The Morning Brew

Tomorrow is New Year’s Day - a public holiday here in the UK, so as usual The Morning Brew will be taking a break, returning on Wednesday. I will also be doing a (shorter than usual) year in review post at some point either today or tomorrow - In the meantime, all that remains is to wish you all a very happy new year, and to thank all the authors of posts included in the past year’s Morning Brew

Information

• TypeScript Templates for Windows 8 - Chris Sells discusses the process of converting the Windows 8 JavaScript application templates to TypeScript, sharing the results which provide an easy head start to working with TypeScript to create Windows 8 Store Applications
• Creating a complete ASP.Net MVC 4.0 application with Visual Studio 2012, C# , EF 5.0 (Code First) - part 1, part 2, part 3 & part 4 - Nikolaos Kantzelis is four parts into a step by step walkthough series of posts looking at the construction of an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application making use of C# and Entity Framework 5, with Razor view and a smattering of JavaScript and CSS.
• Logging - Garry Shutler discusses one important thing he learnt this year, the importance of good logging in your applications, discussing a number of best practices for logging in your applications that are applicable regardless of language or framework.
• Task Parallel Library and async-await Functionality - Patterns of Usage in Easy Samples - Nick Polyak shares a long and detailed article looking at the Task Parallel Library and Async / Await functionality, showing where and how you can and should apply these techniques illustrating with plenty of example pieces of code.
• 12 TDDs of Christmas - John Cleary is half way through his 12 days of Test Driven Development series with a different Kata exercise being done every day - a great idea and a good way to get back into the swing after a long Christmas break.
• using MVC Navigation Routes in Twitter.Bootstrap.MVC4 - Eric Hexter continues discussion of his Twitter.BootStrap.MVC4 NuGet Package which brings the power of Twitter’s Bootstrap library to ASP.NET MVC in a nice integrated way. In this post Eric discusses how adding routes to your application can automatically populate your Bootstrap navigation.
• Building a better .NET Application Configuration Class - revisited - Rick Strahl revisits the old chestnut of Configuration, and particularly providing strongly typed configuration via web.config, sharing a configuration library which he recently separated from his West Wind Web Toolkit and is now sharing as its own module on GitHub.
• Build Patterns: Script Injection - Roy Osherove shares another post on Build Patterns, discussing the separation of the CI build process into a CI side and a version controlled side, allowing you to build different versions of your applications from CI without configuration changes.
• Nancy and returning a pdf - Christiaan Baes continues exploring the NancyFx web framework, this time taking a look at building and returning PDF Content for a request.
• What happens to Windows 8 Apps already Installed with a Current Expired Developer License? - Michael Crump highlights a gotcha that is likely to strike a number of people as developer licenses expire - thankfully its a really easy ‘fix’

2 Comments »

Information

• Nullable micro-optimization, part two - Eric Lippert continues discussions of the performance optimisations in the C# compiler surrounding the use of GetValueOrDefault over Value, taking us on a journey through Lifted Functions, and how they are implemented in the C# Compiler
• When is a reference a reference? - David Starr discusses the concept of References in C# and discusses how his team should go about counting the references of a specific type, looking at a number of the different varieties of reference you can encounter.
• Job scheduling in Windows Azure - Sandrino Di Mattia takes a look at the use of the Windows Azure Job Scheduler, part of the Windows Azure Mobile Services, and look at putting it to use to keep a Windows Azure Website alive by making requests to it on a schedule.
• MiniProfiler - Installation and Setup & Elmah - Karl Stoney takes a look at two great Web application debugging and diagnostic tools, exploring their installation and use in these two CodeProject articles
• Finding Memory Leaks in .NET Compact Framework Applications - Jesse Taber shares some lessons learnt from debugging memory leaks in an application running on the .NET Compact Framework, highlighting some useful tools, patches and practices.
• JavaScript var hoisting - Joseph Donley discusses one of the more confusing aspects of the JavaScript language, its handling of declared variables in different scopes
• Backbone.js Tutorial: List Views - Alex Young is part way through a tutorial series taking a look at building some real application functionality using Backbone.js - the tutorial is backed with a GitHub repository with coordinated commits allowing you follow along with the real code as it grows.

