The Morning Brew

I’m attending and presenting at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 10 in Reading this weekend - if you see me there please come and say hello!

Software

• Get Windows 8 Metro Elements for as little as $1 … crazy, but true! - The Team over at Mindscape are trying out an interesting pricing model for their latest controls library, allowing people to purchase it for a really low price, but with every purchase increasing the price by $1. The current asking price is $75, and the RRP is $799, so its quite a deal at the moment.

Information

• Getting Symbols and Source with ASP.NET Nightly NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen shows how easily you can get the symbols and source debugging assistance for the ASP.NET Nightly Build NuGet release, walking through the steps to get your IDE set up
• Supporting arbitrary types in Azure Mobile Services managed client - simple types - Carlos Figueira discusses how the Azure Mobile Services allow you to add support for your own more complex data types, showing how support for TimeSpans can be implemented as an example.
• Add cloud to your app with Windows Azure Mobile Services - Kirill Gavrylyuk walks through the setup and simple use of Windows Azure Mobile Services to extend your Windows Store Applications into the cloud quickly and easily
• NuGet Perf, Part III - Displaying the Packages page - Ayende continues his series looking at how migrating the NuGet database backend to a document database like RavenDB can make the querying easier and the performance better
• A guide to asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET Web API RTM - Filip W. takes a looks at uploading files to WebAPI endpoints using .NET 4.0 compatible code, looking at the server side aspects of the file upload and looking at calling it from the client in JavaScript HTML and .NET applications.
• Evolutionary Project Structure - Jimmy Bogard discusses how he is moving away from layering applications using lots of projects, and complex dependency relationships, focusing on good working code and worrying less about the ‘architectural structure’
• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing - Rick Strahl discusses how with the release of ASP.NET Web API the JSON.NET library has become the top JSON library for .NET, and takes a look at its use parsing JSON both statically and dynamically.
• Single Page Application with Backbone.js and ASP.NET Web API - Hongye Sun takes a look at building Single Page Applications using ASP.NET Web API server side and Backbone.js on the client, illustrating key points with a simple ToDo application sample.
• Giving Data to JavaScript - K. Scott Allen discusses a couple of techniques for getting data into your JavaScript Code from the server side
• WP to W8: API Mapping - Jared Bienz shares a useful article mapping the various common API themes in Windows Phone and Windows 8 together, providing a jump start on one platform to anyone familiar with the other.
• Keep Public Interfaces away from Children - Anders Abel discusses segregating class interfaces between those presented to users (public) and that available for sub-classes, highlighting areas where these two merge as being an area for concern
• Remember the Atari 2600? Brace yourself because it’s marrying HTML5! - Paul Laberge highlights a partnership between Microsoft, Atari and Grant Skinner which is brings classic Atari games to to HTML5, and making available various useful tutorials, resources and code which we can benefit from along the way

Community

• Hidden Complexity - Mark Rendle discusses the topic for his latest talk which will be getting its first outing at Skills Matter in London next Monday

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Software

• WCF Data Service 5.0.2 Released - The WCF Data Services Team announce the release of WCF Data Services 5.0.2 which addresses a number of reported issues, including NugetPackage dependency versions, improved true and false support in atom, and a variety of reported bugs.
• Simple.Data 0.18 / 1.0.0-rc1 - Mark Rendle announce the release of Simple.Data 0.18 which is also being considered to be the first release candidate for a 1.0 release, with the last bits of issue fixing and documentation improvement stil underway.
• Cry Ping and let loose the dogs of ICMP… CryPing lets you "ping" HTTP, SMTP, POP3 or NNTP services and more - Greg Duncan highlights CryPing, a tool which lets you ping servers in a protocol aware way allowing you to check that HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc servers are responding correctly.

