The Morning Brew

Today’s edition is a bit short due to my laptop forgetting how to let me do drag and drop (a vital part of my Morning Brew Creation Application) – copy and pasting URLs and titles takes a lot longer!

Software

• The feeling of excitement is tangible… with the release of the tangible T4 Editor 2.0! – Greg Duncan highlights the latest major release of the Tangible T4 Editor, a significant release from the team, which adds support for VS 11 beta, makes use of the real code editor in VS, supports statement completion, and much more.

Information

• My Favorite Features: Unit Testing Enhancements in Visual Studio 11 – Jason Zander continues his series looking at some of his favourite features of Visual Studio 11 with a look at the improvements made to Unit Testing in this new release.
• Using async and await in Silverlight 5 and .NET 4 in Visual Studio 11 with the async targeting pack – Pete Brown discusses the use of async / await, and how by using the latest compiler and the fact that the async/await is implemented by the compiler rather than the runtime, you can make use of it in other versions of the framework.
• The Problem with C# 5?s async/await Pattern – Joel Martinez discusses the async / await functionality, and how it is really useful for working with IO-bound operations at a low level, but discusses the issues around using it in higher level APIs.
• Getting Started with CSS Media Queries – Dan Wahlin discusses the use of CSS Media queries to allow you to make web pages look different on different classes of browser, working through their use in some examples.
• Get started with Windows 8 Metro style app development using JavaScript and HTML5 – Rachel Appel gives an overview of Windows 8 application development using JavaScript and HTML5 discussing the platform, the simulator, and giving an introduction to the code required.
• ASP.NET MVC Beta and RC Upgrades – Confirm your Expectations and Version Numbers in Production Environments – Scott Hanselman discusses a difference he discovered between two minor versions of ASP.NET MVC (the current daily build and the version deployed at his server), and shows how you can easily find out information about the server environment using the MvcDiagnostics NuGet Package

Community

• Event: Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow – Sarah Allison highlights the Windows Server 2012 Community Roadshow, running in over 20 countries, which will be in the UK in London (14th June) and Edinburgh (15th June).
• Fancy some help to port your Windows Phone app to Windows 8? – Mike Ormond highlights an exclusive 2 day event running in London on the weekend of 16/17th June. This event is targeted at developers who have applications in the Windows Phone MarketPlace, and will provide assistance in porting your applications to the Windows 8 Platform.
• Windows Azure Conference 22nd June 2012 – Further details are available about the Windows Azure Conference running in London on 22nd June, with a 4 track agenda covering cloud and related technologies.

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Software

• Kinect for Windows: SDK and Runtime version 1.5 Released – Craig Eisler of the Kinect for Windows team announces the release of the Kinect for Windows SDK and Runtime version 1.5. This release includes a number of major improvements including Kinect Studio, a tool for working with and replaying Kinect data, Face Tracking support, human interface guidelines.
• GitHub for Windows – &
• Introducing GitHub For Windows – GitHub, and Phil Haack announce the public release of GitHub for Windows, their easy way of getting up and running with Git (and GitHub) on the Windows Platform. The application is a Metro styled one, and provides a nice user experience, and the application is also bundled with an enhanced version of Git and the Posh-Git PowerShell extensions.

Information

• A Gentle Reintroduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript – Matthew Podwysocki discusses his recent work on the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript discussing the V1 SP! and the current Version 2 Beta releases, and highlights some of the recent improvements.
• ASP.NET Web API: Generating a Web API help page using ApiExplorer – Yao follows on from a previous post discussing the IApiExplorer interface in Web API, looking at how you can use this interface to build help pages for your API implementation, walking through the creation of a simple help page.
• Under the covers of the async modifier and await operator in .NET 4.5 and C# Metro style applications – Pete Brown shares his first .NET program written in IL, before going on to discuss how the new C# async and await keywords are implemented in IL
• Enhancing Windows 8 for multiple monitors – Steven Sinofsky shares a post from Mark Yalovsky discussing the improvements for Multi-Monitor support in Windows 8 – as someone who has been using Multi-Monitor setups for many years these improvements are all very very welcome.
• Windows 8: Top 10 Reasons why Metro development smokes Windows Desktop development – Jerry Nixon shares his 11 favorite reasons why he believes that Metro style application development on Windows 8 is better than developing for the classic Windows Desktop.
• Creating a fast and fluid app launch experience – Justin Cooperman discusses the work done to ensure that application startup on Windows 8 has the best experience possible, looking at the application lifecycle and application launch operation sequences.
• Document Databases : A look at them – Sacha Barber gives a nice overview of Document Databases in this CodeProject article, exploring Redis, MongoDB and RavenDB.