No Comments »

Software

• Windows Azure Training Kit December 2012 Refresh - Dr. Z highlights the release of the December 2012 Refresh of the Windows Azure Training Kit, which includes new demos taken from the Build 2012 conference looking at Mobile Services, Websites and Cloud services.
• WiX 3.7 released (Think"The MSBuild Everywhere" release) - Greg Duncan highlights the official Stable release of the WiX Toolset 3.7. This release adds in the features that missed out on inclusion in WiX 3.6, and brings MSBuild to the forefront, and adds bundling features.
• Twitter.Bootstrap.MVC4 - new release 1.0.71 - Eric Hexter highlights his latest update to the Twitter.BootStrap.MVC4 package which makes it easy to add the Twitter Bootstrap libraries to your ASP.NET MVC 4 sites

Information

• Simple bash scripting for "azure" cli - Glenn Block discusses the various options available for scripting Azure functionality in bash/gitbash using the Azure CLI implementation, discussing some of the scripting techniques, and looking at some example scripts.
• Running Typescript tests via Jasmine and Chutzpah on Teamcity - Derik Whittaker discusses the integration of TypeScript tests in a TeamCity Continuous Integration environment using Jasmine and Chutzpah frameworks, showing how to assembly the parts.
• Windows Azure Mobile Services — Unofficial Android SDK & Windows Azure Mobile Services — Scheduler Scripts - Sasha Goldshtein discusses the use of the Windows Azure Mobile Services from Android Devices, discussing the initial setup and first steps of consuming the services, and also, in the second post, takes a look at the recently added Scheduler Scripts feature of the Azure Mobile Services.
• Gain more performance in ASP Web API, replace standard serialization to MessagePack - Oleksandr Kulchytskyi discusses the technique for swapping oujt the serialization in ASP.NET Web API and replacing it with the MessagePack serializer
• ZeroMQ via C#: Multi-part messages, JSON and Synchronized PUB-SUB pattern - Manar Ezzadeen follows on from his introductory post on ZeroMQ with a look at the two types of message that can be sent and received by ZeroMQ, looking at JSON based messages and Pub-Sub messaging.
• Code rant: A Geek Christmas Quiz - The Answers! - Mike Hadlow shares the answers for his Christmas Geek Quiz, included in the December 24th Morning Brew.

Community

• Christmas present for you: Announcing Web.NET Conf 2013 in Paris - Simone Chiaretta shares the news that the next Web.NET conference will be held in Paris at the end of May

No Comments »

As is traditional, The Morning Brew will be taking a break over the Christmas Public Holidays here in the UK, so the next edition will be on Thursday (27th). Have a great Christmas everyone.

Software

• Updates to Windows Azure (Mobile, Web Sites, SQL Data Sync, ACS, Media, Store) - Scott Guthrie announces the latest raft of updates of Windows Azure, released Friday. The new features include additional regions, scheduling, and CLI support for Mobile Services, Improvements for Azure Websites, SQL Data Sync and ACS Management in the new portal, wider availability of the Windows Azure Store, and much more
• Knockout Lite Tools (KoLite 1.1.0) - John Papa announces the release of the Knockout Lite Tools 1.1.0, a set of helpers to assist in building data bound applications using Knockout and JAvaScript.
• NUnit Test Adapter Update - Charlie Poole announces the release of the latest beta release (4) of the NUnit Test Adapter for Visual Studio, updating to include support for VS2012 Update 1

Information

• Does ASP.NET Web API + OData filter at the database level? Let’s ask IntelliTrace - Jon Galloway explores two possibilities for answering a Tweeted question about where the filtering occurs when using ASP.NET Web API and OData, one looking at the code, the other making use of IntelliTrace.
• Understanding OData v3 and WCF Data Services 5.x - Mohamad Halabi takes a detailed look at the use of OData v3 and the WCF Data Services 5.x in this Code Project article which avoids the standard examples of exposing EF objects, and gives a good groundings in the key areas of querying and exposing data.
• Nancy and VB.Net: the login/logout thing & Nancy and VB.Net: Using easyhttp as our client - Christiaan Baes continues his exploration of the Nancy Web Framework using VB.NET as the language, continuing looking at authentication related topics before moving on to look at serving content other than HTML, before celebrating the 500th post on his blog with a ReSharper giveaway.
• Large collection of Free Microsoft eBooks for you, including: SharePoint, Visual Studio, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Office 365, Office 2010, SQL Server 2012, Azure, and more. (More than +80 eBooks) - Aseel AlOmran shares a post from Eric Ligman which details a collection of free eBooks from Microsoft Press - plenty of reading for over the Christmas Break
• Building a Simple Bottle to Extend FubuMVC - Jeremy Miller shares the process of building custom functionality to extend the core of FubuMVC, and how the ‘Bottles’ functionality allows you to split functional areas of your application
• Knockout.js and Kendo UI - a Potent Duo - Ryan Niemeyer takes a look at combining the Kendo UI JavaScript controls from Telerik with the Knockout.JS library to build powerful client side we applications.
• Code rant: A Geek Christmas Quiz - Mike Hadlow shares his 2012 Geek Christmas Quiz, with questions across all the key ‘geek’ areas - a great way to wind down the work year with your collegues and friends.