Information

• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates - Jon Galloway discusses the use of SimpleMembership within the ASP.NET 4.5 Webforms and MVC4 releases, discussing the aims of introducing SimpleMembership to replace the previous Role and Membership providers, addressing difficulties people had in using them, and taking a look at how you use SimpleMembership.
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Handler Factories - Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at the extensibility points in ASP.NET, exploring the use of Handler factories to provide handler implementations for your own types of file.
• OData 101: Bin deploying WCF Data Services & OData 101: Using the [NotMapped] attribute to exclude Enum properties - The WCF Data Services team discus two aspects of working with OData in this series of posts, first exploring how the WCF Data Services can be bin deployed, and looking at one of the things which catches people out when doing so, and also discuss using attributes to hide the currently unsupported Enum properties in your Enity Framework models.
• Caching in WCF Services: Part 2 AppFabric distributed cache - Pieter De Rycke follows on from an earlier post looking at using the in-memory cache in ASP.NET to cache WCF service data, looking in this post at how you can scale the caching out to multiple hosts by using the AppFabric Distributed Cache.
• Building an End-to-End Windows Store App - Part 2: Integrating Cloud Services - S. Somasegar shares the second and final part of this series looking at building a simple Windows Store application for Windows8 using the tooling in VS2012 Express and he features of the OS, creating a simple feed reader application.
• Pinning Useful and Obscure Stuff to the Windows 8 Start Menu - Scott Hanselman continues his exploration of Windows 8 looking at how you can make your stuff easier to access using a variety of techniques and pinning the resulting implementations to the new Start Menu
• Build Single Page Apps - Part 9 - Navigation, Transitions, Storage, and Messaging - John Papa continues his series of posts looking at Single Page Application development, exploring the role and implementation of Navigation, transitions, and storage and messaging in single page applications to enhance the user experience and give restore capabilities to your applications.
• NuGet Perf Problems, part I & Part II - Importing To RavenDB - Ayende takes a look at the database queries behind the NuGet performance problems, discussing the complexity of them due in part to the relational data model behind them, before moving on to look at importing the data into RavenDB and exploring how it offers a more performant way of structuring the data.
• How rainbow tables work - Terry Zink gives a brief discussion of how Ranbow TAbles help ‘hackers’ to break passwords which have been hashed for storage in a database.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Custom Types and Detecting Changes - Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at possible pitfalls you may encounter when working with NHibernate taking a look today at how user types may be used in your data model, discussing how you need to be able to compare the data easily to know if it has changed.

Community

• A Developer’s Guide to Presentations - Zac Gery shares a number of really good tips for presenters new and old - well worth a look if you are doing a usergroup, workplace, or conference presentation.

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Software

• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services - Scott Guthrie announces the latest innovation from the Windows Azure Team, Windows Azure Mobile Services. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides an easy way to authenticate users, store data, and notify clients across a range of platforms, while utilizing the cloud for scalability.
• ReSharper 7.0.1: Bugfix Update Available - JetBrains announce the release of ReSharper 7.0.1, a bugfix release which addresses issues reported since the RTM release, with a significant focus on memory and performance related issues.
• New Beta of GhostDoc v4 - Tatworth highlights SubMain’s announcement of a beta release of GhostDoc v4, a tool to make documenting your code base easier. V4 includes a number of substantial new features, and includes Visual Studio 2012 compatibility.
• Announcing TouchDevelop v2.10: tutorial videos, code synthesis, trace+replay, and more! - Nikolai Tillmann and the TouchDevelop Team announce their latest release, V2.10. This release is the result of the work for the Team supplemented by some summer interns, and includes new debugging features, editor improvements, and improved documentation.

Information

• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services - Carlos Figueira, who has been working with the Windows Azure team on the Windows Azure Mobile Services discusses what he feels are the key areas which these services offer best value.
• Evolving the Reflection API - Brandon Bray discusses how the Reflection API has changed in the .NET API set for Windows Store Apps, discussing how the team went about deciding what functionality to include based upon the common usage scenarios, and how they went about re-organising the API
• Async in Entity Framework 6.0 - K. Scott Allen takes a sneak peek at the new Async support coming in Entity Framework 6.0, showing how some of the new methods look in use in common scenarios.
• TFS Shipping Cadence - Brian Harry discusses the TFS team’s development practices and how they have been moving to a shorter release cadence, with planning reaching out to 12-18 months
• Rapid Prototyping, the MVC Working Model - Edward Charbeneau shares some techniques and practices for building good looking functional working prototypes using ASP.NET MVC
• Data Duplication and Replication - Udi Dahan discusses the role of duplicated data in CQRS based architectures, looking at different types of duplicated data (business data and de-normalised data) and discussing how he considers duplicate data in these scenarios.

