The Morning Brew

Information

• April 27th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio - Jason Zander gives another of his updates on what is going on in the Visual Studio World, highlighting the Async Targeting Pack for VS11, a number of great blog articles, and highlighting the availability of session recordings from the STAREAST testing conference.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can now get the latest and greatest ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet packages which are generated from nightly builds of the Open Source project, showing how you can configure your system to use these cutting edge packages.
• A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 1 of ?) - Michael Crump kicks off a new series of posts taking a look at ASP.NET MVC4 from the point of view of a XAML Silverlight / Windows Phone / WPF developer. This first post gets you up and running and introduces some of the ASP.NET MVC fundamentals.
• Using Razor V2 in ASP.NET MVC 3 - Imran Baloch takes a look at how you can make use of the Razor V2 engine, which ships with ASP.NET MVC 4 and web Pages 2, from within your ASP.NET MVC 3 applications.
• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC - Rick Strahl revisits GZip compression of web page output, looking at the best way of adding this capability in a controllable fashion to your ASP.NET MVC applications via ActionFilters.
• Learn MVC (Model view controller) Step by Step in 7days - Day 3 - Shivprasad koirala picks up this series of posts again posting day 3 of the series to CodeProject , taking a look at the use of partial views, the Razor View Engine, Data Annotation validation, and the use of Windows Authentication in your applications.
• The Present and Future of Using JSON in WebForms - Carl Bergenhem of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX Team discusses the use of JSON data in your ASP.NET Web Forms applications, looking at the current WebService approach, and discussing some of the new features coming in ASP.NET 4.5
• The Case of The Unquoted Command Line: Process Monitor and MPGO.EXE - Sasha Goldshtein highlights MPGO.EXE, a tool which is included in the ,NET Framework which provides improved optimization managed assemblies. In this post Sasha takes a look at using process monitor to investigate an issue he was having with its use.
• Simple.Data and VB.Net the beginning & Seeing the sql Simple.Data generates - Christiaan Baes kicks off a series of posts looking at the use of the Simple.Data Micro ORM library from VB.NET, taking you through the setup and simple use of Simple.Data, and looking at the generated SQL it produces.
• Playing with PetaPoco - Eli Weinstock-Herman follows suit and takes a look at the use of PetaPoco (in C#), again exploring the getting started story, and looking at some simple examples.
• JSIL - The IL to JS transformation project (Yes it takes .Net IL assemblies and generates JavaScript from them) - Greg Duncan highlights JSIL, a compiler which takes .NET applications and libraries and ‘compiles ‘them into cross browser JavaScript, outputting code which is surprisingly well written, making it easier to debug.
• Celebration! 120′000 downloads for #mvvmlight, 2 copies of Expression Studio to win - Laurent Bugnion celebrates 120000 downloads of his MVVMLight framework, with a give away of two copies of Expression Studio, along with a discussion of some of the history of MVVM Light.

Community

• Event: Free UK Windows Azure Bootcamp: Online - Planky highlights plans to run a version of the Windows Azure Bootcamp (which will be running in person in London and Liverpool in May) as a Lync online session to make it available to a wider range of people.
• Upcoming developer events in Edinburgh - So what is a developer experience anyway? - ’stephencl123456789′ highlights two developer events being held up in Edinburgh, the first an all day event looking at Windows 8 for developers tomorrow (1st May), and the second a half day exploring Visual Studio 11 ALM features on 13th June.

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Software

• Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 - The BCL team announce the release of the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 which addresses an incompatibility between the Compiler in VS11 and the Async CTP release, allowing you to target .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 5.
• MS Open Tech JQuery Mobile’s Metro - Greg Duncan highlights the release of a Windows Phone Metro theme for jQuery Mobile from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. and Sergei Grebnov

Information

• ASP.NET Web API Updates - April 27 - Henrik F Nielsen highlights some of the changes to the ASP.NET Web API which are now available in the source code, and will eventually become part of the official release. The changes surround the wiring up of Message Handlers, access to progress notification for upload and download, and further support for Multipart messages.
• Back to Basics: Moving beyond for, if and switch - Scott Hanselman resumes his Back To Basics series looking at how modern languages allow you to move beyond the standard for, if and switch statements allowing you to write more expressive and shorter code.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Enumerable.Range() Static Method - James Michael Hare also continues his series on the little wonders available in the C# language and .NET Framework with a look at the use of the Enumerable.Range() method in a couple of scenarios.
• "Virtual method call from constructor" What Could Go Wrong? - Peter Ritchie discusses a common code analysis warning about calling overridable methods in constructors which while syntactically correct can result in unexpected behaviour.
• ASP.NET MVC: Resolve or Inject? That’s the Issue - Dino Esposito discusses the difference between dependency resolving using a service locator and dependency injection in ASP.NET MVC web applications.
• Auto-scaling Azure with WASABi - From the Ground Up - Greg Oliver discusses the process of setting up WASABi to provide auto scaling of Windows Azure, looking at how you can test the setup using the compute emulator

