The Morning Brew

Software

• ReSharper 8 EAP: NuGet based Extension Manager - Matt Ellis takes a deeper look at the new NuGet enabled Extension Manager in ReSharper 8 Early Access Preview, providing a neat way to obtain and update Extensions to ReSharper.

Information

• scriptcs and accessing Azure Mobile Services like a pro - Filip W highlights the 0.4 release of scriptcs and takes a look at using it to consume Windows Azure Mobile Services
• Redirecting ASP.NET Legacy URLs to Extensionless with the IIS Rewrite Module - Scott Hanselman takes a look at how you can use the IIS Rewrite module to provide redirection for your legacy URLs (those ones with file extensions!) and map them to the new extensionless URLs
• Super simple SPA sample - Daniel Wertheim shares a simple template Single Page Application which makes use of PathJs, KnockoutJs and Headjs, walking through wiring up the required components.
• Using Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in ASP.NET Web API - Bipin Joshi takes a look at the Cross Orign Resource Sharing support which is now included in ASP.NET Web API, discussing how you get granular control of the CORS support in Web API and looking at it in use.
• Ready to learn XAML? - Jerry Nixon highlights the 1 day Microsoft Virtual Academy course for Windows8 XAML development which he taught with Daren May, which is now available to view online.

Community

• Open Source Podcast #2 - Nick Berardi highligts the second edition of the Open Source Podcast, now know as ‘Seriously Open’. This episode features the first half of an interview with Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Horn, the two chaps who head up the Glimpse project

1 Comment »

Update: The joke was on me, with a bit of broken HTML in today’s Humour link causing issues with the rest of the page - thanks to Damien for letting me know via the comments

Software

• jQuery Migrate 1.2.1 Released - Dave Methvin announces the release of jQuery Migrate 1.2.1 which addresses a regression defect in version 1.2 regarding rejection of valid HTML strings. The release is already available on the jQuery CDN in both minified and non-minified forms.
• Toastr 1.3.0 Now Available - John Papa announces the release of Toastr 1.3.0 the latest update to this nice simple JavaScript based Toast Notification library

Information

• Entity Framework Code First Validation & Entity Framework Code First Fluent Validation - Ricardo Peres takes a look at performing validation with Enfity Framework Code First entities exploring the various approaches to validation available in the box, and also explores constructing validation using a Fluent Interface
• Getting started with ScriptCS - Scott Smith shares an introductory look at ScriptCS, giving a nice getting started overview looking at installation, running samples, and starting writing your own scripts .
• Consistent error handling with Nancy - Paul Stovell is setting about moving his Octopus Deploy portal to run under NancyFX and in this post shares some of his experiences working with and handling errors in a Nancy based application
• W3C Transitions Pointer Events to Candidate Recommendation - Jacob Rossi highlights the change in status of the W3C Pointer Events to become a Candidate Recommendation. This specification is a concerted effort by browser vendors to standardise the various mouse and touch events to allow better more efficient development for application developers.
• When To Comment Your Code - Steve Smith discusses the art and science of commenting your code, drawing on various points of view in well know software development related books

Community

• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Luke Hoban: TypeScript - Skills Matter welcome Luke Holban of the Microsoft TypeScript Team for an ‘In the Brain of’ session on the evening of Monday 20th May 2013 at the Skills Matter eXchange in London.

Humour

• Developer humor - Jason Jarrett highlights a couple of amusing developer related collections of animated gifs covering everything from Git to Project Management

2 Comments »

Software

• TFS 2012.2 Power Tools update available - Brian Harry announces the release of the update for the TFS Power Tools which adds support for the Visual Studio 2012.2 Update
• Visualizing TFS source history now with source - Greg Duncan highlights a rather pretty visualisation of your source code in TFS, with code for both the library and Extension now available

Information

• Some thoughts on a comment about VS 2012.3 - Brian Harry shares a fascenating insight into the process of releasing something like the VS 2012.3 Update in response to a comment on his CTP release post - well worth reading to better understand how Microsoft think about software release and updates.
• Putting the Dynamic back into TypeScript - Derik Whittaker takes a look at how you can recapture some of the Dynamic nature of JavaScript when using TypeScript to give you a mostly static typed environment.
• Ditching two-phased commits - Jimmy Bogard discusses the 2 phase commit pattern, and also discusses how with a bit of thought and consideration the requirement for 2 phase commit can often be removed
• NancyFX - Revisiting Content Negotiation & APIs (Part 2) - Phillip Haydon further explores the content negotiation features of NancyFX, looking at the use of Negotiate in controlling which content types are serviced.
• Using Fluent Validation with ASP.NET MVC – Part 1: The Basics - Jerrie Pelser takes a look at swapping the standard Data Annotations validation commonly used in ASP.NET MVC to provide model validation, and replacing it with the Fluent Validation library.
• Cutting-edge web development with jsRazor: tiny JavaScript that replaces ASP.NET (PHP, MVC, JSP, etc.) rendering! - rgubarenko takes a look at the possibilities of Client Side Rendering using jsRazor as an alternative to rendering on the server side in this CodeProject article.

