The Morning Brew

Software

• Juice UI: Open source ASP.NET Web Forms components for jQuery UI widgets - Jon Galloway highlights JuiceUI, a new open source project from the folks over at appendTo which brings easy server side support for jQuery UI controls to your ASP.NET Webforms applications.
• Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 RC1 - Todd Parker highlights the first RC release of jQuery Mobile 1.1.0. The 1.1.0 release is all about making jQuery Mobile perform better, with smoother and more polished behaviours, ad this RC includes support for true fixed toolbars, smoother transitions, adds Turn and Flow transitions, updates support for jQuery 1.7.1 and much much more.

Information

• Consuming WebApi endpoints in your application - Derik Whittaker continues his look at the ASP.NET WebAPI beta exploring the consumption of WebAPI endpoints in applications, looking at the async support of the HttpClient
• ASP.NET Web Api - Request/Response/Usage Logging - Glav takes a look at how you can log information about the requests to your WebAPI services, including capture of the parameters supplied, and the response sent by way of MessageHandlers extension points.
• New features of ASP.NET MVC 4 that you will love - Leon Cullens highlights some of the key new features of ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta, drawn from the recent presentation from Scott Guthrie on MVC4 at TechDays Netherlands.
• Shhh… don’t let your response headers talk too loudly - Troy Hunt discusses the information leak that occurs with the standard configuration of most web servers, where they reveal quite a lot of information about the software being used in th HTTP response headers, before looking at how you can control the headers sent, and discussing his ASafaWeb tool which now checks for these information leaks.
• "Parsing" Arguments in JavaScript - Jim Cowart discusses the various practices for passing arguments into JavaScript methods to provide overload like capabilities, including looking at the performance implications of the different approaches
• Primitive JavaScript (BYOSP Part 7) - K. Scott Allen continues his Build Your Own Slide Presenter series looking at building a Slide Show Presentation application in pure HTML5, JavaScript and CSS, taking a look at refactoring the strings and selectors used in some of the code
• Introduction to jQuery Mobile - Brian Mains share an article discussing the concepts behind jQuery Mobile, along with the setup and getting started and conventions used in this Dotnetslackers article.
• Two words to code by… IDEAL CHALK [a mnemonic for OOP] - Greg Duncan highlights an article from ProEnggSoft over on CodeProject which provides mnemonic acronym and mnemonic images for the key object oriented principles
• Umbraco - NuGet Packages and Visual Studio Templates - Morten Christensen of the Umbraco team announces a suite of NuGet Packages for Umbraco which contain templates and functionality making it easy to add features to your Visual Studio based Umbraco projects.
• Enhancing the "non-javascript" user experience with jQuery UI and Fluqi - toepoke discusses how they maintained the non-JavaScript experience of their site when using Fluqi to add jQuery UI functionality to the site

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Software

• Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update - CTP now available for download - Aaron Stebner highlights the release of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Community Technology Preview. This latest SDK includes support for a new class of WP7 device containing only 256MB RAM. The CTP is being released as a patch on top of the 7.1 SDK, and does not include go-live licensing.

Information

• Zero to Self Hosting AspNet WebAPI in a few short steps - Derik Whittaker takes a look at implementing a self-hosted ASP.NET Web API implementation inside a console application, showing how easily the API can be be brought online with a HTTP endpoint.
• Content Negotiation in ASP.NET MVC4 Web API Beta - Part 2 - Kiran Challa continues this series looking at the role of content negotiation in the ASP.NET Web API exploring MediaTypeMapping and the MediaTypeFormatter.
• Handling exceptions in your ASP.NET Web API - Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the facilities provided in the ASP.NET Web API for handling exceptions, looking at how the ASP.NET MVC basis allows the implementation of Filters to handle and respond to exceptions.
• WebAPI and Ninject - Shawn Wildermuth digs into the support for Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection frameworks within your WebAPI implementations, looking at how DependencyResolvers are configured in WebAPI, and looking at the use of the CommonServiceLocator
• Building a Northwind Single Page Application using ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta - Part 1 & Part 2 - Harish Ranganathan takes a look at the Single Page Application templates included in ASP.NET MVC4 Beta which provide the core functionality for creating this new popular form of all in one page application.
• From ASP.NET MVC to Nancy - Part 3 - Jonas Hovgaard continues his series looking at the Nancy lightweight web framework from the point of view of an ASP.NET MVC developer, looking at the support in Nancy for dependency injection using TinyIOC.
• MSDN Magazine March Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives us a taste of what is coming in March’s edition of the MSDN Magazine, due out online in the next couple of days.
• Plain Old JavaScript - K. Scott Allen discusses the increasing complexity and embedding of code related to frameworks in your own JavaScript code as a result of the way these frameworks work. Interesting discussion starting in the comments of this one.
• jQuery Tip #5: Using jQuery’s end() Function to Work with Sets & Video: Structuring JavaScript with the Revealing Module Pattern - Dan Wahlin continues his jQuery Tips series with a look at the use of the end() method wen working with sets on the stack, and also shares a part of the PluralSight Structuring JavaScript Code online course which discusses the use of the Revealing Module pattern.
• Revisiting Hosting Reflector - Nick Harrison takes a look at hosting Reflector inside your own applications, allowing you to make use of its code analysis and disassembler features in your own applications, illustrating with discussing its inclusion in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC applications

