The Morning Brew

Information

• Troy Hunt: Lessons in website security anti-patterns by Tesco - Troy Hunt discusses a number of security anti-patterns occurring on one fo the largest UK Supermarket Chains website, discussing the security considerations of password storage and looking at a number of other security factors which should be reviewed - useful pointers for everyone.
• Transactions in Windows Azure (with Service Bus) - An Email Discussion - Clemens Vasters shares the highlights of a recent email discussion he had with a technical account manager about transactions in Windows Azure, discussing the service bus and its duplicate detection implementation.
• Fault-tolerance in Windows Azure SQL Database - Tony Petrossian discusses the concepts of fault tolerance in SQL Databases, and looks at how Windows Azure SQL databases provide fault tolerance through replication and failure detection and failover.
• IE for the XBox 360, a Dev’s Guide (13 pages) - Greg Duncan highlights a short paper on the features and capabilities of Internet Explorer for XBox, highlighting the differences between this edition and the other IE editions about.
• Using SignalR in MonoTouch and Mono for Android Apps - Greg Shackles discusses getting up and running with SignalR on Android and iOS using Mono and MonoTouch, looking at building the client and consuming it in code.
• Top 10 Raspberry Pi Myths and Truths - Scott Hanselman gives a nice introduction to the Raspberry Pi platform, discussing some of the can’s and cannot’s, and discusses some of the things it is ideal for.
• Make Your JavaScript Better With Self Executing Anonymous Functions - Chris Love takes a look at how the coding pattern of self executing functions is a useful one in JavaScript allowing you to better organize code and give your variables some level of scoping/protection.
• Using AutoMapper to build base class for mappers between domain classes and models - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at the use of Automapper to deal with the mapping between domain classes and models use on the UI, looking at how a base class with generics can help provide powerful capabilities.

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Software

• Announcing Web Deploy 3.0 RTW - Harsh Mittal highlights the release of version 3.0 of Web Deploy as an RTW release. Web Deploy 3.0 brings IIS 8 and Windows 2012 support, providing a means of assisting your upgrade to the latest OS when it officially releases, supports Azure deployment, Incremental database publishing, Powershell commandlets and much more.
• StyleCop 4.7.35.0 has been released - Tatworth highlights an updated StyleCop release which along with being compatible with VS2012 RC, also adds support for those working with ReSharper 7 RTM.
• jQuery 1.8 RC1 Released - The jQuery team announce the first release candidate release of jQuery 1.8. As always the team are looking for you to include this new version in your applications to help them give it a final test before its stable release.

Information

• How to migrate an existing ASP.NET Website Project to Windows Azure - ‘zkap’ takes us on a journey migrating an existing ASP.NET Website to run on the Azure, walking through the full process, from checking out the original code to publishing and browsing the ported application.
• Integrate Windows Live SignIn Support In ASP.NET - Prashant Khandelwal takes a look at how you can integrate Windows Live login in your own web applications, sharing sample code which does this.
• 24 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design - #10 Layout & Composition in Windows Phone Part III - Arturo Toledo continues his series looking at the Windows Phone Metro design principles, further exploring the concepts of Layout and Composition
• Everything you need to know to build HTML5 games with Canvas & SVG - David Rousset takes a look at the exciting world of creating games in HTML5 using the Canvas and SVG support. In this article David explores the principles, looks at the libraries which are available for graphics, physics, and connected gaming, as well as looking at performance and highlighing further resources.
• Web Performance APIs Rapidly Become W3C Candidate Recommendations - Jatinder Mann highlights three new Web Performance APIs which are now moving into the W3C Candidate Recommendation status. The three specifications (Navigation Timing, Resource Timing, User Timing and Performance Timeline) are all about helping developers understand the performance of their browser based applications.
• Backbone.js: Hacker’s Guide Part 2 - Alex Young continues his series looking at the Backbone.js framework from the inside looking to learn about and teach how it operates by examining how it does things, exploring the Backbone.Collection in this part.