Community

• Live blogging at OuterConf2013 - Paula Hunter shares links to the presentations from OuterConf 2013, the OuterCurve foundation’s conference for open source development

No Comments »

Software

• Visual Studio 2012.3 (Update 3) “go-live” CTP is now available & Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 now available - Brian Harry and Charles Sterling highlight the availability of the release candidate / CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3. This CTP release has a go-live license so enables supported use in a real world production environment, helping the team find issues before the RTM release.
• Glimpse 1.3.1 released - Anthony van der Hoorn announces the latest release from th Glimpse team with some major fixes to the Glimpse core as well as enhancements to ASP.NET and ADO features, with an ever growing team of contributors

Information

• scriptcs gets a REPL! - Glenn Block announces the release of a REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop) for ScriptCS which gives an interactive ScriptCS experience affording easy experimentation and many other powerful scenarios.
• .NET Security Part 2 - Simon Cooper continues his series looking at Security in .NET with a look at creating appdomains with different trust levels giving sandboxes for code to play in without exposing the whole application to it.
• 10 Years (of the CSS Zen Garden) - Dave Shea announces a refresh of the CSS Zen Garden, now 10 years old, and opens up to submissions using the best of CSS3 and Responsive Design. The original Zen Garden was a great resource in in early days of selling people on the concept of CSS based layouts, and I hope the new Zen Garden reaches these heights.
• .NET Crash Dump and Live Process Inspection - Lee Culver shares a look at a new managed library from the .NET Runtime Team which allows you to automate debugging inspection and capture more information about your crashes. The library, Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime or ClrMD) provides a code interface to working with a processes state, and is certainly something I’ll be having a play with in the future.
• Handling IE 9 & 10’s and Chrome’s clear button with Knockout binding
  - Kevin Logan takes a look at an interesting problem when working with Knockout.js in modern browsers which have additional functionality in the input text box
• An Editor Pattern for Knckout.js Using TypeScript Inheritance - Steve Michelotti shares a look at an editor pattern for Knockout based code which provides for the accept / cancel of user changes

Community

• Free Visual Studio Lifecycle Tools Events - Mike Taulty highlights the latest series of events from the team at Microsoft UK, which will be taking a look at the Application Lifecycle Management features of Visual Studio / TFS in Cardiff, Nottingham, Reading, London and Glasgow during May and June

No Comments »

Software

• Announcing availability of ISOs for Visual Studio Updates - The Visual Studio Team announce the availability of ISO image of the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, making it easier to obtain an offline version of the update.
• Announcing PostSharp 3 RTM - Gael Fraiteur announces the RTM release of PostSharp 3, now available from the Visual Studio Gallery and NuGet, replacing the PostSharp 2.1 package
• Free ModernUI Charts for WPF, Windows Store Apps und Silverlight published - SharePoint Software Quality, .NET and ModernUI apps - Torsten Mandelkow announces the availability of a free charting library for WPF Windows Store and Silverlight applications which has the Modern UI look and feel

Information

• Producing permutations, part seven - Eric Lippert returns for another instalment of his series looking at the production of permutations, digging into the answer to the poser in the last post about random permutations of a deck of cards
• The future is now - OWIN and multi-hosting ASP.NET web applications - Filip W takes us to the bleeding edge exploring the capabilities of the nightly builds from the ASP.NET team of Katana and ASP.NET Web API, looking at the support for multi-hosting in self host scenarios
• One ASP.NET: Nancy.Templates for Visual Studio - Scott Hanselman shares a look at the NancyFX Visual Studio templates showing how they provide valuable starting points for Nancy development, and take advantage of the extensibility in Visual Studio, which is still sadly more complicated than folk would like it to be,
• The Benefits of a Reverse Proxy - Mike Hadlow takes a few moments to consider the architectural benefits of running web infrastructure behind a reverse proxy, allowing it to shield your infrastructure and provide valuable services on top of a multi-server setup.
• Resources for Learning CoffeeScript & 10 CoffeeScript Features You Might Not Know - Jaco Pretorius highlights some nice resources for getting up and running and deepening your understanding of the CoffeeScript language, as well as highlighting 10 useful and interesting aspects of the language.

No Comments »

Monday is a bank/public holiday here in the UK, so as is the usual Morning Brew tradition, I will be taking the day off from publishing here, and will return on Tuesday. Enjoy the weekend.