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Had a great start to the MVP Summit yesterday at GeekGive where we collectivly packed over 7500 pounds of beans - find out more over on the MVP Award Blog

Software

• Nancy v0.10.0 - The next step in awesome - Andreas Håkansson announces the release of Nancy v0.10.0, the latest release of the Nancy lightweight web framework. This release includes improvements to diagnostics, Razor, model validation, along with bugfixes and tweaks to existing functionality. Andreas goes on to discuss the amount of community involvement which went into the release, along with taking a look at some of the key new features.
• jQuery UI 1.8.18 - The jQuery UI Team announce the release of jQuery UI 1.8.18, their latest maintenance release featuring bugfixes for the Accordion, Autocomplete, Button, DatePicker, Dialog, Draggable, Position, Resizable, Slider, Sortable, and Tabs controls. This update is available as a download, and also from a variety of CDN host.
• Change Considered Harmful? - The New Visual Studio Look and Feel & Visual Studio 11 Beta: Thoughts and Resources - Just in case you missed the news last week of the first previews of the Beta release of Visual Studio 11, Scott Hanselman & Michael Crump discuss the new features of the beta, along with the most discussed feature, the updated ‘metro’ style appearance.

Information

• ASP.NET Web API (Part 1) - Scott Guthrie kicks off a series of posts looking at the new ASP.NET Web API, included in the ASP.NET MVC 4 beta release, highlighting some of the key features the framework offers.
• One ASP.NET - Making JSON Web APIs with ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and ASP.NET Web API - Scott Hanselman also takes a look at the ASP.NET Web API, discussing how it fits in with the overall ASP.NET picture, and looks at using it to create JSON based APIs.
• Writing a Lightweight Web Service using WebApi Building Blocks - Youssef Moussaoui discusses how easy the ASP.NET Web API makes publishing HTTP based services, and discusses how one of the goals of the framework was to decouple the receiving and dispatching of messages to enable extensibility.
• Disabling the Xml Formatter in ASP.NET Web API - The easy way - Glenn Block discusses two techniques to remove the XML Formatter when using the ASP.NET Web API, meaning that your services will only return JSON formatted data
• Content Negotiation in ASP.NET MVC4 Web API Beta - Part 1 - Kiran Challa kicks off a series of posts looking at the role of content negotiation in the ASP.NET MVC4 Web API, discussing how the accept header is used to determine the format of content returned
• ASP.NET MVC4 bundling in ASP.NET MVC3 - Jef Claes takes a look at how you can utilise the ASP.NET MVC 4 Bundling functionality from ASP.NET MVC 3 by installing the Microsoft.Web.Optimization package using the NuGet -Pre switch.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders - The List<T>Range Methods - James Michael Hare continues his C#/.NET Little Wonders series with a look at the AddRange, InsertRange, RemoveRange and GetRange methods on List<T>
• jQuery Tip #4 - Use the on() Function for Event Handling - Dan Wahlin continues his jQuery Tips series with a look at handling events using the on() method, looking at how it provides a consistent method for handling all types of events, looking at it in operation.
• WinForms and MVP: Making a testable application - Lenny Kean takes a look at applying the MVP pattern to Winforms applications to make them more testable, illustrating with an example from his NoteCard sample application.
• TouchDevelop book and slides - now available online - Nikolai Tillmann highlights some new resources to help you get started developing on your Windows Phone using TouchDevelop

