The Morning Brew

Software

• Boo-yah!!! Caliburn.Micro v1.3 RTW is Here – Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Caliburn.Micro v1.3, the latest release of this MVVM framework for Windows Phone 7 Mango, Silverlight 5 and WPF. This release also includes basic MVVM support for WinRT / Metro apps, improves the ViewModelLocator/ViewLocator implementation along with addressing issues from previous releases and improvements to the API.
• IE10 Compat Inspector – The Internet Explorer Team announce the release of the IE10 Compat Inspector, a JavaScript based testing tool which will allow you to verify that your sites and applications will work correctly in IE10. The tool consists of a single JavaScript reference, which can be manually inserted into your pages or added via the use of Fiddler.

Information

• Modern Web Development – Part 2 – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at the world of modern web development, taking a look at the structuring and architecture of your JavaScript in this second part in this series of 10 posts.
• Introducing Microsoft Codename "Cloud Numerics" from SQL Azure Labs – Roger Jennings rounds up a collection of resources on the recently released Microsoft Codename ‘Cloud Numerics’ project for performing numerical calculations on a large scale using Windows Azure.
• Visual Studio 11 ALM Advances – S.Somasegar wraps up the 5 post series on Visual Studio 11 he has been posting since the //Build conference with a look at the key Application Lifecycle Management features of Visual Studio 11
• Rx – Exception Handling – Bnaya Eshet continues his series of posts looking at the reactive extensions, looking at how you should handle exceptions occurring when working with observable streams of events. Also well worth checking out the previous two posts from Bnaya where he took a look at async / await and error handling.
• Mango Sample: a Secondary Tile in 5 Minutes – Jerry Nixon continues his series exploring the various features of Windows Phone 7 and the techniques for developing with them with a looking at the support for secondary tiles which allow you to present information to the user before they launch your application.
• The flowchart of the IE rendering modes – Chun Liu shares a flowchart originally created by Henri Sivonen which explains how the browser gets into the various rendering modes based upon a variety of settings and page content.
• Aggressive Inlining in the CLR 4.5 JIT – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the CLR JIT compiler’s inlining support, and highlights some new capabilities included in .NET 4.5
• F#, WebSharper, JavaScript, HTML5, Mobile etc – Don Syme gives a catchup on the world of F# and the happenings over the Christmas break, including the releasing of WebSharper as open source, compilation of F# to JavaScript, and some of the recent Azure releases.
• Speaking of Dev video resources… UserGroup.tv (with ‘State of .NET – The Road to Windows 8’ now available) – Greg Duncan highlights UserGroup.tv, a community site which aggregates recorded Usergroup presentations and materials. The site has a fantastic range of content covering all kinds of developer topics and is well worth checking out.
• Await, SynchronizationContext, and Console Apps & Implementing a SynchronizationContext.SendAsync method – Stephen Toub discusses how async / await attempts to ‘bring you back to where you were’ with a look at some of the goings on under the covers of the framework in the form of the SynchronizationContext and TaskScheduler.

Community

• PacMan Kata – Phil Trelford highligjhts the first meeting of the F#unctional Londeners Meetup Group on Thursday 26th January at Skills Matter. The event will be a Code Kata event looking at the the PacMan kata.
• NxtGenUG – Event – MicroORMs: Making data access – The Coventry NxtGEnUG welcome Ian Russel for a session on Micro ORMs on Monday 30th January. In the talk, Ian will explore the world of the MicroORM showing where they can be useful and how much functionality they provide with such little code and configuration.
• Teched Europe 2012 Registration now open – Lee Stott highlights the opening of registrations for TechEd Europe, running from 26th – 29th June 2012 in Amsterdam. The Early Bird discount price of 1695 Euro runs until 31st March, after which the price rises to 1995 Euro.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1027

Apologies for the late edition today – I was too quick closing my laptop this morning and managed to do it before the edition had posted to the server 🙁 Thanks to Libor for letting me know about my posting snafu

