The Morning Brew

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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Software

• Download: ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta – ASP.NET MVC 4 has reached its Beta Release, with downloads available from the Microsoft Download centre and also as a Nuget package.
• ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta Released! – Jon Galloway gives a detailed overview of what is new in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release, discussing the inclusion of the WebAPI, bundling, razor view engine enhancements, and much more.
• Introducing ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta with Web APIs – Carlos Figueira discusses the release of the WebAPIs as a part of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release, looking back at the history of the project and its aims, and highlighting the key features of the release.
• It’s a Decompiler day! JustDecompile RTW’s and ILSpy v2 beta’s – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the latest versions of two decompilation products. Both Telerik JustDecompile and ILSpy are free alternatives to Refactor, and both contain some great features. Chris Eargle of Telerik also shares some of the back story to JustDecompile along with a competition to win limited edition T-Shirts in his post ‘State of the Decompiler‘
• Simple.Data 1.0.0-beta1 – Mark Rendle announces the first beta release of Simple.Data 1.0. This release adds Eager Loading and Upsert support, and also marks a key stage in the project’s timeline, where Mark will now be focusing on getting the current feature set up to 1.0 release standard.

Information

• Using Entity Framework 4.3 Database migration for any project – Fredrik Normén discusses the use of the new Entity Framework Migrations features in situations where you are not using Entity Framework at all, showing how you can benefit from this new functionality without the need to use the Entity Framework ORM,
• JavaScript Closures Explained – Derek Greer gives a nice explanation of how closures work in JavaScript, looking at the underlying ECMAScript specification for some of the finer points and illustrating with examples.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The SequenceEqual() Method – James Michael Hare resumes his C# / .NET Little Wonders series looking at the SequenceEqual extension method which allows you to test for equality across two enumberables of items.
• Changing A Strong Name Is A Major Breaking Change – Phil Haack discusses the importance of understanding version numbers and strong names, looking at the implications and how may users of Log4NET are having issues with the latest release. Phil also discusses how version numbers in NuGet Packages play an important role, and how they don’t actually have to match the assembly version.
• Open Source and Open Source Software Are Not The Same Things – Phil also discusses another important question regarding the Open Source nature of software, responding to a tweeted question about MVC3’s open source status
• Http Caching is complicated for everyone, even @ayende – Seb Lambla discusses some of the difficulties and confusion that the HTTP specifications cause with regard to caching, and how confusing documentation can lead to implementation variations.
• The Enemy of My Friend Writes Bad MVC Controller Actions (Microsoft) – Doug Lampe discusses the common practice of having two controller methods of the same name, with one taking no parameters, and the other receiving data via post, and compares this to the we forms world of page_load and Button_Click

Community

• You can become a Make Web Not War Warrior – Susan Ibach highlights a great series of virtual events being held on Thursday 8th March. The events cover all aspects of the modern web, mobile, cloud, resposive design, etc. The events kick off at 11am Eastern, and run through to 6pm. Registration is required for each of the individual sessions so you can pick and attend just the ones you are interested in (or them all if you can’t decide)

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