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Software

• CQRS Journey guidance project released - Grigori Melnik announces the release of the guidance package for the CQRS Journey project, where a team have developed a real world application using CQRS techniques and moved it through three psuedo releases to look at hos CQRS and Event Sourcing can be made to support multiple iterative releases.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 is available - Aaron Bertrand highlights the release of Service Pack 2 for SQL Server 2008 R2, a release which rolls up all the fixes in SP1 and Cumulative Updates 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

Information

• The Results of my Essential Tools, Libs and Frameworks for Front-End Development Survey - Rey Bango shares the results from his survey of the front end web frameworks and supporting utilities being used, revealing the spectrum of tools being used, highlighting jQuery as the clear ‘winner’ with some more recent additions appearing in the top 10.
• ORM techniques for legacy databases - Jimmy Bogard discusses one of the key reasons most often cited by people who ‘rolled their own’ Object Relational Mapper - support for legacy databases, discussing features of ORMs and techniques you can use to tame legacy databases to work with your ORM.
• Windows Azure and Office 365 - Scott Guthrie discusses how the Office 365 and Sharepoint’s recent beta releases fit in with Azure, highlighting how you can now extend both using azure hosted applications
• My Git, Mercurial and Powershell setup - Scott Koon discusses how he sets up his environment to make working with Git and Mercurial from the command line easier and better
• Reading UTF-8 Characters From An Infinite Byte Stream - Mike Hadlow shares some lessons learnt while working to read the Twitter streaming API which involves an open stream of data coming directly from Twitter, discussing the reading and decoding of characters from the stream.
• Update from the Windows 8 Camps - Martin Beeby shares some answers to common questions raised at the Windows 8 camp events covering a variety of different specifics of Metro application development.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: No More Passwords, OAuth in Action - Jimmy Skowronski takes a trip to Oxfordshire on Tuesday 7th August where he will be presenting his session looking at the modern face of authentication at the Oxfordshire NxtGenUG.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Entity Framework - Geff Lombardi visits the Coventry NxtGenUG on Wednesday August 8th where he will be giving a tour of the new and exciting features included in Entity Framework 5.

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Software

• ReSharper 7.0 is Released - JetBrains announce the official release of ReSharper 7.0, their latest version of this Developer Productivity extension for Visual Studio. The V7 release supports VS2005, 2008 2010 and adds support for Visual Studio 2012, along with capabilities for WinRT Metro application development, amongst an array of other new features.
• The Open XML SDK 2.5 CTP is now available for download - S. D. Oliver announces the availability of a Community Technology Preview of the Open XML SKD2.5 which supports the features of Office 2013 Preview

Information

• Free ASP.NET Training Videos from aspConf now available for download or streaming - Scott Hanselman highlights the abundance of excellent technical content from the aspConf virtual conference now available online to stream. Lots of really good sessions there, and the espcially nice thing is that it was a virtual conference, so you can be sure that the recorded content will be clear!
• Reader Question: Member Initializers vs. Constructors - Bill Wagner responds to a reader question on the use of member initializers, discussing his recommended bast practices in the area, as well as some of the justification for how the feature works.
• The Truth About .NET Objects And Sharing Them Between AppDomains - Alois Kraus discusses the size and structure of .NET objects, looking at how you can work with them, and exploring passing pointers to objects between application domains, interesting, if slightly scary stuff!
• Evolution of the Entity Framework: Lesson 5 - K. Scott Allen continues his series looking at the history and lessons from the development of the Entity Framework, discussing the use of angle brackets (XML)
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Querying Unmapped Properties With LINQ - Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at NHibernate Pitfalls with a discussion of querying non-mapped properties of objects, looking at the three options available to make this work.

Community

• Announcing BUILD 2012 - Tim O’Brien announces the plans for this year’s BUILD conference to be held at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond between 30th October and 2nd November, with registration opening on 8th August.

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Hopefully no typos today!

Information

• Finding Bad Controllers - Phil Haack discusses locating bad MVC Controllers in ASP.NET MVC looking at the RouteDebugger as a debugging tool for this kind of issues
• Don’t write your own ORM - Jimmy Bogard continues his recent discussion of Object Relational Mapping with a plea to you all to leverage existing ORM Frameworks over spending the time and effort to write your own, be that your own ORM, or a more specific data access layer for your application.
• Essential Tools, Libs and Frameworks for Front-End Development. What are you Using? - Rey Bango is running a poll to gather the details of the libraries being used for front end web development these days - if you have 5 minutes spare go give him your feedback - results will be published some time later.
• Upgrading to Azure 1.7 SDK: Visual Studio build and publishing problems - Mike Volodarsky shares some of the problems he encountered in updating to the 1.7 version of the Windows Azure SDK and how he worked round them.
• NuGet Package Restore with a Local Repository and Offline Access - Mark Kemper takes a look at using the Nuget Package Restore functionality and explores configuring it in an environment where there is no internet connectivity

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: Developer’s View of Windows 8 - The Cambridge NxtGenUG welcome friend of the Brew Robert "Boss" Hogg for a session looking at Windows 8 from a developers perspective next Tuesday (31st July)

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Update: Mistyped Troy Hunt’s firstname this morning…..not having a good week for these things! Sorry Troy.

