The Morning Brew

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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