Community

• Windows 8 Camp in a Box – Mike Ormond highlights the availability of the materials from the Windows 8 Camp events which have been run here in the UK. The materials include the Hand on Labs, Presentations, samples giving those who didn’t attend (or those who did) a chance to gain knowledge.
• Event: Tech.Days: Visual Studio 11 Online Event, 28th June 2012, 1pm to 3pm – Sara Allison highlights an early afternoon online presentation on Visual Studio 11, looking at the Agile / Scrum features, Story boarding and IntelliTrace, improvements to the IDE, Coded UI Tests, and how non-VS developers can interact. The event is an online presentation between 1pm and 3pm on Thursday 28th June.

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Software

• A look ahead at the Visual Studio 11 product lineup and platform support – The Visual Studio Team announce the official product line-up for The Visual Studio 11 release, including details of the full product SKUs and the Express editions, including a Windows Phone Express editions, and also the inclusion of LightSwitch in the main Visual Studio product in Professional, Premium and Ultimate editions.
• WCF Data Services 5.0.1 Released – The WCF Data Services Team announce the release of WCF Data Services 5.0.1, available now from NuGet, with an MSI release due in the next week. This release builds upon the preview releases, and addresses further user reported issues.
• [Visual Studio Extension Of The Day] PHP Tools for Visual Studio – Hosam Kamel highlights a Visual Studio extension which adds PHP support into the IDE, allowing PHP Developers (whether occasional or regular) to benefit from the common Editor experience of Visual Studio with the addition of syntax highlighting, code outlining, brace matching, error detection and the navigation bar.
• Developer productivity tools and Visual Studio extensions – Mehdi Khalili shares his current software list, covering both utilities and Visual Studio Extensions he makes use of, giving a short (one or 2 line) summary of what it is and how it works.

Information

• Useful .NET Delegate Internals – Alois Kraus takes a look under the covers at how the .NET CLR actually implements Delegates, looking at investigating and working with code that makes use of delegates in WinDBG.
• Why I Hate Unit Testing – Chris Eargle discusses the importance and benefit of unit testing whilst exploring some of the negatives of bad tests by way of a short story.
• Noninvasive Unit Testing in ASP.NET MVC4 – A Microsoft Fakes Deep Dive – Rich Czyzewski takes a detailed look at the Microsoft Fakes functionality included in Visual Studio 11, looking at how you can make use of it to test ASP.NET MVC applications in this detailed step by step example.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Topic Exchanges – Derek Greer continues his exploration of RabbitMQ working through the use of Topic Exchanges by way of a worked example.
• .Net 4.5 Gets Zippy… Zip support is baked into the .Net 4.5 Framework – Greg Duncan highlights a post from Tugberk Ugurlu looking at the inclusion of ZIP support (after all these years) in the .NET Framework 4.5
• 24 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design | #6 Information Architecture for a Windows Phone App – Arturo Toledo continues his series looking at the fundamentals of Windows Phone 7 Metro design, exploring some of the concepts of information architecture which you should apply to your Windows Phone applications.
• Which WCF Binding Is Best? – Rick Rainey compares the performance of the 4 different transports offered out of the box by WCF (http, net.tcp, net.pipe, net.msmq) showing that a decision of transport is a significant one for the performance of your applications.

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