No Comments »

Software

• So long and thanks for the all the Expression… Expression Design & Web are End of Life'd (but now free) [oh, and the rest of the Expression Suite is dead too] - Greg Duncan highlights the news that the Expression Web Tooling has become ‘end of life’. There will be continued support until 2015, and the best bit is that the tools are now available for free download.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Parallel.Invoke() Method - James Michael Hare picks up his Little Wonders series again with a look at the Parallel.Invoke method for an easy way of obtaining some asynchrony in your applications.
• Nullable micro-optimizations, part one - Eric Lippert kicks off another mini-series looking at the micro-optimisation of Nullable Types, digging into the key properties of the Nullable implementation.
• Messaging Semantics: Ownership - Jimmy Bogard resumes his series on Messaging Semantics, with a look at the role that message ownership should play in the meaning of your messages, commands and events
• SignalR: Building real time web applications - Gustavo Armenta Valdez continues the .NET Web Development and Tools Blog’s series of more detailed posts about the features that are in the 2012.2 update with a look at SignalR 1.0RC
• New Tutorial Series and Sample Application for ASP.NET MVC 4 with Windows Azure Tables, Blobs, and Queues - Tom Dykstra highlights a Windows Azure sample application and tutorial which illustrates working with ASP.NET MVC4 and ASP.NET Web API on Windows Azure working with Azure Table, blob and Queue Storage. The tutorial is in 5 parts and covers a good range of functionality.
• Why use NancyFX? - Jonathan Channon takes a look at the variety of reasons why you should consider using the NancyFX framework when you next need to use a web framework.
• Nancy and VB.Net: Forms authentication - Christiaan Baes also continues his exploration of the NancyFX using VB.NET with a look at implementing Forms Authentication in your Nancy based applications
• Windows Azure SQL Reporting - Great to see a dramatic price decrease for lower volume users - Greg Low highlights some update and reduced pricing for Windows Azure SQL Reporting which will be in place from 1st February 2013
• Making ASP.NET Web API Help Page work on self-hosted services - Yao continues discussion of the ASP.NET Web API Help Page functionality, discussing how you can get it operational when you self host your Web API Code in your own processes.

No Comments »

Software

• azure-cli 0.6.9 ships, pure joy - Glen Block gives a run down of the new features added to the latest release of the Windows Azure azure-cli package which brings management of Windows Azure to your command liner
• this.Log - Source, NuGet Package & Performance - After a positive response to his recent post on this.log, Rob Reynolds has extracted the code into a collection of different NuGet Packages containing implementations for different logging and Mocking Frameworks, and sample code packages too.
• NuGet package for creating and querying Table Storage entities in (reverse) chronological order - Sandrino Di Mattia shares a useful NuGet Package for working with Windows Azure Table Storage entities where you need to store and query chronologically ordered data
• Team Explorer Everywhere Update 1 - Brian Harry highlights the update 1 release of Team Explorer Everywhere, released along side the Visual Studio 2012 / TFS Update 1, which brings support for public workspaces, baseless merges in the UI and Chinese Language in the UI, as well as various smaller fixes and improvements

Information

• jQuery Core 1.9 Upgrade Guide - The jQuery Team have a useful reference which covers the various changes to the jQuery Core in the 1.9 release, providing a guide for developers on what parts of their code may require updates following the removal of some depreciated functionality, and looking at the new features added in the, currently beta, release
• How To Write Maintainable jQuery Applications - Leland Richardson shares some thoughts on building maintainable applications using jQuery, illustrating with some examples in this CodeProject article.
• MVC Single Page Application Template Update for ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 RC - Xinyang Qiu takes a look at another of the new features included in the ASP.NET Web Tools 2012.2 RC update, exploring the ASP.NET MVC Single Page Application template, discussing what has changed since the BUILD preview release, and looking at the key features.
• A Sudden Move: One developer’s journey from C# to JavaScript - Joel Cochran discusses his move from being a WPF / XAML developer using C# to working solely in JavaScript orking on Single Page Applications using Knockout.JS, and how JavaScript now opens up a world of development possibilities on a variety of platforms.
• FREE Windows 8 Dev with HTML5 Exam Voucher - ‘jhealy’ highlights a great offer (which I believe is running world wide) which gives you a free promotional code for the MCP 70-480 exam which covers HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3
• Using HTML5/Javascript in Windows Store apps: Data access and storage mechanism (II) - Windows Store apps development support - Robin Yang continues his exploration of storage options in HTML5 / JavaScript based Windows Store applications with part 2 of his series
• The Big List of Small Basic Programs - Greg Duncan highlights a page over on Technet which contains a collection of programs made using Small Basic - some really good stuff there, and all runnable from within the browser