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Software

• The Road to Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET 4.5 Beta - Somasegar announces the date for the beta release of Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5, both with a go-live license. The date for release is Wednesday 29th February. Jason Zander also shares the announcement in his post ‘Sneak Preview of Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta‘
• Introducing the New Developer Experience - The Visual Studio Blog features and article from Monty Hammontree, the Director of User Experience in the Developer Tools Division discussing the significant changes to the Visual Studio IDE being released as a part of the Visual Studio 11 Beta.
• Visual Studio 11 Beta - The Microsoft Visual Studio product website has also recieved an update for the beta release, with a range of content discussing the beta products to be released on Wednesday.
• Coming Soon: TFS Express - Brian Harry announces a new edition of Team Foundation Server coming in TFS 11. Team Foundation Server Express will provide the core developer features required, including integration with Visual Studio Express editions, and will be free for team sizes of up to 5 users

Information

• Visual Studio 11 Design Changes - What, Really? & Mmm, news about Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5 beta! - Roland Weigelt and Julian M Bucknall discuss the VS 11 and .NET 4.5 Beta release, discussing the UI changes and licensing.
• Validating your models in ASP.NET Web API - Pablo M. Cibraro discusses how the common extensibility model between ASP.NET MVC and the ASP.NET Web API means you get features from one in the other, looking at model binding and validation in Web API.
• More about REST: File upload download service with ASP.NET Web API and Windows Phone background file transfer - Yi-Lun Luo looks at updating code from WCF Web API to the ASP.NET Web API Beta, and looks at the consumption of such a service from the Windows Phone 7 using the Background File Transfer services
• ASP.NET Web API and ELMAH Integration - Tugberk Ugurlu takes a look at integrating the ASP.NET Web API with EMLAH to handle errors, looking at how the integration has changed from the WCF Web API.
• Building Expression Evaluator with Expression Trees in C# - Part 1 - Giorgi Dalakishvili kicks off a series of posts looking at the creation of an Expression Evaluator using C# and Expression Trees, working through the process in a test first style.
• How do I use HTML5 in Visual Studio 2010? - Susan Ibach shares her experiences and tips for working with HTML 5 in Visual Studio 2010
• Cross-cutting concerns via Interception on Windows Phone - Ilya Builuk explores the application of Aspect Oriented Programming approaches to deal with cross cutting concerns in your Windows Phone applications in this Code Project article.

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Information

• What Is The Spirit of Open Source? - Phil Haack follows on from his previous post discussing the notion of Open Source and Open Source Software, and the community reactions to it, discussing the topic further, the various view points, and official definitions. Interesting post, and also interesting comments on this one well worth reading too.
• Extended WPF Toolkit is getting a new owner - On a similar note, Brian Lagunas discusses a new owner of the open source project he has been curating / developing. It’s great to see companies willing to take over projects like this, and I congratulate Brian on making the transfer to Xceed to avoid a conflict of interest (and also on his new job)
• WebAPI for the MVC Guy - Shawn Wildermuth takes a break from his modern web development series to take a look at the new Web API released as part of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta, exploring its use to create an API for mobile applications for an existing web application.
• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentDictionary - Simon Cooper continues his series looking at the internal implementation of the Concurrent Collections, taking a high level overview look at the implementation of the Concurrent Dictionary, highlighting the use of Partitioning, Ordered lock taking and Lockless reads in the implementation.
• Generics: The Better Method Match - Bill Wagner discusses one of the common questions regarding the use of generics, establishing which method will actually be called in different circumstances.
• How to: Build Testable Windows Phone Applications - Sara Allison shares an article from David Britch on the UK MSDN Blog. In the article David looks at techniques to help in the testability of your Windows Phone applications, by wrapping up dependencies on the hardware to allow mocking.
• Quick tip: Windows Phone 7 Guidance - patterns & practices release - Katrien DG highlights an updated release of the Windows Phone Developer Guide from the Patterns and Practices team which contains a number of updated articles and code samples for Windows Phone 7.5 and SDK 7.1
• Media Queries (BYOSP Part 5) & History and Hash Changes (BYOSP Part 6) - K. Scott Allen continues his ‘Build Your Own Slide Presenter’ series looking at building a HTML5 / JavaScript based slide presenter. Part 5 of this series looks at the use of CSS media selectors to support better printing of the slides, and part 6 explores the use of this history API and Hash locations to maintain your position in the slide deck.
• EmberJS: Initial Impressions (Compared To Backbone) & Handling DOM Events With EmberJS Views And Controllers - Not content with having only one JavaScript JS-MV* framework in his toolset, Derick Bailey takes a look at one of the other popular choices out there. EmberJS (previously known as AmberJS and SprouteCore 2) aims to provide a standard application architecture, and remove bolierplate code to produce ‘ambitious web applications’, and Derick shares a look at it from a Backbone user’s perspective.
• A Beginner’s Tutorial on Caching in ASP.NET & Understanding ASP.NET Validation Techniques - Rahul Rajat Singh shares two back to basics articles looking at core concepts in ASP.NET, discussing the different forms of caching and validation controls available in the ASP.NET Framework in these two Code Project articles.

