projects and looking at the process for Git Repositories
  • Better Git with PowerShell - Phil Haack is also discussing git topics as a part of his new role at GitHub (congrats by the way), discussing how PowerShell and Git become good friends with Posh-Git, discussing the use of PSGet to install it.
  • Remove full path of PDB file from C# dll or exe. (/pdbaltpath in c#) - Vaibhav Gaikwad discusses removing or changing the paths that are embedded in executable and DLLs which point to the PDB file, discussing where these are stored and sharing a simple utility which reads the format and updates the files headers.
  • Subterranean IL: Explicit overrides - Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at the .NET Intermediate Language, continuing the exploration of this with a look at how override methods are implemented for virtual methods, looking at implicit and explicit overrides at the IL level.
  • 31 Days of Testing - Day 12: Functional Test 101 - Jim Holmes continues his series of posts on Testing with an introduction to Functional Testing of web applications using Selenium and Web Driver
  • Zero-One-Some Testing - George Mastros discusses test case heuristics, discussing the creation of tests and the Zero-one-some practice of testing looking at it applied to database testing.
  • Just because you can test it doesn’t mean you should - Samson Tanrena is also discussing testing practices, talking about the importance of good appropriate tests rather than testing everything
  • 7 WP7 dev tools you might not know but will want to have - ‘Timdams’ has a post which highlights 7 tools and libraries to assist with Windows Phone Development which you may not be aware of, discussing the purpose of each and linking on to further information.
  • Mango Sample: Icon Design, Advertising &Accelerometer - Jerry Nixon presses on with his collection of Windows Phone Mango samples taking a look at the design of icons for use in your applications, the introduction of advertising into your apps, and exploring some code which makes use of the accelerometer built into Windows Phones.

The Morning Brew #1001

Posted by Chris Alcock on 13 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Many many thanks for all of the congratulations and kind comments on yesterday’s 1000th edition post - much appreciated.

Software

  • Improved Developer Experience, Interoperability, and Scalability on Windows Azure - The Windows Azure Team announce multiple updates for the Windows Azure Platform, including price reductions, larger SQL Azure Databases, improved subscriptions management via the newly updated site, SQL Azure Federation, Windows Azure support for Node.js in the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js, preview of Hadoop for Windows Azure, along with a variety of features to improve Azure support for Open Source Development platforms (Eclipse/Java, MongoDB, Solr/Lucene and Memcached). Other announcement posts include:
  • New Windows Azure Guidance Topics Published - Glenn Gailey & (Windows Azure Prescriptive Guidance Released) Rick Saling announce the release of new guidance topics for Windows Azure and SQL Azure, discussing topics including OData, Windows Phone integration, Managing SQL Azure connections, working with Entity Framework and Federations, and much more
  • Now Available: SQL Azure Q4 2011 Service Release - The Windows Azure Team also announce the Q4 2011 service release of SQL Azure, discussing the pricing changes, database size increases and new features of this update.
  • SQL Database Federations: Enhancing SQL to enable Data Sharding for Scalability in the Cloud - Ram Jeyaraman also discusses the new Federation support in the latest update to SQL Azure, giving an overview of the functionality and showing the TSQL use of federations.
  • SpecsFor.com Launched, SpecsFor 2.2 Released! - Matt Honeycutt announces the launch of both an updated version of his SpecsFor project and also a new project website. The 2.2 release of SpecsFor improves the process for creating multiple mocks of the same type for use in IEnumerable parameters with the introduction of the GetMockForEnumerableOf method.
  • YUI 3.5.0 PR1 Is Now Available - The YUI Team announce their first developer preview release of the YUI 3.5.0 JavaScript library. This release gives the first taste of some of the new features that are coming, and is the first opportunity for you to feed back on the ideas and features. There will be a number of further preview releases as the team continue to implement the new features for the 3.5.0 release.
  • Bumblebee 0.1 is on CodePlex - Mathias Brandewinder announces the alpha release of Bumblebee 0.1. Bumblebee is a implementation of the Artifical Bee Colony algorithm which creates a simulation of the behaviour of a bee colony. What’s interesting about this is the implementation which makes use of the Task Parallel Library to parallelize the implementation over multiple cores, implements a good API design for ease of consumption in C# and F#.