No Comments »

Software

• jQuery 1.9 Beta 1 Released - As an early Christmas present the jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.9 beta 1. This release is in part a clean up release removing depreciated functionality, but all is not lost, the jQuery Migrate plugin will bring back many of them to allow you to begin transitioning.

Information

• ‘Paste JSON As Classes’ in ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 RC - Anand Paranjape discusses a neat feature added in the Web Tools 2012.2 Release Candidate Update which brings the ability to paste a JSON object into your web project and have it converted to a ,NET class - no more manual creation of classes for deserialisation purposes
• Elevation of Privilege: Drawing Developers into Threat Modeling - Adam Shostack shares a whitepaper discussing the principles and motivation for the creation of the Elevation of Privilege card game from the Microsoft SDL Team linked to a few issues back
• Understanding the Decorator Pattern - Abul Kayes shares a good writeup of the purpose and use of the Decorator design pattern in this CodeProject article
• Key qualities of a good unit test - Kenneth Truyers has a short series on effective unit testing - this is part two which looks at the key properties of a good unit test, something which is always worth reminding ourselves. Be sure to check out parts 1 and 3 as welll which look at writing effective tests, and testing and refactoring legacy code.
• A sample real-time web application using Ember.js, REST API, and SignalR - ‘quiit’ shares an article on The CodeProject walking through the creation of a web application using Ember.js with a REST like API and using SignalR persistent connection for realtime updating.
• Conditional loading of resources with mediaqueries - Christian Heilmann discusses some techniques for ensuring that only the CSS files needed for the particular resolution of your site are loaded when working with Responsive Web Design practices.
• CSS Click Events - Hugo Giraudel takes a look at some techniques for working with Click events in HTML pages using only CSS techniques, and no JavaScript.
• Using HTML5/Javascript in Windows Store apps: Data access and storage mechanism (I) - Windows Store apps development support - Robin Yang discusses some techniques available for storage of data in Windows Store applications, briefly covering Application Data, File API , HTML5 Web Storage, Indexed Database API and remote data access

Community

• CraftyCoders - CraftyCoders is a new principles focused usergroup running out of the West Midlands here in the UK. Their first meeting will be a session on Taming your Dependencies with Ian Russell looking at the practices surrounding Dependency Injection, taking place on Thursday 17 January in Bromsgrove. Signup on the Eventbrite page

No Comments »

Software

• WCF Data Services 5.2.0 Released - The WCF Data Services Team announce the release of WCF Data Services 5.2.0 as both NuGet packages and a tools installer. This release follows on from a successful Release Candidate release last week, and adds UriParser support for $filter and $orderby expressions, along with performance and reliability bugfixes

Information

• Breaking news: HTML 5.0 and Canvas 2D specification’s definition is complete! - Paul Cotton highlights the significant news that the HTML5 and Canvas 2D specification from the W3C have been published in the Candidate Recommendation form, meaning that there will be no further new features added to either.
• Which is faster? - Eric Lippert shares 6 parts of wisdom which you should always consider when asking the question ‘which is faster?’
• How to read performance articles - Christian Heilmann is also discussing performance related topics, reminding us that performance tests, etc are all based only on the available implementations at the time, and seldom are revisited to reflect updates to the library/platform/etc
• Running ASP.NET Web API via OWIN with Katana - Filip W discusses the use of ASP.NET Web API with the OWIN framework and Katana OWIN implementation for Windows, discussing how unlike many earlier Microsoft Web Technologies, Web API allows you a variety of options for hosting.
• What I Learned Building My First 4 Windows 8 Apps - Jason Roberts discusses some of the key lessons he learned in the production of his first 4 Windows 8 Store Applications
• The Benefits of Regular Deployment - James Moore discusses the adoption of regular deployment at RedGate, talking about some problems they previously encountered on products, the lean manufacturing techniques they adopted, the lessons learned, and how its working for them now.

No Comments »