The Morning Brew

Catching up on all the great posts from last week and the weekend with a heavy dose of //Build/ content, along with the non-build links that missed out on being included last week.

//Build/ Related

• Windows Build/Windows 8: My Impressions – Change is a good thing – John Petersen reflects back over the //Build/ Conference discussing how the latest announcements fit in with the on-going bigger picture of the evolution of our platform.
• BUILD Day #3 in Review According to MVPs – The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – The MVP Programme Blog highlights a number of posts from MVPs discussing the events, announcements and experiences of the 3rd Day of the //Build/ conference.
• Why I’m Excited About Windows 8 – Dan Wahlin shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 Developer Preview, discussing the various aspects of the announcement, the technology, its likelihood of adoption, and what the consumer facing feature may mean for the Enterprise Developer.
• A Tale of Two Windows – Andrew Burst discusses the difficult problem that Windows 8 attempts to address, being all things to all people across user experience, Human Computer Interaction technologies and platforms.
• My thoughts about Build, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and Silverlight – Laurent Bugnion shares a nice discussion of the Windows 8 announcement, and the reaction to the proposed options for the development platform for Windows 8 Metro style applications, weighing up the various options presented in the different aspects of the //Build/ Conference.
• Windows Runtime – Dial in the right expectations before reading up – Samuel Jack urges us all to ensure we have the right expectations before you embark on looking at the new world of WinRT
• Real Native WinRT Development – Ian Griffiths drops down to the COM level and explore WinRT by looking at consuming it at this level using C++, revealing something of how WinRT actually works
• WinRT and .NET, WinRT and business apps & CSLA on WinRT (project start) – Rockford Lhotka discusses the announcement of WinRT, discusses its possible future use in Line of Business applications and outlines his plans for his CSLA application framework on Windows 8 / WinRT
• WinRT and .NET in Windows 8 – Sasha Goldshtein outlines the position of WinRT alongside the existing UI technologies like WPF and Silverlight.
• Microsoft’s New Mullet – Colin Blair looks at the now famous Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide from the //Build/ Conference discussing the UI technologies and their appropriateness for different types of application.
• A bad picture is worth a thousand long discussions – Doug Seven discusses the difficulty in creating a good marketing info graphic, exploring the Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide, sharing some details from discussions with members of the .NET Team and re-drawing the diagram to better reflect the intended reality.

Software

• Released: Project Silk Client-Side Web Development for Modern Browsers – Karl Shifflett announces the official release of Project Silk – a guidance package for the creation of rich web based experiences using modern web development technologies and techniques. This release comes on the end of a series of preview releases where we have been able to watch the team build the guidance package and the supporting sample application.
• Announcing Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta – Stathis Papaefstathiou announces the beta release of the first beta of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. The major features of this release involve integration of Kinect based functionality for improved Human Robot Interaction, and a Silverlight based CCR Programming model.
• Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.0 have been released! – Michael Washam announces the release of a new version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. This version 2 release adds a number of new and updated cmdlets for improving the Deployment, diagnostics capabilities of Azure from your PowerShell command line.
• Now Available: The Service Bus September 2011 Release – Clemens Vasters announces the September 2011 release of the Azure Service Bus. The new release improves capabilities in Pub/Sub messaging, enables load balancing capabilities for Intra Application messaging, supports Asynchronous Cloud Eventing and Event Driven Service Oriented Architectures
• WebMatrix v2 Beta is out… – Greg Duncan highlights the announcement from Simon Tan of the Beta release of WebMatrix V2. This release sees a significant development in the product, and brings with it a range of great new features for development using PHP, JavaScript, and .NET, including NuGet support, and improved data management options and features. Be sure to check out the linked New features document for all the new bits.
• PlayStation Suite SDK beta coming in November, offering new games in spring 2012 – Engadget highlights the forthcoming Sony PlayStation Suite which will support the use of C# to program games for the various Sony games platforms,

