The Morning Brew

Information

• Visual Studio 2010 Web Publish Updates – Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi shares the details of the latest release of updates for Visual Studio 2010’s Web Publishing functionality which shipped as a part of the Windows Azure SDK, discussing the web publishing dialog, EF Code First Migrations support, publish profile and config transformations.
• Planner | NDC2012 – The Session Planner from the NDC Confernce now provides the easiest way to get your hands on the session recordings from all the sessions at NDC this year, a really great collection of learning materials from industry experts.
• Using ASP.NET MVC in Umbraco 4 & MVC in Umbraco v4 – Aaron Powell & Shannon Deminick discuss what the retirement for Umbraco V5 which was MVC based means for developers, and take a look at how you can still include Umbraco content in MVC sites and applications. Ayende also discusses the Umbraco V5 retirement in his post On Umbraco’s NHibernate’s Pullout
• Unit Testing ASP.NET Web API – Peter Provost sets about exploring the testability of Web API in this post, looking at a the range of testing possible and exploring the specifics of testing an implementation with plenty of code included to illustrate.
• Anatomy of a File-based Unit Test Plugin – Peter also highlights a post from Matthew Manela which discusses the integration of his Chutzpah JavaScript test framework into the Visual Studio runner.
• ExecutionContext vs SynchronizationContext – Stephen Toub shares a deep dive post looking at ExecutionContext and SynchronizationContext, answering questions on how they differ, how they interact with async / await.
• Managing multiple web service calls with Rx – ‘BenWilli’ discusses the use of the Reactive Extensions for working and managing service requests in asynchronous situations such as User interfaces.
• Upcoming presentations by me at Windows Azure Events – Soctt ‘The Gu’ Guthrie is on tour this week, with visits to Scottsdale Arizona, Cambridge UK, London UK, TechEd Europe In Amsterdam, and the Windows Azure UG in Amsterdam, presenting sessions at each stop (adding to the belief that Scott is a lean mean presenting machine who clearly needs no sleep!)
• SignalR – Group Notifications – Dane-Garrin Balia takes a look at the notion of Groups in SignalR and how they allow you to direct messages to a particular subset of your connections.

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Information

• Most TechEd North America 2012 sessions are now available for viewing on-demand… – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of recordings from most of the TechEd North America 2012 sessions, available over on the Channel 9 Site – I’ve heard a good things about a number of the sessions so am looking forward to watching a few.
• Using ConventionTests – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses the testing of conventions used in your applications, and introduces ConventionTests a library which provides helpers to make testing of conventions you have used easy.
• Testing Rx Queries using Virtual Time Scheduling – Reactive Extensions – Bart J.F. De Smet gives a deep dive post discussing how you can use virtual time scheduling to allow you to better test your time based Reactive Extensions code. This is a long and detailed post which I think I’ll be reading more than once to understand!
• Exposing .NET tasks as WinRT asynchronous operations – Stephen Toub follows up on a previous post for the Windows 8 App Dev blog looking at the use of await in WinRT applications, this time exploring how you can work with .NET based Tasks in WinRT code.
• Salt and hash a password in .NET – Jon Canning highlights a nice a nice article from CrackStation discussing the correct ways of salting and hashing passwords, looking at the various ways in which bad implementations can be compromised, and shares his own C# implementation of their best practices
• Under the Hood: Bubbles – Andrew Miadowicz follows on from the recent discussions on the Internet Explorer blog regarding JavaScript performance, sharing a look at a new sample application which aims to demonstrate some of the areas if performance improvement.
• Windows Azure Evolution – TFS Integration (WAWS Part 2) – Shaun Xu continues his series lookng at the new Windows Azure Web Sites functionality, exploring its use from TFS.
• Windows Azure Websites: Node.js – Larry Franks discusses the new Websites feature with a Niode.js slant, exploring how you can go about using the WebSites hosting to run your Node.js applications.
• Welcome back to the Debug Diagnostics Blog – Finbar Ryan has taken responsibility for the DebugDiag blog, and set about giving an overview of the current DebugDiag 1.2 looking at what it is particularly useful for doing, and what the new features in the 1.2 release were.
• Programmer Time Translation Table – Anders Abel shares a useful conversion table of the common crimes against scheduling that developers commit, useful reading from a Dev point of view (to help you improve your estimates) and also from a manager point of view to understand the common under-estimation reasons.
• Evolution of the Entity Framework: Lesson 1 – K. Scott Allen kicks off a series looking back over the history and evolution of the Entity Framework, starting back in the early days of Microsoft ORM discussing object spaces and WinFS.

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Software

• Umbraco – v5 RIP – Paul Sterling announces the sad news that the Umbraco V5 is to be retired, with a final V5 release (5.2) being made to address some of its issues, with future development being based back on the V4 version, addressing concerns about the direction and complexity of V5
• IE 9.0.7 Available via Windows Update – Tyson Storey announces the release of the June 2012 Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer which takes the installed version of Internet Explorer 9 to 9.0.7. This patch addresses critical security issues, so is one you should definitely be installing.

Information

• New V3 Language Features – Jason Shirk of the PowerShell team discusses some of the new language features included in PowerShell 3, discussing Enumeration, New Redirection operators, Local to remote variable support, and much more
• How we got rid of the database & How we got rid of the database – part 2 – Gabriel Schenker discusses the architecture his company uses which has allowed them to remove the database by making use of CQRS style architecture, sharing a simple example which illustrates how this can work.
• Using C# 5 caller info attributes when targeting earlier versions of the .NET framework – Thomas Levesque shares a hack which allows you to make use of the new C#5 Caller information attributes even if you are not targeting the latest framework. allowing you to gain the benefit in .NET 4, 3.5, and 2
• ASP.NET Bundling and Minification – Rick Anderson highlights his latest contribution to the ASP.NET documentation for V4.5, showing the purpose and use of the new bundling and minification support in the ASP.NET Framework.
• Advances in JavaScript Performance in IE10 and Windows 8 – Andrew Miadowicz, Program Manager for JavaScript on the Internet Explorer Team discusses the various improvements to the JavaScript execution engine included in Internet Explorer and Windows 8, discussing the improved JIT, better floating point maths, deferred parsing,improved garbage collection, and faster property and object access.
• ASP.NET Web API integration testing with in-memory hosting – Filip W continues his series of posts looking at the new ASP.NET Web API, showing how you can host your WebAPI applications ‘in-memory’, allowing you to more easily test your implementations.

Community

• Continuous Delivery with Szymon Pobiega – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group in London are hosting an event on Wednesday 20th June 2012 where Szymon Pobiega will be talking on the subject of Continuous Delivery, looking at deployment, PowerShell and configuration management.

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