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Software

• Json.NET - Download: Json.NET 4.5 Release 4 - The Json.NET team announce the release of Json.NET 4.5 Release 4. This release adds a Portable Class Library build, further customization of the JsonConverter, improved error messages in Json Reader and Serializer, along with some new attributes for controlling serialization and the usual fixes.

Information

• Visual Studio Fakes Part 2 - Shims - Peter Provost continues his series looking at the Visual Studio 11 support for Fakes, in this part discussing the use of Shims to allow you to control code your code under test relies on but which cannot be injected, looking at how Shims allow you to create tests of this type of code, allowing you to eventually refactor the dependency out into something manageable.
• Bringing CLR’s Power to non .NET languages - Part 1 - Dorian Corompt kicks off what looks to be an interesting series of posts looking at consuming .NET CLR based code in non .NET languages like C++, Java, PHP, etc, looking at the use of C++ to create a bridge between the non .NET language and the CLR.
• Obsoleted Types, Methods and Migration Guide and more for .Net 4.5 (Beta) - Greg Duncan highlights s selection of resources (with some help from Wriju) which discuss the many changes in .NET 4.5, the types and members which have been marked as obsolete, migration documentation, and discussion of dependencies of the different .NET versions.
• Windows Azure Storage for the ASP.NET Developer - Adam Hoffman shares his latest installment of s series of posts from Adam, Rachel Appel, and Peter Laudati looking at Azure for Web Developers. In this post Adam discusses the different storage options available on Windows Azure, ranging from relational SQL Server data stores to blots and queues.
• Top 7 Concerns of Migrating an ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure - Peter Laudati’s latest part of the series is also available, where he discusses the 7 most common concerns and decisions you need to make when moving an existing ASP.NET application to the cloud.
• Get Started Building Data Driven Apps with Windows Azure and SQL Axure - Rachel Appel also has her latest article in the series available, looking at the use of SQL Azure to create a data driven application.
• ‘Task List’ and comments - Amar Nityananda reminds us of the ability to customize the tokens that the Visual Studio Task List uses to identify tasks in code, allowing you to identify custom markers in code via the task list.
• 6. Sequences - Being lazy is allowed - Dorian Corompt continues this series on F#, discussing the concept of laziness in sequences, their role in programming and dealing with infinite sequences, and how you can use them in F#.

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Software

• NHibernate 3.3.0.GA released - Oskar Berggren announces the release of version 3.3.0GA of NHibernate. This release includes improvements to the LINQ provider, additional ‘enhanced’ identity providers, and additional capabilities for mapping in code.

Information

• GUID Guide, part one - Eric Lippert kicks off another series of posts looking at the interesting and slightly magical world of the GUID - globally unique identifiers.
• Petzold Book Blog - 2-4-6-8-10 - Charles Petzold shares a unique offer which will get you early access copies and a final e-book edition of his updated ‘Programming Windows’ book. This book is one of the most well known and revered in the space, and the updated edition will be adding content regarding Metro Style Applications development for Windows 8 using C#
  and XAML.
• Announcing ReactiveUI 3.1 at Thursday Night - Paul Betts announces a new release of ReactiveUI. This library is a MVVM framework which is tightly integrated with the reactive extensions for .NET, providing a simple way of writing complex stateful interactions and async operations.
• Compilify - Fast and Simple Online Compiler For .Net Code on a Browser - Jiby John highlights Compilify, a Roslyn based online compiler for .NET code accessible through your web browser. The implementation is open source, with source code available on GitHub, and there is a hosted version available running on AppHarbor.
• WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues) - Colin Eberhardt takes a look at the performance of various WPF based charting solutions, looking at their performance refreshing and animating with different sized data sets.
• Diving deep with WinRT and await - Windows 8 app developer blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Stephen Toub is a guest author over on the Windows 8 App Developer Blog discussing the implementation and use of asynyc/await in Windows 8 WinRT applications, discussing the basics and how the compiler transforms the code.
• Be Mindful With Your Code - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses code quality, and the reasons you should care about the code you write.
• Concurrency, Performance, Arrays and when Dirty Writes are OK - Ben Watson discusses multiple threads accessing a single shared resource (Array), discussing synchronization, and how you can improve performance by accepting some loss in accuracy.