Community

• DDD North - Agenda Released and Registration Open - The Agenda has now been finalised and released, and Registration has now opened for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North conference on Saturday 13th October taking place at Bradford University. Be sure to register quickly for this event as place are sure to fill up quickly.
• Windows 8 Code Weekend - Another reminder for the dev4good organised Windows 8 Code Weekend, running in conjunction with TheGivingLab.org and Givey.co.uk, and taking place on the weekend 8/9th September in London
• How I learned to stop worrying and love my community - Ben Dornis shares his inspiring story of how community involvement really helped him grow as a developer, and encourages you to get involved with your community

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Software

• C# Yellow Book 2012 Now Available - Rob Miles announces the 2012 edition of his C# Yellow Book, a free pdf download now in its 5th year of being updated. This edition contains updates and corrections, along with moving the GUI section onto XAML rather than WinForms.
• #mvvmlight V4 update for Win8 RTM - Laurent Bugnion has updated his MVVM Light framework for the Windows 8 RTM release, including a few updates, and discusses upgrading your applications to the RTM release in this post.
• FsCheck 0.8.3 and FsCheck.Xunit 0.3 - Kurt Schelfthout announces the latest versions of FsCheck and , adding support for running tests through NCrunch, and use of Assembly binding redirects to ensure that thte correct versions of assemblies are used.

Information

• An "is" operator puzzle, part two - Eric Lippert returns with the answer and reasoning behind his latest teaser puzzle looking at the use of the ‘is’ operator in C#
• Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is. - Scott Hanselman gives a nice overview of the new, changed and rearranged features in Windows 8, sharing his own personal feelings on the Windows8 RTM release.
• Greenfield Development with ASP.NET MVC & S#arp Lite - Day 1 - Billy McCafferty kicks off his new series of posts looking at creating greenfields applications using the ASP.NET MVC stack with his S#arp architecture extensions. This posts is the first real one in the series taking a look at requirements, user stories and actors in the system.
• Building an End-to-End Windows Store App - Part 1 - S. Somasegar takes a look building Windows Store applications in this first part of a two part series exploring the building of a simple RSS Consuming application using the new tooling and OS.
• Build Single Page Apps - Part 8 - JavaScript Data Services - John Papa continues his series of posts looking at building single page web applications with a look at Data Access / Data Services features that you need and want to structure your Single Page Applications code in a good, SRP observing way.
• List of ASP.NET Web API and HttpClient Samples - Henrik F Nielsen highlights a selection of WebAPI and HTTPClient samples available online, covering all aspects of using the latest Web Framework from Microsoft.
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Providers - Ricardo Peres discusses the various provider models which permit extensibility of ASP.NET and Web Forms, and looking at new areas of extensibility introduced in ASP.NET 4.0, which many have forgotten about.

Community

• Event: Windows Azure User Group Meeting - Manchester inc Special Guest - Sarah Lamb highlights the Manchester Azure Usergroup event this Thursday (30th) which features a special guest speaker, Cory Fowler, an Azure Technical Evangelist from Microsoft’s Redmond offices, who will be taking a look at building PHP applications on Azure.
• Free One Day Windows Azure Developer Camp Edinburgh, Thursday 30th August - Planky also highlights a Windows Azure Event taking place on Thursday (30th), this time a DevCamp event taking place in Edinburgh

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Monday is a public holiday here in England, and as Morning Brew tradition stipulates I will not be publishing an issue on Monday, and having a lie-in instead. The Morning Brew will return as usual on Tuesday. Have a good weekend everyone.

Software

• Announcing the Release of SignalR 0.5.3 - Brady Gaster and the SignalR team make the official announcement of version 0.5.3 of SignalR, highlighting new and improved cross domain connection support, client side hubs for improved javascript syntactix sugar, enhanced logging and much more.
• node.js - Version 0.8.8 (stable) - The Node.js team announce their 0.8.8 stable release available on the usual array of platforms, and including updates of the V8 engine and npm, as well as a number fo platform specific fixes for each platform.
• JavaScript improvements in ReSharper 7 - Hadi Hariri discusses the improved JavaScript features of ReSharper 7, discussing how the tooling help you write safer more correct code by providing some compiler / linting like behaviours
• Microsoft and Design: The New Logo - Seth Eliot highlights the new Microsoft Logo, unveiled yesterday, also taking a look at some of the other Microsoft Product logos.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked Read() and Exchange() - James Michael Hare kicks off our weekend with another post from his Little Wonders series looking at less known features of the .NET framework and C# language. In this post James takes a look at the Interlocked read and exchange methods to provide atomic operations on variables ensuring nothing tampers with the value while you obtain it.
• An "is" operator puzzle, part one - Eric Lippert sets a puzzle for you this weekend involving the is operator evaluating true when you actually couldn’t perform a cast to the type.
• Property Finder - a Cross-Platform HTML5 Mobile App - Colin Eberhardt shares a deep discussion on building cross platform (including platform like UI) applications for mobile devices using HTML5 and PhoneGap in this CodeProject article.
• CQRS and user experience - Jimmy Bogard continues his series of posts discussing CQRS principles and practices with a look at how CQRS effects the Users experience, and discussing eventual consistency.
• New Visual Studio 2012 Debugging Features for the Windows 8 App Lifecycle Model - Dmitri Leonov discusses how Windows8 applications present new situations which debuggers have to support, and takes a look at the features of the Visual Studio 2012 debugger which enable working in these situations.
• OData 101: Building our first OData-based Windows Store app (Part 1) - & (Part 2) - The WCF Data Services team kick off a series of posts looking at consuming OData based data services from Windows 8 Store applications, working through an example based on the NetFlix data services.