Information

Community

The Morning Brew #1000

Posted by Chris Alcock on 12 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Today is the 1000th edition of the Morning Brew. Back in January 2008 when I started out with this series of posts I had no idea how long I’d keep them up for. Back then the post series started out called Morning Coffee with the first edition containing a whole 3 links – how things have grown since then!
Since then, for 1000 working UK days I’ve produced an edition, even managing to achieve posts when I was out of the country on both business and pleasure. There have been a few occasions where posts have been delayed – once due to falling asleep jetlagged in Seattle while preparing the post, but mostly things have gone out on time.
I had planned to have more a celebratory post for today, perhaps with a new look website and some giveaways, but unfortunately the last few weeks have been rather hectic, so instead I will look to the 1024th edition for those things.
I’m forever in debt to the great authors and technologists without who’s posts the Morning Brew would be nothing, and I only keep doing this because of the wonderful community we work within – if you’ve enjoyed The Morning Brew and found it useful I encourage you to let your colleagues and developer friends know about it.
Here is to the next 1000!

Silverlight 5 and Related

Information

  • The New MSDN Subscriber Portal is Live! - The MSDN Subscription Team have launched the new MSDN Subscriber Portal, both a visual refresh as well as a significant behind the scenes rewrite.
  • Using QUnit with Razor Layouts - Phil Haack discusses the role of JavaScript in modern web applications and how important it is to test your JavaScript code well, setting out to show how he uses QUnit to test JavaScript in his Razor views, drawing on Jonathan Creamer’s recent post as inspiration.
  • SOLID JavaScript: Single Responsibility Principle - Derek Greer kicks off a series of posts over on Fresh Brewed Code looking at applying the SOLID Principle to JavaScript Code, starting off with a look at the Single Responsibility Principle.
  • BackboneJS modular app using RequireJS - Jonathan Creamer discusses the using RequireJS to create modular JavaScript applications which avoid the problems of scale that many large and complex JavaScript applications suffer from.
  • "A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control, Second Edition" in 441 pages of a free PDF - Greg Duncan highlights the release of the second edition of the Patterns and Practices ‘A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control’ available as a PDF download. The book addresses all aspects of claims based identity including Windows Identity Foundation an Active Directory Federation Services.
  • ASP.NET MVC Routing Extensibility - Simone Chiaretta discusses how you can hook into the ASP.NET MVC pipeline via Routing extensibility allowing you to jump into your own pipeline before the controller instance is created for the request.
  • Easy URL rewriting in ASP.NET 4.0 web forms - Jalpesh P. Vadgama discusses the use of Routing in your ASP.NET Web Forms applications, showing a simple worked example of the configuration and use.
  • Take Control of Your .NET Builds with Rake and Albacore - Josh Bush highlights the Albacore project from Derick Bailey which makes building .NET Applications with Rake allowing you to create build scripts in Ruby.
  • FrazzledDad: 31 Days of Testing - Day 8: Pay Attention to Your Tests’ Setup! - Jim Holmes continues his 31 Days of Testing series of posts with discussion of the test setup and how you should observe good programing practices (like DRY) when writing your tests.
  • User testing is common sense - ‘armear’ highlights the practice of User Testing, discussing the value of performing User Testing to improve the quality of your products and User Interfaces
  • Zooming & Panning with CSS in IE 10 - Mike Taulty explores how some of the CSS 3 features of the Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview can help you create a familiar experience for those used to touch based interfaces, discussing the practices and implementation of panning and zooming.

The Morning Brew #999

Posted by Chris Alcock on 09 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Today marks the last triple digit edition of The Morning Brew!