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Software

• Windows 8 Release Preview Coming June 2012 - Doug Holland highlights yesterday’s announcement by Steven Sinofsky at the Japan Windows 8 Dev Days event that the Release Preview of Windows 8 will be made available in the first week of June.
• F#, MSTest, and FsUnit 1.1.0.0 - Dan Mohl gives an update on his recent work with a new project template for UnitTesting in F# using MSTest and Visual Studio 11, and also discusses the latest update for FsUnit which brings additional asserts and support for VS11

Information

• How to create a custom value provider in WebAPI - Mike Stall continues his series on WebAPI extensibility and Model / parameter Binding with a look at implementing a custom value provider
• ASP.NET Web API: Query string based content formatting - Gunnar Peipman also presses on with his series looking at the other end of the process, formatting the output from WebAPI calls, continuing an example formatting data into a VCard format.
• Developing Windows Azure, Cloud-Based Applications With Windows 8-What you need and how to get there - Bruno Terkaly discusses his new development environment in Windows 8, and walks through getting the required bits for Azure application development set up on Windows 8.
• How to avoid creating real tasks when unit testing async - Peter Provost discusses the use of async / await in unit tests in MSTest and xUnit.net and looks at how you can fake tasks using the VS11 Fakes functionality
• Create a great mobile experience for your website today. Please - Scott Hanselman discusses the various options for making your websites more mobile friendly, looking at how you can utilize frameworks and helper libraries to give a more native application look and feel to your site across a range of devices.
• Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 5 - Basic Animation - G. Andrew Duthie resumes his series diving into the functionality offered by the HTML 5 Canvas element, allowing you to draw and manipulate image content directly on your web page. This part explores simple animation, and if you haven’t seen them before be sure to check out the previous 4 parts.
• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week - Day 2 - David Catuhe is on day 2 of a series of a 5 day blog post series looking at building a simple yet complete Windows 8 application using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Today’s post explores the internationalization of the application, offline mode, and more application functionality.

Community

• Hands-On Windows 8 Camps in May - Mike Taulty highlights a series of ‘Windows 8 Camp’ events running though out May with three events in London, and one in Birmingham, and the possibility of Manchester and Edinburgh events too - a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the Windows 8 development labs with help on hand from experts.

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Software

• WCF Data Services 5.1.0-rc Prerelease - With Version 5.0 released, the WCF Data Services Team are pressing on with their first release candidate pre-release of version 5.1, addressing a number of reported bugs. The release is available as a pre-release package on NuGet.
• #mvvmlight V4RC available on #nuget - Laurent Bugnion announces the preview release of MVVMLight version 4, available as packages for Silverlight 3,4,5, .NET 3.5SP1, 4.0, WP7 & 7.1, and adding support for Windows 8 WinRT Development

Information

• How to bind to custom objects in action signatures in MVC/WebAPI - Mike Stall continues his series looking at binding of parameters in WebAPI, taking a look at 3 different ways of binding values to custom object types, using manual parse, TypeConverters and custom model binders.
• ASP.NET Web API Content Negotiation and Accept-Charset - Henrik F Nielsen also continues his discussion of content negotiation with a look at how character sets and encoding come into play, and the role of the Accept-Charset HTTP header.
• ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats - Gunnar Peipman is also exploring topics relating to content negotiation, looking at how you can use the extensibility of the WebAPI Framework to present data in different formats, specifically illustrating with an implementation of VCard.
• jQuery Documentation Resources to Speed Up Your Development - Dan Wahlin highlights a number of jQuery related resources available online which provide easy access to documentation for this very popular JavaScript library.
• Guidelines for Building Touch-friendly Sites - Jacob Rossi, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team discusses some best practice guidelines for creating sites for use on touch devices, discussing accessing content, and the size of fingers and how this should relate to the positioning of elements on the page.
• Getting Rid of the “Plug-in Not Responding” Message when Debugging Silverlight Applications in Chrome - Michael Crump shares a useful tip for anyone debugging Silverlight Applications inside Google’s Chrome browser, showing how disabling the hang detection features make the debugging experience better.

