The Morning Brew

Software

• Umbraco 5.0 RTM is on CodePlex, ready for download - The Umbraco team announce the RTM release of V5.0. This release is a major milestone for the project, taking the key features of 4.7 and re-writing on the ASP.NET MVC stack, allowing use of Razor, along with the core CMS functionality.
• Debugger Canvas 1.1 is Released! - Kael Rowan announces the 1.1 release of the Debugger Canvas extension for Visual Studio. The release addresses a number of bugs, improves performance and also includes some new features including the ability to turn the canvas on or off during debugging, view multithreaded code on canvas, navigate more easily through code and view recursive calls side by side.
• StyleCop 4.7.7.0 released - Tatworth highlights the release of StyleCop 4.7.7.0 which includes compatibility with the Visual Studio 11 preview release and ReSharper 5.1, 6.0, 6.1 and 6.1.1, along with addressing further bugs.

Information

• One ASP.NET Sneak Peek: Elegant Web Forms and Snowballs in Hell - Scott Hanselman highlights some of the cool improvements coming in the various aspects of the ASP.NET platform, focusing on some of the exciting things happening for WebForms.
• Modern Web Development - Part 3 - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at modern web development, exploring CSS in this post. Shawn discusses how CSS can be awkward, and how CSS can be made better by using dynamic stylesheet languages like SASS and LESS to enhance the generation of CSS rules via nested styles, mixins and variables.
• How to force Nuget not to update log4net to 1.2.11 - Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the updated Log4Net release which uses a new signing key, and how this is causing issues with lots of projects which have used Log4Net in the past via NuGet and are now having problems, exploring how to tell NuGet to use a specific version of a package.
• Ngen or not? The rules haven’t changed very much since 2004 - Rico Mariani gives a very nice concise explanation of the situations where you will gain performance by using ngen to generate native images for your applications assemblies.
• Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (second DRAFT preview) - Microsoft Press share the second draft preview of a forthcoming title on SQL Server 2012 which includes 6 out of the 12 chapters that will be in the final book - a great resource to have, and free.
• Announcing the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book - Roger Doherty highlights the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book TechNet wiki whcih contains links to a variety of information on SQL Server 2012 from both teams at Microsoft and their partner organisations.
• Visual Studio 2010 UML Design Pattern Toolbox Items Extension - Giles Davies shares a Visual Studio extension which adds the Gang of Four design pattern to the UML Toolbox in Visual Studio, and then goes on to discuss how the extension was created.
• CodeBuild: 15 Best Practices for Exception Handling - Cagdas Basaraner shares 15 best practices for handling exceptions in code - the post has is a bit Java based but a lot of the principles apply more generally, some interesting discussion in the comments.
• Event Handler Memory Leaks, Unwiring Events, and the WeakEventManager in WPF 4.5 - Pete Brown discusses the use of events in your code, focusing specifically on their use in WPF applications, and how they can be a cause of memory leaks, before discussing one of the new features in WPF4.5 makes implementing a solution much easier.
• Installing Mono on Windows - Paul Stack discusses his desire to get TeamCitySharp working on Mono, and to that end takes a look at getting a Mono environment up and running on a Windows machine.