Software

• Announcing Gallio and MbUnit 3.4 - Yann Trevin highlights the latest release of the Gallio and MbUnit Testing framework and runner, now supporting ReSharper 6.1 and also the latest versions of XUnit.net and NUnit, along with support for Async Tests in MbUnit4.

Information

• Stronger password hashing in .NET with Microsoft’s universal providers - ToryTroy Hunt continues discussion of password hashing with a look at how you can get stronger password hashing while still using the standard ASP.NET functionality by way of universal providers
• BSON (Binary JSON) and how your Web API can be even faster - Filip W takes a look at introducing BSON (Binary JSON) into your Web API implementations to support higher throughput due to smaller payloads that BSON gives, walking through implementing a BSON formatter and looking at it in use.
• An easy way to write an integration test with Web API - Ugo Lattanzi discusses how Web API can easily be integration tested, looking at how a base class for integration tests which wires up all the correct bits will make it even easier.
• DSLs : A Deep(ish) look - Sacha Barber takes a detailed look at a variety of different internal DSL techniques, working through a detailed example to illustrate them in this CodeProject article.
• The .NET Framework 4.5 includes new garbage collector enhancements for client and server apps - Brandon Bray shares a post from Abhishek Mondal and Maoni Stephens who work on the Garbage Collector in the CLR which discusses the improvements to garbage collection included in .NET 4.5 which aims to increase performance and reduce the stalls garbage collection can cause in your applications.
• FileLoadException: Could not load file for Version 2.0.5.0, Portable Class Library - Derik Whittaker highlights a gotcha to be aware of when working with the Portable Class Library caused by requiring a .NET update to enable portable class library code to run.
• How do I Test Internet Explorer 10 Touch Behavior Without a Touch Device? - Pat Altimore discusses the testing of touch based behavior in Internet Explorer 10 when you don’t have access to touch based hardware, and looks at the use of the Visual Studio Simulator included in VS2012 which allows you to simulate Windows 8 with Touch.
• Announcing the CloudyDeveloper.com Blog - The Web Development Tools Team at Microsoft highlight a new Blog from the Developer Experience folks which focuses on developing cloud based applications on Windows Azure using the full range of web technologies possible on Azure.
• Windows 8: The right way to Read & Write Files in WinRT - Jerry Nixon discusses the different ways of acceding and storing files in Windows 8 WinRT based applications
• Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics - Steven Sinofsky shares a post from Rob Copeland discussing the graphics functionality within Windows 8, and how the team have worked hard to improve the experience on the biggest range of graphics hardware ever supported in a Windows release, ranging from extreme low power tablet devices to the crazy high power graphics cards in today’s workstations and gaming machines, discussing different graphics techniques along the way.
• Get All Types in an Assembly - Phil Haack discusses the problem with enumerating the types in an assembly the easy way, discussing a solution which allows you to avoid problems when certain types cannot be loaded
• Throttling F# Events using the Reactive Extensions - Mathias Brandewinder discusses combining the F# language with the Reactive Extensions to throttle event raising within an application allowing you to slow down the events being processed.

Community

• Exterminate Common jQuery Bugs Video - Elijah Manor highlights the availability of the recording of his aspConf session on the eradication of common jQuery bugs on Channel 9, where gradually all the session videos from aspConf are becoming available.

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Update: The HTML Gremilins struck this morning, rendering the link to Simon Coopers article broken - Its fixed now - thanks to @monkeyonahill and @leppie and OdedCoster for letting me know.

Software

• Modernizr 2.6 released - The Modernizr Team announce the release of version 2.6 of Modernizr. This version includes a number of new detection tests addressing issues with testing for geolocation, web sockets, flexbox, WebGL, along with new tests for blob-constructor, advanced CSS background properties and much much more.
• Version 0.8.3 (Stable) - The Node.js team announced the release of Version 0.8.3 last week, a release which updates the V8 engine and npm, along with addressing a number of reported issues.
• V3 Final Release - Project "a CQRS Journey" - The Patterns and Practices CQRS team deliver their 3rd and final psuedo production release of the ‘Contoso Conference Management System’ a sample built with CQRS principles, and exploring the use of CQRS in real world software development where multiple releases are made.
• Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released - Adobe announce the release of PhoneGap 2.0, including command line support for tooling for Android, iOS and Blackberry, improved documentation, Cordova WebView and Cordovajs.