Community

• First meeting Thurs May 3rd -
  Sheffield .NET User Group - The very first meeting of a new .NET Usergroup is happening next Thursday (3rd May) in Sheffield, hosted at GIST Lab. The first meeting is a planning session looking at what the local .NET community would like from the UserGroup.
• patterns & practices Global Online Symposium 2012 - Grigori Melnik highlights the Patterns & Practices Global Online Symposium, being held tomorrow, streaming live, and featuring a number of well known speakers, along with cloud, phone and web development related sessions.

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Software

• dotPeek 1.0 Beta Available - JetBrains announce the beta release of dotPeek 1.0, their free .NET decompiler product. This release is shipped with an installer, supports assembly lists, can open assemblies from folder and zip format archives (including NuGet Packages), and have finder control over the generated decompilation code.
• SQL Server 2012 Best Practices Analyzer - Jack Richins highlights the latest release of SQL Server 2012 Best Practices Analyzer, a tool which will monitor and observe your SQL Server instances and give recommendations on things to change to make your setup conform to best practices.

Information

• null is not false, part three - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of null as a Boolean value looking at operator overloading of & | && and || and some of the complexities of creating them and passing parameters with eager evaluation.
• Arrays and Memory, Part 2 - Karl Seguin continues on from a previous post looking at the use of memory in array structures, going back to basics and exploring how C deals with arrays and memory allocation, as well as direct access to raw memory
• ASP.NET Web API: How content negotiation works? - Gunnar Peipman gives a brief overview of content negotiation in the ASP.NET Web API, discussing the HTTP principles before discussing and illustrating the implementation in Web API.
• Great Free Course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps With EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery - Scott Guthrie highlights the 1 month free access offer giving access to the ‘Building ASP.NET MVC applications with Entity Framework Code First, HTML5 and jQuery’ course from Pluralsight, created and presented by Dan Wahlin.
• A Match Made in Http Heaven - ASP.NET Web Forms and WebAPI - Joshua Holt kicks off a series of posts looking at the use of the ASP.NET Web API which shipped with the ASP.NET MVC 4 beta, showing how it can be combined with the more established ASP.NET Web Forms in the same project to provide powerful solutions.
• "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" [An alternate implementation of HTTP gzip decompression for Windows Phone] - David Anson shares an alternative implementation of HTTP gzip decompression for use in Windows Phone applications, sharing his dependency free implementation which allows for compressed content to be passed over the network into your applications.

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Software

• Need a SQL Server Database Schema Diff tool and would really like an open source one? Check out Open DBDiff - Greg Duncan highlights Open DBDiff a database comparison utility which allows you to easily compare schema of SQL Server 2005 and 2008 databases

Information

• MVC Style parameter binding for WebAPI - Mike Stall continues his series of posts looking at binding in WebAPI, looking in this post at the IActionValueBinder implementation ‘MvcActionValueBinder’ which provides MVC style parameter binding
• ASP.NET MVC Authentication - Global Authentication and Allow Anonymous - Jon Galloway kicks off a new blog post series looking at a variety of common questions, tips, and tricks regarding ASP.NET MVC. This first post in the series takes a look at Global Authentication, tracing the functionality back through the releases of ASP.NET MVC.
• Consolidating jQuery Ajax Calls - Dan Wahlin takes a look at how you can use JavaScript objects to help encapsulate your AJAX calls, making a data service object to handle all your data work rather than littering calls across scripts.
• Use the source, don’t read it - Inside 233 has an excellent little (hand written/drawn) guide to how you should best make use of the source access that open source gives you, discussing a number of useful approaches to ‘reading’ and comprehending source code.
• Who knows Enumerable.Range(…)? - Andreas Gieriet highlights the much underused Enumerable.Range method for generating sequences of numbers in a range - a nice readable alternative to the standard for syntax.
• MEF 2 Preview Beginners Guide - Dean Oliver gives a nice beginners overview to some of the new features which are planned to be included in the MEF (Mananged Extensibility Framework) 2 release.
• I was going to call this post ‘Windows Azure Best Practices’ but I’m not allowed to - Despite not being officially called ‘Best Practices’ Buck Woody shares a number of good tips for making the most of Windows Azure and ensuring that your applications and code work as well as possible.
• Custom errors and error detail policy in ASP.NET Web API - Jimmy Bogard shares some tips on how you can get full exception information out of the ASP.NET Web API using the IncludeErrorDetailPolicy.

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