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Software

• TouchDevelop v2.6: enhanced user profiles, libraries, access devices in your home network, and more - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop 2.6, the latest update to this Windows Phone 7 application which lets you develop scripts for your Windows Phone 7 mobile device. This version includes a redesigned Script editor, new events, and support for library code reuse, along with various improvements to the social aspects of the project.
• MooTools Bootstrap 2.0 - Clientcide highlights the release of MooTools Bootstrap 2.0 from Aaron Newton which brings MooTools into the mix for sites built with Twitter’s Bootstrap, allowing you use MooTools rather than jQuery in your Twitter Bootstrap based sites.

Information

• Generating Random Non-Uniform Data In C# - Eric Lippert discusses the creation of random data which is not uniform, looking at making random data fir to underlying probability distributions delving into some of the statistics behind non-uniform data.
• Visual Studio 11: New Features Preview - Jerry Nixon highlights a video interview with Tim Huckaby and Cameron Skinner discussing what is coming in Visual Studio 11, along with highlighting some MSDN content looking in more detail at some of the features.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: EventAggregator.Net - Jason Jarrett continues his series looking at projects from the NuGet Feed, discussing another of his own projects - EventAggregator.Net - a simple single file Pub/Sub event aggregator
• Implementing CORS support in ASP.NET Web APIs - take 2 - Carlos Figueira looks at another way of implementing Cross-Origin Resource Sharing using the ASP.NET WebAPIs looking at a solution which allows for more fine grain control over the actions to expose in this way
• ASP.NET Web API: Fun with verbs - Yaniv Rodenski takes a look, from the point of view of a WCF Developer, at controlling the HTTP Verbs for which your controller methods are called in the new ASP.NET WebAPIs
• Unit Testing with MSTest, xUnit and NUnit in the VS11 Developer Preview - Peter Provost highlights a new plugin for the Visual Studio 11 Developer preview which brings NUnit Testing integration to the platform, and also highlights the existing xUnit.net plugin released back at Build, both allowing you to use your choice of test framework with the built in testing functionality of Visual Studio
• Async CTP - Task based asynchronous programming for Windows Phone - Kevin Ashley shares 6 samples which illustrate the use of the Async CTP Version 3, and highlights the compatibility of the this preview release with Windows Phone SDK 7.1, Silverlight 5 and Roslyn CTP.
• Refactoring Switches to Classes - John Sonmez looks at another scenario where you may encounter switch statements which break separation of concerns, and looks at how you can refactor them to a more object oriented approach.

Community

• Internationalizing ASP.NET MVC Around The UK - Guy Smith-Ferrier is going on tour over the next few weeks taking his latest talk ‘Internationalizing ASP.NET MVC’ to usergroups in Cambridge, Southampton, Shropshire and Bristol. The session, also titled ‘How To Achieve World(-Ready) Domination In ASP.NET MVC’ will look at localizing HTML, HTML Helpers and URLs, globalizing JavaScript, Data Annotations,
• Orchard CMS virtual meetup, Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - Matt Harrington highlights the Orchard CMS Developer Virtual Meetup, a webinar on Tuesday 6th March, with Bertrand LeRoy presenting new features ofOrchard 1.4, and Matt Harrington showing how you can run Orchard on Windows Azure

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Software

• Prism for Silverlight 5 Ships - Blaine Wastell highlights the release of Prism 4.1 for Silverlight 5. The introduction of Silverlight 5 support has caused a few changes in Prism, some scoped only to the Silverlight Support, and this release also addresses a number of reported issues.
• FluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database - The Fluent Data Team announce the latest release of their MicroORM. As the name suggests, FluentData provides a Fluent API. This release includes support for querying your data. This release adds support for MySql to the list of databases supported.
• ASP.NET Web API and HttpClient Available on NuGet - Henrik F Nielsen highlights the various NuGet Packages which allow you to get the various parts of the WebAPI functionality into your projects in a granular and installer free way.