Software

Information

  • So many interfaces, part two - Eric Lippert revisits a topic from earlier in the year taking a look at interface re-implementation where your class explicitly states that it implements an interface that is already implemented in the inheritance hierarchy, showing how inheritance can be a much more complex topic that we may initially think.
  • C# Fundamentals: Returning Zero or One Item As IEnumerable<T> - James Michael Hare continues his C# Fundamentals series with a look at returning empty results collections or single results wrapped as IEnumerable<T>, exploring the use og List<T>, arrays and iterators, comparing their implementation in code and performance.
  • NuGet: little known features - Peter Kuhn discusses some of the less well know features of NuGet, discussing and highlighting documentation on creating your own NuGet feeds, making use of Package Restore as a part of your build process, and creating your own packages.
  • Use Projections and a Repository to Fake a Filtered Eager Load - Julie Lerman discusses one of the most requested features which is not currently in Entity Framework - sorting and filtering of eager loaded data - discussing the problem pace and showing how you can work around the current limitation in certain circumstances.
  • Hosted Execution of smaller code snippets with Roslyn - Filip Ekberg discusses the creation of a Roslyn based environment which allows you to run arbitrary C# code in a more isolated way than many of the existing REPL demonstrations support.
  • Test first != TDD - Kailuo Wang discusses the difference between writing your tests first and actually doing real Test Driven Development
  • 31 Days of Testing - Day 7: Automated Test Basics - Jim Holmes is pressing on with his Testing Series continuing with exploration of Automated Testing looking at the basics of NUnit testing.
  • Testing Web.config Transformations, Part 1 - Mads Troest takes a look at performing web.config transformations programmatically allowing you to create automated tests for your web.config transformations, looking at the use of IBuildEngine outside the MSBuild Process.

Community

  • The SQL Server Conference - SQLBits 10 - 29 - 31 Mar 2012 - London - Registrations for SQL Bits X which runs between 29th and 31st March 2012 in London. The format of the event is the usual 2 days of paid for conference followed by the Saturday Community Day which is free for all (Registration required). SqlBits X is also doubling up as the SQL Server 2012 UK Launch event, so expect it to be bigger than ever.
  • Free OpenWrap workshop Saturday 10th December in Lier, Belgium - Sebastien Lambla is out in Belgium and will be running a 4 hour session on package management, Open Wrap, and composite systems this Saturday (10th December). The event is free, and includes a complimentary lunch.

The Morning Brew #998

Posted by Chris Alcock on 08 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

Information

  • Daytona - Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure - Josh Reuben gives a nice overview of the Microsoft Research Daytona project, a map reduce implementation which runs across multiple nodes on the Windows Azure Platform, discussing how it works, the API and looking at a sample of using it.
  • QUnit layout for JavaScript testing in ASP.net MVC3 - Jonathan Creamer discusses the structuring of QUnit tests for JavaScript in your ASP.NET MVC applications, providing a simple framework to get you up and running.
  • Runtime code generation for types - Ivan Towlson continues his exploration of runtime code generation looking this time at creating whole new types at runtime using reflection emit to build the IL representations.
  • PragPub - Issue 30, December 2011 - The Pragmatic Bookshelf folks announce the December edition of PragPub magazine, available in HTML, PDF, epub and mobi formats, and covering Graphics Hardware, Just-In-Time logging, extending Java, and all the usual columns.
  • Is ThreadStatic a leaky abstraction? - Jimmy Bogard the use of ThreadStatic to control object lifecycle, suggesting that its use may result in a leaky abstraction, and suggesting alternatives for controlling lifecycle.
  • jQuery 1.7 Cheat Sheet - This nicely formatted jQuery 1.7 cheat sheet (well sheets really, its 8 pages long) gives a nice overview of the functionality of jQuery, and also highlights the areas which are new or updated in the 1.7 release.

Community

  • Learn Windows Azure Next Tuesday (Dec 13th) - On December 13th Scott Guthrie is headlining a free day of developer training on Windows Azure which is running as both an in person event at Microsoft in Redmond and is also being streamed live. Both options are free and this is a great opportunity to learn more about the Windows Azure platform.
  • ALM SUMMIT 2011 Videos are Available NOW - Hosam Kamel highlights the availability of the session recordings from the recent ALM Summit 2011 on the Channel 9 site.
  • NxtGenUG - Event - Continuous Integration - Paul Stack will be visiting the Hereford NxtGenUG on Monday 13th February 2012 where he will be delivering a session on Continuous Integration.
  • NxtGenUG - Event - Being a Simple Nancy in WebDev - Mark Rendle takes a trip down to Southampton’s NxtGenUG on Thursday 16th February where he will be giving a session on the use of Simple.Data and the Nancy framework to bring Light weight web development to the .NET platform.

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