Information

• Inside the DLR - Callsites - Simon Cooper digs into the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime, discussing how the DLR sits on top of the CLR providing a means for dynamic code to co-exist with static typed code, and looking at the key concept of Callsites
• Roslyn Code Quoter tool - generating syntax API calls to generate any C# program - Kirill Osenkov discusses code generation on the Roslyn CTP, looking at the alternatives to get to a syntax tree ranging from parsing strings of code to using the fluent API to build up code, sharing a sample which generates the syntax API calls for any program.
• Weak Event - Bnaya Eshet discusses a common cause of memory leaks, in the form of events, and discusses how weak referenced events provide a solution where the event handler is allowed to be garbage collected if needed.
• Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck - Ilya Grigorik discusses the problem of latency in web applications. While I wouldn’t consider this to be anew problem the discussion here is a good one, with some interesting discussion occurring in the comments.
• How to make a library portable and data binding friendly at the same time? - Ron Jacobs takes a look at building libraries for use on multiple platforms using the portable class luibrary functionality, as well as exploring how you can add eas data binding into your library for any platform which supports it.
• New Blob Constructor in IE10 - Sharon Newman discusses the Bob constructor and Blob Builder interface available in Internet Explorer 10 which supports the in-progress work on the File API.
• JavaScript Exactly Equal - Joe Mayo gives a nice introduction to the triple equals operator in JavaScript, explaining its use in simple terms.
• Backbone.js: Hacker’s Guide - Alex Young shares a nice introduction to Backbone,js approaching it from the point of view of looking at the source of backbone and learning about how it works from there.
• Partially Applied Functions In JavaScript - Derick Bailey discusses the use of partial function application in writing JavaScript in a functional programming style, discussing the concept and looking at a sample use of it
• Using the ASP.NET Health Monitoring Provider to Secure Your Application in the Case of an Attack - Ricardo Peres takes a look at the ASP.NET Health Monitoring features, and discusses how it can be used to provide a security lock down by monitoring events for failed logins and having your application respond accordingly.
• Rant: SignalR, Crazyiness, Head Butting & Wall Crashing - Ayende discusses his experiences of attempting to fit SignalR into RavenDB to provide real time change notification, and discusses the problems he ran into.
• The 5 thing to immediately grab from EF Open Source - Felice Pollano highlights 5 interesting areas of the Entity Framework Code released as open source last week.

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Update: I mistyped Arturo Toledo’s Twitter handle this morning to get his full name resulting in me mis-crediting his article - apologies to Arturo, and thanks to @robfe for letting me know

Software

• Entity Framework and Open Source - The Entity Framework Team announce the exciting news that the Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft Framework to be made open source, with the project hosted on CodePlex.
• Entity Framework and Open Source & Entity Framework Magic Unicorn (and much more!) is now open source with take backs - Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman share their view of the release of Entity Framework as open source, with Scott Hanselman taking a look at future EF async functionality too.
• Windows 8 gets a date: 10/26 - Todd Bishop highlights the announcement of the official date for the Windows 8 General Availability release.

Information

• So you want to contribute to EF? Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: The code , Part 3: Testing, Part 4: Developer experience & Part 5: High-level architecture - Arthur Vickers, a developer on the Entity Framework Team kicks off a series of posts looking at the Entity Framework with a view to assisting developers to get involved with the project and contribute to the framework
• Choosing an ORM strategy - Jimmy Bogard discusses the decision making when it comes to choosing and applying an Object Relational Mapper in your software projects, suggesting that the different data access strategies address different problems, and that we should choose the best one(s) for the task at hand rather than having high expectations of one single solution.
• Introducing Service Bus for Windows Server (Service Bus 1.0 Beta) - Manoj Talreja takes a look at the Service Bus for Windows Server Beta release announced earlier this week, exploring what the service bus is, and how it works.
• When is a non-breaking language fix, breaking? - Lucian Wischik discusses how even the most seemingly safe change to things like compilers can have negative impacts, discussing some recent changes to the compilers in VS2012, and looking at how this non-breaking change can, in extreme situations, still cause a break.
• 24 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design - #9 Layout & Composition in Windows Phone - Part II - Arthur Vinícius Arturo Toledo continues his series on Windows Phone Metro Design with a look at the art and science of designing tiles for the Windows Phone
• Want To Build Win8/WinJS Apps? You Need To Understand Promises - Derick Bailey discusses the aysnc programming style in JavaScript looking initially at callbacks and then moving on to discuss the concept of Promises
• How To Debug GC Issues Using PerfView - Ben Watson discusses the use of PerfView to help you profile, understand and diagnose performance issues relating to Garage Collection, looking at some common scenarios and how to investigate.
• PerfView tutorials gathered as a Channel 9 series - Vance Morrison highlights a series of tutorials from Charles Torre on Channel9 looking at the use of PerfView

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