Software

• Announcing OData T4 for C#, Preview 1 – WCF Data Services Team Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Ahmed Moustafa of the WCF Data Services Team announces the first preview release of OData T4 for C#, T4 Templating for Add Service Reference for OData Services. This release works alongside the October 2011 CTP release of WCF Data Services, and give you a preview and ability to feedback on this feature which will eventually be in the main product.
• RaptorDB – The Key Value Store V2 – CodeProject® – Mehdi Gholam shares and discusses RaptorDB 2.0, a key value NoSQL database whcih makes use of MGIndex and MurMur2 Hashing. Full Code is available, alongside this detailed CodeProject article which discusses the implementation.
• A framework for building of WP7 application – Ilya Builuk shares a detailed look at his PhoneCore library for implementing Windows Phone 7 applications. The library provides a framework for building applications including features for Navigation, Dependency Injection, Configuration, Tracing, and much more. Full source and binaries along with sample applications are available from CodePlex

Information

• Getting Started with Windows Azure – Scott Guthrie continues his discussions of the Windows Azure in this blog series, discussing the options to get you started with Azure including a look at the signup process and discussing the 3 month trial options.
• C#, Async, Limits, oh my! – Peter Ritchie explores the limits of Async in C#, discussing how Async implements a state machine with integers representing the states, discussing how he generated 45GB C# Code file to probe the absolute limits.
• Abusing the Microsoft Research’s Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK with a Console-based Heat-map – – Scott Hanselman discusses the Microsoft Touch Mouse and the recently released Touch Mouse Sensor API SDK from Microsoft Research, exploring the use of the API to read data from the mouse and visualising it, along with pondering the possibilities this could be put to work in.
• PhoneGap now fully supports Windows Phone – Architects Rule! – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Bart Vande Ghinste highlights the level of completeness now offered by PhoneGap for targeting Windows Phone 7 devices, discussing the general coverage, and some of the plugins which enhance the integration with various aspects of the phone, along with highlighting a number of resources for learning more.
• Mango Sample: Delete Dramatically – Jerry Nixon continues his Mango Windows Phone samples series with a look at the implementation of another ‘must have’ animation, exploring the removal od data from a list.
• How Wikipedia uses HTML5 to save bandwidth – Jef Claes discusses how Wikipedia are making use of the HTML 5 support for SVG in browsers to render images such as flags and saving bandwidth along the way.

Community

• Into testing? Want to learn? Come to Testfest 2012 – Sara Allison higlights Testfest 2012, a 1 day event organised by the folks at Testing Stuff. The event isn’t going to be a traditional conference, with a mix of exhibit, discussions and a lack of Powerpoint silides. The event is on Wednesday 22nd February, at the Brighton Metropole, and tickets are priced very reasonably at £60.

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Software

• Announcing Visual Studio Achievements Beta – The Team over at Channel9 announce the beta release of Visual Studio Achievements, a fun extension which brings an element of game play to writing code
• Visual Studio Achievements – Remember Kids They’re Just For Fun – Bil Simser discusses the Visual Studio Achievements, and reminds us that they are just for fun, rather than reflecting best practices in all cases

Information

• Testing framework is not just for writing… tests – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses an alternative use for the testing frameworks we use, using them as a way of easily running sample code.
• What’s new in WCF 4.5? Improved streaming in IIS hosting – Ido Flatow is now on part 9 of a series of posts spanning back to September looking at the new features of WCF4.5. This post looks at streaming support in WCF when hosted on IIS, allowing better performance and memory use characteristics.
• Mango Sample: The ApplicationBar’s Secret Blend? – Jerry Nixon continues his series of articles looking at sample applications to demonstrate various features of Windows Phone Mango taking a look in this post at the Application Bar and looking at creating an Application Bar in both Expression Blend and Visual Studio.
• An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout" HTML and CSS techniques – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the variety of methods which websites used yesterday to black out in protest of the SOPA and PIPA acts

Community

• Microsoft IE6 Migration – Tarun Arora highlights the Microsoft IE6 Migration Roadshow events. These events, in conjunction with various partners, are taking place in February, March and April in Manchester, Chalfont St. Peter, London, and Reading. The idea behind the events is to help IT departments understand the issues with migration and why the need to perform migration
• Join me for a developer webcast for Windows Phone 7.5 – Paul Laberge’s Windows Phone 7.5 Developer webcast is today (January 19th) at 1PM EST / 10am PST. This web cast runs for 3 hours, looking at implementing a variety of Windows Phone features into your applications. The even better news is that the session will be recorded and made available after the event!

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