Information

• Producing permutations, part six - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at generation of permutations, with a discussion on the potential for bias in the random elements of generating random permutations, along with setting a challenge to predict the next cards picked by a sample program.
• .NET Security Part 1 - Simon Cooper takes a look at the built in Code Access Security included in the .NET Framework exploring partial and full trust assemblies, the testing of permissions and the different security modes/levels.
• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Three Tech.Pro Tutorials - James Michael Hare shares three tutorial articles he wrote for Tech.Pro exploring Linq, Tuples and Anonymous Types, and extension methods
• Configuring Nancy to use views in a separate assembly - Colin Angus Mackay takes a look at an alternative way of loading views when working with the Nancy Framework, looking at embedding views as resources in assemblies, and how to bootstrap Nancy to load these.
• Communication with Cross Domain IFrame - A Cross Browser Solution - Tadit Dash takes a look at the solution to passing information between browser frames, and even moving information across two different domains using message passing using postMessage
• Developers and Depression - Killing our Knowledge Workers - AgileScout discusses the importance of good mental health, and some of the typical developer traits and work patterns which don’t help - Important stuff which isn’t discussed often enough.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Cross platform game / app dev - Simon Jackson is giving a session on the issues and solutions for developing games to run on the multitude of different platforms available these days at the Manchester/Warrington NxtGenUG on the evening of Wednesday 15th May.
• NxtGenUG - Typescript - Mark Rendle journeys north to Birmingham to deliver a session on TypeScript on the evening of Tuesday 21st May
• Utilize Roslyn to create the next level plugin capability - Filip Ekberg shares the video of his dotnetConf session which looks at using the Compiler as a Service functionality provided by Roslyn as an alternative way of creating plugins for applications. Don’t forget all the other dotnetConf sessions are also available online and are well worth checking out.

3 Comments »

Software

• Announcing the Release of WebMatrix 3 & Announcing WebMatrix 3 - Scott Guthrie and Justin Beckwith announce the release of WebMatrix 3, the latest edition of Microsoft’s lightweight web development tooling which enables development in ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js. This release centres around the Windows Azure integration, improving remote editing capabilities and integration with TFS and Git.
• jQuery Migrate 1.2.0 Released - Dave Methvin announces the release of jQuery Migrate 1.2.0 which can be used with jQuery 1.9 or 2.0 to plug the gaps in the API where methods have been removed, providing a means of gradually updating your applications to use only the supported functionality of the V1.9 and v2.0 versions.

Information

• There are now Visual studio project templates for Nancy - Christiaan Baes highlights the availability of Visual Studio project templates for NancyFx available now as a VSIX from the Visual Studio Gallery, providing a much easier way to get up and running with a Nancy project.
• Using Nancy to Remotely Control a Desktop Application & An Example for Self-Hosting Nancy in an Application - Roland Weigelt discusses the how and why of his recent project working with NanxyFx to create an application which allows the controlling of a Desktop application
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Enabling New Relic Performance Monitoring on Windows Azure Websites - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the free offering of New Relic for working with Windows Azure, looking at how it offers improved monitoring of your Windows Azure services
• Mmm, curry - Eric Lippert highlights the May-June edition of .NET Curry Magazine, a free publication (although registration is required)
• MSDN Magazine - Speaking of Magazines, The May edition of MSDN Magazine is now out with articles looking at authentication with Social Media Applications, JSON support in Windows Runtime Components, ‘One ASP.NET’ and much more

Community

• DDD East Anglia Sessions - Session Voting for DDD East Anglia, the first DDD event of the year, has now opened, with most of the month available for voting on a great range of sessions.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Windows Azure Websites - The Hereford NxtGenUG chapter welcome Richard Conway for a session looking at the use of Windows Azure Websites for hosting your applications on Monday 13th May.

No Comments »

Update: Fixed the link on the Async Controllers article, another victim of the trailing r ‘human error’ - thanks to Ruud for letting me know.

Software

• Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET - Scott Guthrie announces the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET . This release adds improved support for Azure Websites publishing management and diagnostics from within Visual Studio, support for the new larger Virtual Machine sizes, updated PowerShell integration and much more.
• New Features in the Latest ReSharper 8 EAP - The ReSharper Team over at JetBrains announce their latest Early Access Preview release of ReSharper 8, with its major new feature, a NuGet Gallery based extension Manager making it ever easier to obtain and install ReSharper extensions. This release also has a bunch of other new templating and navigating features.

Information

• A WebAPI Basic Authentication MessageHandler - Rick Strahl follows on from his previous post on WebAPI authentication with a look at implementing the same functionality as he did using a filter in the previous post, this time looking at implementing it ‘the correct’ way using a MessageHandler.
• Async Controller In MVC 4 - Prashant Khandelwal takes an introductory look at implementing ASP.NET MVC4 controllers using the AsyncControler to allow the use of tasks to improve the straight line speed of your actions.
• A View Engine for ASP.NET MVC Feature-Based Organized - Matt Honeycutt takes a look at the default ASP.NET MVC file layout conventions and shares a View Engine which operates to different conventions, showing how you can provide support for your on desired layout
• CDNs fail, but your scripts don’t have to - fallback from CDN to local jQuery - Scott Hanselman discusses the ultimate responsibility for the availability of web applications, and takes a look at how you can cater for situations where the Content Delivery Network may go down, exploring how you can ensure that your site continues to operate in such a situation.
• MSDN Magazine May Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives a preview of the content coming in the May edition of MSDN Magazine which should be available online late today
• Node at Work: A Walkthrough - Garann Means takes a look at the use of Node.js as a rapid prototyping language to quickly building application prototypes / designs in this A List Apart article.

Community

• Windows AzureConf 2013 (Sessions Now On Demand) - Tareq Ateik highlights the availability of the session recordings from the Windows Azure Conf 2013 event

1 Comment »