The Morning Brew

Software

• RavenDB 2.0 Release Candidates – Ayende announces the release candidate build of RavenDB 2.0. The team are running this version in production on their own systems, and would like other users to try out the new version with real world workloads.
• The update Windows SDK and Windows App Certification Kit tool (now checks branding images) – Pete Brown highlights the release of the latest version of the Windows Software Development Kit last week, and takes a look at the improved Windows App Certification Kit, a tool for verifying that your applications meet the various requirements.
• dotCover 2.2 is here! – JetBrains announce the release of dotCover 2.2. This version includes ReSharpter 7.1 integration, some support for Windows Store Application Tests, along with a number of bugfixes and improvements.

Information

• Why must async methods return Task? – Lucian Wischik discusses the requirement for async methods to return Tasks, discussing the early prototypes where other return values were allowed, and looking at why these didn’t work in general
• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #22: Using Play To – Jeff Blankenburg and Clark Sell continue their joint series looking at Windows 8 Application development in XAML/C# and HTML/JS respectively. The latest instalment looking at playing picture and videos on another device.
• F# as a Unit Testing Language – Phil Trelford discusses how he uses F# to write tests for btoh C# and F# code, citing the power and terse syntax as being great for writing tests. In this post Phil takes a look at the test and mocking framework support, and shows a couple of language features which make writing tests easier.
• Future Mocking – Mehfuz Hossain over at Telerik takes a look at using their JustMock mocking framework to implement mocks for types which are instantiated internally inside methods
• Design patterns in the test of time: Command, Redux – Ayende is still pressing on through his series of posts looking at the original ‘Gang of Four’ design patterns, looking back on what we have learnt about their use since their formalisation. In this post, Ayende continues the discussion of the Command Pattern
• Routing the ASP.NET Way – Dino Esposito gives an overview of the URL routing capabilities in ASP.NET, discussing its use, and configuration

Community

• Links to Channel 9’s Video Archives of the Online Windows Azure Conf of 11/14/2012 – Roger Jennings shares a collection of links to the Channel9 recordings of last week’s Windows Azure Conf virtual conference. All the sessions are available as recordings and there is a lot of great content there.

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Software

• Add Packages, not References – a NuGet plugin for ReSharper – The Team over at JetBrains have released an useful plugin which will help with keeping your referenced assemblies and NuGet Packages in line, allowing ReSharper to add NuGet Package references from the quick fix instead of just referencing assemblies already in the solution
• xunitcontrib-resharper 0.7 – ReSharper 7.1 and stuff – Matt Ellis shares the latest version of his xunit.net test runner for ReSharper, updated to work against ReSharper 7.1

Information

• Building Windows Store Apps with .NET – Brandon Bray shares a post from Richard Lander, a PM on the CLR team discusses the new opportunities created by the Windows Store, giving an eventual market of 1 billion users, and all accessible by developing applications in .NET
• Fixing Visual Studio 2012 Intellisense for WinJS Files – Phil Japikse shares a useful reminder to help you get good intellisense in Visual Studio when working with WinJS application development, adding references to the core WinJS libraries
• Building a JavaScript Event Aggregator using TypeScript – Jeremy Likness takes a look at building a event aggregator, to provide decoupling of notifications, looking at the implementation in JavaScript using the TypeScript extensions
• Key Windows Phone Development Concepts – Tim Murphy gives an introduction to some of the key terms, concepts and types in Windows Phone Development
• Web Publish Updates with Windows Azure SDK 1.8 – John Wen discusses the improvements to Web Publishing included in the Windows Azure SDK 1.8
• Looking into Entity Framework Code First Migrations – Nikolaos Kantzelis takes us on a tour of the Entity Framework Code First Migrations functionality, exploring step by step its use in a real world like situation
• BUILD 2012: 50 Performance Tricks to make your HTML5 Applications and Sites faster – Jatinder Mann highlights a session from the //Build conference this year, which covers 50 performance enhancements and tricks you can use to improve your HTML 5 applications performance. Also a useful reminder that all the conference content from Build is now available on Channel9

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Software

• CLRProfiler 4.5 released: includes Windows Store app support – David Broman highlights the release and new home of the CLR Profiler 4.5, available now on CodePlex. This release adds support for the profiling of Windows Store applications
• More Great Improvements to the Windows Azure Management Portal – Scott Guthrie highlights a number of new features and improvements in the Windows Azure Management Portal, bringing new features to managing and working wih Azure Web Sites, Virtual Machines, Cloud and Media Services and more.

Information

• All about <httpRuntime targetFramework> – Levi Broderick discusses the targetFramework attribute of the HttpRuntime element of ASP.NET Configuration, and its role in ensuring your applications do what you expect them to regarding compatibility between framework versions.
• Harvey, a .net chat server built with RabbitMQ – Leon Bambrick gives a nice introduction to working with RabbitMQ, illustrating and discussing its setup and use wtih a Chat Server example
• CSS Architecture – Philip Walton discusses the structuring of CSS and looks at applying good programming principles (Least Surprise, predictability, maintainability, etc) to CSS architecture to ensure you have a maintainable CSS codebase
• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #20: Printing – Jeff Blankenburg and Clark Sells continue their series looking at Windows 8 development using XAML/C# and HTML/JS with a look at printing from within your Windows App Store applications.
• Small in, Big out – Eric Gunnerson takes a look at the choice of return type between IEnumerable and IList, and discusses best practices to decide where and when to use which type.
• GroupBy With Maximum Size – K. Scott Allen shares a solution to a grouping problem in LINQ, arranging items into groups with a maximum group size.
• Why you should never use a boolean field (use an Enum instead) – Simone Chiaretta discusses the use of boolean fields as an AntiPattern looking at a real world example in which he encountered problems using boolean.
• Visual Studio 2012 Page Inspector – Giles Davies takes a look at the Visual Studio 2012 Page Inspector functionality showing how it integrates application use and debugging of client side DOM interactions into the Visual Studio IDE.

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