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Update: Corrected description of link regarding Enterprise Library - Thanks to @anders_abel for letting me know via Twitter

Software

• Download: Windows Azure Training Kit - The August edition of the Windows Azure Training Key is now available fo download, with new content from the Windows Azure DevCamp Events, SQL Azure Federations, Reporting and Data Sync, more guidance on building scalable global and highly available web applications, and bugfixes to hands on labs.
• MyGet Build Services - Join the private beta! - Maarten Balliauw sharse the news that MyGet are now taking applicants for their private beta allowing you to try out having your GitHub projects pulled out, built and published as a NuGet Package. Places on the beta are limited.
• SignalR 0.5.3 - Last Night SignalR 0.5.3 was released to NuGet, with a vast array of fixes and improvements as detailed in these release notes, including Web Socket support for Self Hosted Services, Improved Errors, and case insensitivity for proxy and event names,
• The best extensions for Visual Studio 2012 - Ugo Lattanzi shares a look at some of the best and must have Visual Studio 2012 extensions available now.

Information

• NuGet Gallery Performance Issues - Mads Kristensen gives an update on the recent performance issues with the NuGet service, with a deployment having taken place in the last few hours to address the issues (the deployment of which did result in a short outage this morning).
• Enterprise Library vNext - Simplified - Grigori Melnik discusses the plans for the future of Enterprise Library Framework vNext, a cut down simplified version which will target just Windows8 / 2012 and .NET 4.5 and take advantage of the new features available in these platforms.
• Busting some CQRS myths - Jimmy Bogard discusses 7 common myths surrounding the practice of CQRS which often lead people to go down the wrong route when implementing CQRS
• Extra Information from OAuth/OpenId Provider - Pranav Rastogi discusses some of the additional information available to your applications via the OAuth/ OpenID provider for ASP.NET, made available via features in the OpenAuth protocol, and allowing your application to automatically know more about your users.
• Build Single Page Apps - Part 7 - MVVM and KnockoutJS - John Papa continues his series looking at building single page applications. In this part John explore the use of KnockoutJS a client side MVVM framework.
• 15 things we learned about interface design as developers - Milan Vrekic shares 15 important User Interface design concepts which you should always keep in mind when developing your applications.
• Hooray! Here’s all 316 pages of the Windows 8 UX Guidelines in one cool PDF - Jerry Nixon highlights the 300+ page Windows 8 User Experience Guidelines document, telling you everything you need to know about creating a standardized User Experience for your Windows 8 Applications.
• The Unofficial Windows 8 Developer FAQ - Scott Barnes shares an interesting look behind the scenes at some of the background to the Windows 8 Development experience, and the fall of Silverlight at Microsoft. Interesting reading.

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Software

• MEF and TPL Dataflow NuGet Packages for .NET Framework 4.5 - Immo Landwerth announces the release of the RTM versions of The Managed Extensibility Framework and Task Parallel Library DataFlow NuGet Packages, These components complement the .NET 4.5 RTM release.
• Lucene.Net becomes top-level project at Apache - The H Open highlights the news that the Lucene.NET project has graduated from the Apache Incubator status, and is now a fully fledged top-level Apache Project.
• Bootstrap 2.1.0 released - The Twitter Bootstrap team announce a new update to Twitter BootStrap, their HTML layouit framework. This release while being a point release contains a large number of improvements and features along with over 120 bugfixes.
• NUnitLite for Silverlight - Charlie Poole discusses the latest progress on NUnitLite for Silverlight, a Silverlight based testing framework which allows the testing of Silverlight code from within Silverlight

