The Morning Brew

Software

• Download: Service Bus – The service buss components of Windows Azure are now available to download, allowing you to run your own instance(s) of the Service Bus on your own machines outside the cloud. (Great news for anyone wanting to scale out SignalR across multiple servers).
• Office Development with Visual Studio 2012 and "Napa" – S.Somasegar highlights the release of a preview of "Napa" the Office 365 Development Tools and the new Office Develloper Tools for Visual Studio 2012 as a part of the preview of Office 2013.

Information

• Should C# warn on null dereference? – Eric Lippert takes us on another voyage into the decisions made in implementing the C# compiler, discussing why the compiler does not warn about null deferencing when it does warn about unreachable code.
• Breaking Changes In Argument List Evaluation In C# 5.0 – Paulo Morgado highlights a breaking change between C#4 and C#5 regarding the use of expressions as parameters to method calls, illustrating with a simple example.
• Building Real-time Web Apps with ASP.NET WebAPI and WebSockets – Youssef Moussaoui takes a look at how you can make use of WebSockets in .NET 4.5 and Windows 8 / Windows 2012, looking at a simple example of the client side and server side code.
• Using the ASP.NET Web API UrlHelper – Ron Cain takes a look at the use of the UrlHelper class to provide the hok up from URL to ApiController method, sharing a sample based on the latest nightly build of WebAPI to illustrate its use.
• Designing the Windows 8 touch keyboard – Steven Sinofsky shares an interesting post from Kip Knox discussing the design process for the Windows 8 Touch Keyboard, including sharing some of the research performed and the early versions of the on screen keyboard.
• Clean up your MVC app with SignalR – Yngve Bakken Nilsen takes a look at how SignalR can be used in regular ASP.NET MVC Applications to provide an alternative to the standard ways of doing client to server communications, potentially improving the readability of your code.
• Developer Democracy – Phil Trelford discusses the power of developer democracy, highlighting DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper session voting (including a plug for my proposed session – thanks Phil), The usergroup community (F#unctional Londoners Meetup Group specifically), and UserVoice community voting for F# related support in tools such as ReSharper and MonoDevelop.

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Software

• Microsoft unveils the new Office – Yesterday saw the announcement of the next version of Office (15 / 2013) which embraces the new look and feel and features of Windows 8, along with better integration into cloud based services and social networking. Preview releases are available now

Information

• Here’s why we keep getting hacked – clear and present Billabong failures – Troy Hunt discusses some of the key factors which have been involved in recent password disclosures by major sites, taking a look at a recen incident with Billabong’s website.
• Improved Toolbox Performance Delivers Highly Responsive Visual Studio 2012 – Duke Kamstra and Chuck England discuss the improvements made to the performance of the Visual Studio 2012 Toolbox, discussing how the toolbox works, and how they were able to improve performance.
• Self-Host with Web API – Ugo Lattanzi discusses the self hosting capability of ASP.NET Web API, and how Web API differs from ASP.NET MVC in implementation to allow this self hosting,looking at how you can self host Web API in another application
• Dependency Injection with ASP.NET Web API and Autofac – Ron Cain takes a look at how you can integrate WebAPI with dependency injection provided by AutoFac walking through step by step.
• Should I unit- or integration test my ASP.NET Web API services? – Jef Claes discusses the testing of ASP.NET Web API code, debateing the level at which testing should be performed, and looking at how test friendly ASP.NET Web API is.
• Everything you want to know about ASP.NET Web API content negotiation – Filip W takes a detailed look at the ASP.NET Web API Content Negotiation feature, exploring in detail how it works and how you can work with it to produce output in different formats.
• Deploying: Add Git support to your IIS server – Jonas Hovgaard highlights Kudu the project which is behind the Windows Azure Git Deployment, and takes a look at how you can make use of Kudu yourself to add Git publishing to any IIS server.
• Team Foundation Service Updates 7/16 – Brian Harry gives an update on the teams latest changes to the hosted Team Foundation Service
• Model binding with ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 – Jalpesh P. Vadgama takes a look at the Model Binding support added to ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms, illustrating with a simple example.
• .NET Memory Management Basics – Chris Farrell shares the first chapter of his .NET Memory Management e-book (available for free from the Simple Talk site) discussing the heap and stack, how the interact, along with a discussion of Garbage collection, and other types of variable.

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Software

• Announcing jQuery Mobile 1.1.1 – The jQuery team announce the release of jQuery Mobile 1.1.1, the result of extensive bug fixing, and community feedback and testing. This release improves (amongst other things) the responsiveness to touch, speed of page transitions,
• Chutzpah 2.0 Released – Matthew Manela announces the release of version 2 of his Chutzpah JavaScript Test Runner. This new release updates QUnit and Jasmine support, along with streaming out the results of test runs, make use o provided test harnesses, and optionally execute tests in parallel.
• Announcing the MetroGameKit – a free, sample, starter project for Windows 8 Casual Games using HTML5 and JavaScript – ‘DaveDev’ highlights the release of MetroGameKit a starter project for Windows 8 game development in JavaScript and HTML5, based around Space Cadet, and available on CodePlex.

Information

• Mutexes, Semaphores, Monitors, ReaderWriterLocks, AutoResetEvents & ManualResets oh my! – Abhijeet Patel takes a detailed look at the various methods available for synchronizing access to shared resources in your .NET based applications.
• Using SqlDataReader’s new async methods in .Net 4.5 Beta, Part 2: Examples – Daniel Paoliello continues a discussion of the new async methods being added to SqlDataReader as a part of the introduction of async across the .NET framework, taking a look at some examples of them in use.
• Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API – Stephen Walther takes a look at using the Windows Live SDK’s Single Sign On in a meto application to provide authentication / authorization for access to a WebAPI based web service.
• C# Code Searcher – using Roslyn – ‘woutercx’ shares a look at building a code search tool making use of the new Roslyn APIs to enhance the tooling and searching process in this CodeProject article.
• VS/TFS 2012 Tidbits: Requesting a Code Review on Code Already Checked in – Steve Lange takes a practical look at using the TFS 2012 Code Review functionality, sharing a few tips on its use.

Community

• aspConf – Free Virtual ASP.NET Conference this week – Scott Guthrie highlights the free and virtual aspConf event occuring over two days this week (17th and 18th) where you can see presentations from many of the big names in the ASP.NET community from the comfort of your own (home|desk|armchair). I believe that all the LiveMeeting places have now gone, but you can register to watch the live streams of the event.

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