The Morning Brew

Software

• Reactive Extensions v1.0.10621 SP1 available now – Bart De Smet announces the release of the Reactive Extensions SDK 1.0.10621 Service Pack 1. The release does not include any new functionality, but it does add support ofr Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.5, it also addresses a number of minor bugs in the 1.0 version
• Community TFS Build Extensions – December 2011 &[Visual Studio Extension Of The Day] Community TFS Build Manager (Alpha) – Hosam Kamel highlights the December 2011 release of the Community TFS Build Extensions, and looks in detail at the Community TFS Build Manager.

Information

• OSS and .NET Year In Review 2011 – Phil Haack looks back on some of the significant .NET open source projects of the year, focusing on NuGet, Orchard, Micro ORMs, Mono, Azure and the Open Source .NET Community.
• Shadowcasting in C#, Part Five – Eric Lippert continues his series of posts on the algorithms for casting shadows in the game Rogue. This part looks at filling in the cells as visible in particular columns based upon the visible radius.
• Backbone.js Is Not An MVC Framework & The Responsibilities Of The Various Pieces Of Backbone.js – Derick Bailey discusses some of the reasons why he does not consider Backbone,js to be an MVC framework, discussing the more MVP architectural structure of Backbone, and in the second post discusses the different parts of Backbone and what they are responsible for.
• Knockout.js Observable Extensions – Josh Bush takes a look at Knockout.js 2.0’s extender functionality by way of re-looking at his Money observable example, exploring how you can extend ko.subscribable.fn to have the implementation attach directly to the Knockout observable.
• MVC Techniques with JQuery, JSON, Knockout and C# – Mark J. Caplin works through the creation of an Order Entry application using ASP.NET MVC 4, JSON and client side databinding and behaviour using jQuery and Knockout.js.
• GUI REPL for Roslyn – Chris Sells continues his exploration of C# REPL using the Roslyn CTP, with this post looking at refactoring the earlier console application to be a WPF based one, and discussing some of the decisions that were needed to make it work.
• Introducing the for-if anti-pattern – Raymond Chen discusses a common anti pattern often seen in code, where the code spins through a collection of items testing each one when there are better (and much more performant) ways of achieving the same.
• Anatomy of a .NET Assembly – Type forwards – Simon Cooper discusses the use of Type Forwards by way of the TypeForwardedToAttribute discussing their purpose and use to allow types to be moved between assemblies without requiring recompiles.
• Rx – Buffer – Bnaya Eshet takes a detailed look at one of the Reactive Extensions most useful operators, the Buffer operator which allows you to slow down the throughput of events to help improve performance and resource utilisation.
• Introduction to bddify – Mehdi Khalili announces the release of bddify 1.0, a BDD testing framework which makes it easy to turn Arrange Act Assert unit test into BDD tests, and kicks off a series of posts looking at the framework, starting with an introduction to its history and use.
• 31 Days of Testing – Day 19: Refactoring a ‘Monster’ Functional Test, Part 1 & Day 20: Refactoring a Monster Test, Part 2 – Jim Holmes continues his 31 days of testing series with a look at the process of refactoring a huge functional test containing far too many different steps all rolled together, discussing how you can go about separating them to give a better test structure.
• Expanding your horizons – Ayende discusses how he learns in the technology space, discussing the importance of getting to grips with the basics and the stuff that underpins everything such as memory management, HTTP, the principles of distributed computing, etc.
• 11 Things every Software Developer should be doing in 2012. – Michael Crump shares a list of 11 things which he considers to be important for all software developer to be doing to keep them on top of their game in the coming year

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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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Software

• Knockout 2.0.0 released – Steve Sanderson announces the release of Knockout v2.0.0, a major upgrade to this library for building rich MVVM JavaScript user interfaces. This version was originally planned to be called 1.3, but the desire for Semantic Versioning and the amount of changes made it worth calling a V2. Check out Steve’s post for details of all the new features and improvements.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Training Kit – Daniel Egan highlights the release of the updated Windows Phone 7.5 Training Kit, available in two formats, basic and advanced. The basic kit (unsurprisingly) contains introductory content to all the key development features and APIs, with the advanced labs centring around adding more complex features to real world applications samples.
• WPFSpark gets all V1.0! & Windows Forms Toolkit v0.2… A little WinForm love for the holidays… – Greg Duncan highlights two control libraries, one for WPF and the other for Winforms. WPF Spark has now reached the milestone 1.0 release, adding a bunch of new controls to the library in the process, and the Windows Forms Toolkit shows that WinForms development is alive and kicking with some nice user experience controls.

Information

• Mono in 2011 – Miguel de Icaza takes a look back over 2011 from a Mono Project point of view, highlighting some major changes to the alternative .NET platform, both organisationally and also in technology terms.
• Taking a look at the Windows Simulator in Visual Studio 11 – Michael Crump takes a look at the emulator included in Visual Studio 11 which allows you to work with and debug Windows 8 Metro style apps. Michael walks through the features of the emulator, discussing its use and highlighting the emulator features for simulating multitouch.
• New Developer Centers on WindowsAzure.com – Peter Laudati highlights the newly updated Windows Azure Developer site which now adds (and makes more prominent) a number of new technologies supported on Windows Azure.
• Continuous Delivery – Adding an Automated Interface Test Stage – Eli Weinstock-Herman presses on with his series on Continuous Delivery taking a look in this post at setting up the continuous integration / build environment to run automated user interface tests.
• Building Apps and deploying them from GitHub – Joe Stagner highlights a new facility on GitHub allowing you to host your Mozilla Apps (HTML 5 browser based applications) directly off your GitHub repository for the project.
• Introduction To Designing For Windows Phone 7 And Metro – Daniela Panfili discusses the design of Windows Phone and Metro applications, discussing colours, controls, icons and animation in this Smashing Magazine article.
• Mango Sample: Portable Assemblies – Jerry Nixon continues his Mango Samples series with a look at the use of portable assemblies to allow you to consume the same assembly from Silverlight, Phone and regular .NET code.

Community

• SQLBits 10 – the official UK SQL Server 2012 Technical Launch Event – Sara Allison highlights the SQL Bits 10 event which is being held in London at the end of March. This event is also doubling as the UK launch event for SQL Server 2012, and features 2 pay for conference days, and the usual Saturday community day.

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