Information

• About signing assemblies, GAC and friends - Ran Wahle discusses the ins and outs of signing assemblies and placing them in the Global Assembly Cache, and also takes a look at some of the problems that signing can cause for people working with your assemblies.
• Visual Studio project compatibility and VisualStudioVersion - Sayed-Ibrahim-Hashimi discusses the project compatibility features of Visual Studio 2012 which allows you to work with solutions and projects in both VS2012 and VS2010, looking at how the project file structure is changed and discussing some possible problems you may encounter.
• "Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Second Preview)" 537 page PDF now available (and still free) - Greg Duncan highlights the free PDF version the second preview version of Kraig Brockschmidt’s book ‘Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript’ which includes 12 out of the 17 planned chapters and provides a great learning resource.
• An Introduction to ASP.NET Web API - Rick Strahl shares a nice introduction to the new ASP.NET Web API included in the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 / .NET 4.5, walking through the use of the features of this platform covering everything from output formats to exception handling.
• Windows Azure Media Services and the London 2012 Olympics - Scott Guthrie discusses how the Windows Azure Media Services where utilized by a number of broadcasters for their online Olympic Games broadcasts, discussing some of the features which made it so successful.
• Visual Studio 2012 Metro Styles for WPF - Winfried Lötzsch shares a set of stylings for WPF applications which give a similar look and feel to that of Visual Studio 2012 in this CodeProject article.

Community

• Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch Event — September 12, 2012 - Zain Naboulsi highlights the official Visual Studio 2012 Launch Event which will be taking place ‘virtually’ on 12th September.
• Central Texas GiveCamp needs volunteers - The good folks over at HeadSpring are organising a weekend long GiveCamp event in Central Texas next month and are now looking for people to volunteer their services as designers and developers for the event.
• Learn how to create Windows 8 apps that could change the way people live their lives - In a similar vein Lee Stott highlights an event organised by dev4good, TheGivingLab.org and Givey.co.uk which is technology themed for Windows 8, taking place on 8th September in London.

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Software

• Releasing Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers Core 1.2 - Pranav Rastogi announces the release of an update to the Universal Providers (membership) which shipped in the Visual Studio 2012 RTM release. As things like Universal Providers are all now shipped as NuGet Packages it is easy to get the update, simply update the package using the easy to follow instructions
• EFMVC App Migrated to Visual Studio 2012 RC and ASP.NET MVC 4 RC - Shiju Varghese announces the migration of his sample application which demonstrates Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC to Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC 4. As always, sourcecode is available from the project’s CodePlex site.

Information

• Inside the DLR - Invoking methods - Simon Cooper continues his series exploring the way the Dynamic Language Runtime works under the hood, taking a look at the actual invoking of methods on dynamic objects, discussing callsite caching and how the whole process gives near static type performance.
• Bandwidth, Priority, and Service Contracts - Udi Dahan discusses the actual capabilities of those Gigabit network cards you generally find in servers, looking at what gigabit means in practice, and what happens to your applications when you start to run out of network capacity
• ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Tutorial Series Published - 10 Tutorials - ASP.NET WebForms received some considerable improvements in .NET 4.5 and Erik Reitan highlights tutorial series which covers many of the new features
• How integrate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft Account with your ASP.NET MVC application - Ugo Lattanzi takes a look at implementing authentication using the universal providers released as a part of ASP.NET 4.5 (and updated - see above)
• Web API [Queryable] current support and tentative roadmap - Alex D James gives an overview of what aspects of the OData Queryable features are supported currently in WebAPI, and discusses where the future development effort may go.
• Windows 8 apps for the PhoneGap developer–Motion and orientation - Pla.NET Southeast! - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Glen Gordon continues his series looking at Windows 8 Application Development from the point of view of someone familiar with PhoneGap development, taking a look at working eith the accelerometer access in this part.
• Testing Windows 8 apps using Visual Studio 2012 - Rui Sun, Andre Hamilton and a whole host of contributors discuss the testing of Windows 8 Applications, looking at manual testing, unit, integration testing and exploratory testing using Visual Studio 2012
• Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Refactor Your Code - Chris Eargle discusses why you really should refactor your code, looking at the 5 most compelling reasons to do so

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