The Morning Brew

As is Morning Brew tradition, I shall be taking a break over the public holidays this Christmas, meaning there will be no edition on 25th and 26th December, so the next edition will be Friday 27th December (at some point, assuming I have internet access). Have a great Christmas everyone.

Update: Thanks to David McClelland for letting me know about a broken link caused by a missing quote on a previous link – both should now be working

Software

• NSlice v. 1.1 – Jakub Niemyjski announces the release of NSlice 1.1, a library which provides some Python like array manipulations as extension methods.

Information

• Closer is better – Eric Lippert discusses the rules by which C# determines which overload of a method to call based on best fit against the call site.
• Parallel Programming in C# and Other Alternatives – Jake Drew takes a look at a number of multicore and parallel programming techniques available in the C# language.
• C# async and await: A Deeper Dive – Andrei Marukovich continues discussion of C#’s Async/Await functionality looking at how it is represented in IL.
• Windows Azure Review of 2013 – Niall Moran takes a look back over the year of 2013 at the significant developments and features of Windows Azure.
• JavaScript Unit Testing with Visual Studio – Mark Michaelis discusses the testing of JavaScript using Visual Studio Test Projects in this Visual Studio Magazine article.
• Function = Var + Return: A Functional Style of JavaScript Programming – Programming – O’Reilly Media – Hew Wolff takes a look at a style of programming which can make JavaScript code much more functional in style.
• ASP.NET MVC Paging with OData – Dino Esposito takes a look at retrieving OData formatted data in ASP.NET MVC and paginating it onto a page.
• Experiments with Koa and JavaScript Generators – Steve Sanderson shares a look at Koa, a new Node.js application framework which aims to reduce the callback structures in JavaScript code using the new ECMA Script generators feature.

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Software

• Announcing preview of Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0.0-alpha1 – The ASP.NET team announce the first alpha release of Microsoft.AspNet.Identity 2.0 as a preview NuGet package. This 2.0 release brings a whole host of new features including password reset, account confirmation and better ways of working with users in code.
• EF 6.1 Alpha 1 Available – Rowan Miller announces the first alpha release of Entity Framework 6.1, containing an initial couple of new features which the team are looking to get feedback on.
• Glimpse ASP.NET 1.7 Released – Cache Tab – Nik Molnar announce the 1.7 release of the Glimpse ASP.NET library which adds a new Cache tab giving information about the cache usage of the application. Also updated in this release are Glimpse.Core and Glimpse.MVC
• Updated license for September 2012 Roslyn preview available – MattGe gives a licensing update on the September 2012 Roslyn Preview, offering a new license which extends the old one past its expiry in January.

Information

• Scott Hanselman’s 2014 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Scott Hanselman has updated his epic Tools list, listing all the must have utilities and software that every self-respecting software developer should consider using. I’m also very flattered to see that The Morning Brew has again been included – thanks Scott.
• Updating ASP.NET applications from ASP.NET Identity 1.0 to 2.0.0-alpha1 – Pranav Rastogi takes a look at the Alpha release of ASP.NET Identity 2.0 and explores the upgrading of a project using 1.0 to the new alpha.
• ASP.NET Trends for 2014 – Darcy Lussier looks to the future and suggests areas for Web Developers (ASP.NET Developers) to focus on in the new year.
• Entity Framework and slow bulk INSERTs – Rick Strahl takes a look at Entity Framework’s bulk insert performance and looks at how to improve it.
• Killing memory usage with dynamically generated assemblies – Ben Emmett discusses an interesting memory leak which can occur in .NET applications when they use lots fo dynamically created assemblies, focusing on a case using the XML Serialiser.
• Proper Session/DbContext lifecycle management – Jimmy Bogard looks at the role of the Session/DBContext in object relational mappers, and discusses how they should be managed in your applications.

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Software

• Monaco December 2013 Update – Chris Dias announces the latest update to ‘Monaco’ the Visual Studio Online product from Microsoft which brings with it lots of improvements, many centring on JavaScript and TypeScript support
• Kinect for Windows expands its developer preview program – The Kinect for Windows Team announce the extension of their developer preview program
• Disk2vhd turns 2, v2.0 that is, and a few more Sysinternals utility updates – Greg Duncan highlights the latest batch of SysInternals utility updates, including a V2.0 release of Disk2vhd.

Information

• Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – Ala Shiban discusses some of this year’s graduate features from the PowerTools for Visual Studio into the main product in 2013.
• Happy Holidays from the IE Team! – Jon Aneja and the Internet Explorer team share the festive season with some GPU powered HTML5 and CSS3 making the most of Internet Explorer’s support for these features with a simple game.
• Hello Nancy – Filip Ekberg shares an introduction to the Nancy Framework showing how to get up and responding to HTTP requests with the framework.
• How to get your ASP.NET application working in IE11 – Marin Bratanov highlights some of the difficulties caused with browser detection in ASP.NET with Internet Explorer 11, and highlights the appropriate fixes to ensure your applications work as expected in IE11.
• Release unused space from your Windows Azure Virtual Hard Disks to reduce their billable size – Sandrino Di Mattia discusses the TRIM support included in Azure Virtual Machines which allows you to maintain (and pay for) the minimum data in Azure storage.
• Azure Storage Blobs: the API DownloadToStream is always faster than OpenRead – Yingqin highlights the performance difference between two different ways of reading data from Azure Storage blobs.

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