Information

• Modern Web Development - Part 6 - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at the evolution of we development over the past few years, looking in this part at the packaging of assets, looking at the combining and compressing of JavaScript and CSS.
• Modernization (BYOSP Part 4) - K. Scott Allen continues his ‘Build Your Own Slide Presenter’ series looking at the creation of a slideshow app using HTML 5 and CSS, looking briefly at warning users of old browsers that certain features may not work using Modernizr.
• Supporting high-dpi pixel-dense "Retina" Displays like iPhones or the iPad 3 with CSS or IMG - Scott Hanselman continues his discussions of Responsive Web Design an how he is applying the concepts to his site. This post discusses having images and styling respond to smaller screens / different DPI settings.
• Using jQuery, Plugins and UI Controls With Backbone - Derick Bailey discusses the use of jQuery based controls and plugins with Backbone.js, looking at the use of the KendoUI controls from Telerik (a suite of jQuery controls) to illustrate.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: DumpToText - Jason Jarrett continues his NuGet Packages series taking a look at DumpToText, a simple extension which allows you to write out an object (or object graph) to text for debugging or use in testing.
• From ASP.NET MVC to Nancy - Part 2 - ‘jhovgaard’ is part way through a series of posts looking at moving from ASP.NET MVC to Nancy, giving shape to a nice introductory series covering Nancy from the point of view of an experienced ASP.NET MVC User.
• Launching "Sample of the Day" - Learn an amazing code sample every 24 hours - Jialiang Ge highlights the latest feature from the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, a higlighted code sample every day, allowing you to learn about a new it of application, framework or integration code each day. An RSS feed for the featured code is available for you to subscribe to.
• Windows Phone: Background Agents Pitfalls (1 of n) - Mister Goodcat discusses some of the pitfalls of the Windows Phone Mango Background Agents functionality learnt from applying it to real world problems in the first part of a new mini-series of posts.

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Software

• SharpComments extension for Visual Studio 2010 - Sergey Vlasov highlights a Visual Studio 2010 Extension from Vitaly Maykovsky which adds enhanced comment colouring, formatting and highlighting by way of characters at the beginning of the comment

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta - Scott Guthrie gives an overview of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release, along with sharing a recording of his session from the Belgium and Dutch TechReady Events
• Implementing CORS support in ASP.NET Web APIs - Carlos Figueira discusses using the ASP.NET Web APIs can be used to implement Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to relax the cross domain restrictions in calling APIs, illustrating with examples, and shared code on the MSDN Code Gallery.
• Using JSON.NET with ASP.NET Web API & Using MongoDB with ASP.NET Web API - Henrik F Nielsen looks at using the ASP.Net Web APIs, showing how you can implement your own message formatters by creating one for JSON.NET, and also looks at consuming data from MongoDB.
• MVC4 and Web Api - make an Api the way you always wanted - Part 1 - Glav takes a look at the WebAPI part of the ASP.NET MVC4 Bea release in the first part of this series, exploring how you get up and running with creating RESTFul APIs using the new framework.
• Integrating Backbone.js with ASP.NET Web API - Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax) - Pablo M. Cibraro looks at integrating WebAPI services with the frontend MVC capabilities of Backbone.js
• jQuery.continuations In Action - Josh Arnold looks at the use of Continuations in jQuery, illustrating the discussion by way of an example
• Essential JavaScript Design Patterns For Beginners - Addy Osmani shares a fantastic looking online book (currently in web form) which explores JavaScript Design Patterns, covering many of the common Gang of Four (GoF) patterns, including implementations which make use of jQuery.
• DTO’s Should Transfer Data, Not Entities - Davy Brion discusses a common Data Transfer Object anti-patern where the DTO starts to look a lot like the entity it is modelling, sharing some recommendations along they way.
• Sub-pixel Rendering and the CSS Object Model - Travis Leithead discusses achieving pixel perfect CSS layouts in Internet Explorer, and the role of the CSS Object Model.
• Internet Explorer Performance Lab: reliably measuring browser performance - Steven Sinofsky shares a detailed post from Matt Kotsenas, Jatinder Mann, and Jason Weber looking at the test environment and testing that goes into ensuring Internet Explorer Performance
• Redesigning the Windows Logo - Sam Moreau discusses the design process behind the new look Windows Logo for Windows 8

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