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 4: New template for web applications, ASP.NET MVC 4: New mobile web application template &ASP.NET MVC 4: Display modes – Gunnar Peipman explore the new ASP.NET MVC 4 application template, giving a preview of the layout, and discussing how it makes better use of CSS and HTML(5), and provides a mobile friendly version before moving on to look at the new Display Modes feature allowing you to conditionally render different views to mobile devices, discussing how you can simulate and test this behaviour using your desktop browser and looking at creating custom display mode rules.
• Demystifying the Windows 8 Grid Application – Bil Simser takes the wraps off the Metro Grid Application Template included in the Visual Studio 11 Preview release, exploring the structure of the template and how and what each part does.
• Windows 8 : Metro’s Grid Application – what, how and when ? – Jonathan Antonie also explores the new Windows 8 Metro Grid application template included in Visual Studio 11, looking at the UI Experience and exploring the creation of a sample application using the template.
• Metro .NET Framework Profile (Windows Tailored) – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the parts of the .NET API which are exposed to the new Metro Style applications, discussing what is in and out, some of the possible work around available to getting at other bits of the framework, and their effects of App Marketplace compliance.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Fetch and Lazy, SELECT N + 1 & Merge – Ricardo Peres continues his series focusing on some of the possible problems you as developer can run into using the NHibernate ORM with a look at the condusion around Fetch and he problem of Select N+1 when retrieving complex object graphs, and discusses merging entities back into the session and the backing data store from outside the current Session.
• Windows 8 – An OS of two halves – Colin Eberhardt shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 dual UI experience, from both a developer and end user perspective, discussing the confusion the two UIs may cause, and how we have to be careful to select the right UI for our applications.
• Using System.Reflection.Emit in a Windows 8 Metro style Application – Jason Bock discusses the use of Reflection.Emit in Metro applciation by way of including a .NET Class Library to do the reflection emit work, hard coding the reference to the class library assembly, and discussing the probable impact of this technique on your ability to get the Metro application into the market place.
• Creating Data-driven web apps using ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms – Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the new model binding functionality available in ASP.NET WebForms 4.5 Preview, looking based upon Damian Edwards session at //Build/
• Extending configuration in OpenRasta 2.1 – Sebastien Lambla discusses some changes to OpenRasta 2.1 which make extending OpenRasta’s configuration API easier and also support writing extensions for 2.1 which will continue to function in OpenRasta 3.0
• Effective Xml Part 1: Choose the right API – Pawel Kadluczka starts a series of posts looking at the different APIs provided for working with XML data and documents and looking at whcih approach is best suited to which scenario.
• The .NET Dictionary – Simon Cooper takes a look at the implementation of the humble .NET Dictionary class, looking at the internal structure used by the dictionary to keep track of items.
• Creating simple and complex animations with JQuery in ASP.Net applications – Nikolaos Kantzelis discusses animations using jQuery, sharing some samples which illustrate varying levels of complexity of animation
• What is the cost of try/catch – Ayende discusses one of the misunderstandings people commonly have with try/catch exception handling – that there is actually no performance penalty in using Try / Catch in your code unless exceptions are thrown.

Comments Off on Afternoon Tea – Monday 19th September

Those who follow me on Twitter may recall a few weeks back I mused over doing a daily follow up to the main Morning Brew posting in the afternoon with some of the links that didn’t quite make it into the main Morning Brew. This is where the concept of ‘Afternoon Tea’ came about – and for now I will be occasionally producing these posts to complement The Morning Brew, probably with a more relaxed and varied format than the daily Morning Brew posts. With that introduction out of the way, here is what I have in store today:

• Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials
• Community Events and News
• Link Overflow

Competition – Win a place at the SkillsMatter / London .NET Usergroup Progressive .NET Tutorials

The kind folks at Skills Matter have allowed me 2 tickets to give away for the Progressive .NET Tutorials event being held in London next month. The event is a commercial training opportunity, running over three days (Monday 5th to Wednesday 7th September) and is organised in conjunction with the London .NET UserGroup. Each day features two tracks, with two in-depth sessions / Workshops on each of the tracks from great speakers (many of them with articles which have been featured in The Morning Brew) talking on their areas of authority.

Full details of the event can be found on Skills Matter’s site and you can get £50 off the regular registration fee of £425 using PromoCode PROGNET50 when registering.

As mentioned earlier, I have 2 tickets to give away to lucky readers, so to be in with a chance of winning, let me know what your drink of choice is when you read The Morning Brew by tweeting:

‘Reading @calcock’s #TheMorningBrew with a (cup|mug) of <InsertDrinkHere>‘

at some point before I publish Friday’s Morning Brew when I will pick (at random, or as close as I can manage) the two lucky winners.

Community Events and News

There are plenty of great Community conferences and community events coming up over the next few months:

• SQL Bits 9 – Liverpool – 29th September -1st October

  The SQL Bits team are bringing the SQL Bits conference to my doorstep (almost) with the venue for the 9th conference being Liverpool. The conference runs over 3 days, Day 1 being a pay for Training Day with 8 topics being covered by all day training sessions, the Friday features a paid for Conference day with 25-30 sessions over 5 tracks, and the Saturday is the Free Community Conference.

  The agenda is now set, and Registrations for SQLBits 9 are currently open, with early bird pricing for the pay for component of the conference being available until 26th August. If you are free that week/weekend be sure to check out one of my favourite conferences.

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North – Saturday 8th October 2011 – University of Sunderland

  New for 2011, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North takes the familiar DDD event format to the North of England for a Free all day event at the University of Sunderland. Session submissions have been open for this event for a little while already, and from the look of the sessions the conference will have a fantastic range of topics. If you are interested in speaking at the event, you will need to get your session submissions in on or before 26th August, after which the community will vote on the sessions people want to see before the agenda is finalised.

  The DDD North team are also very interested in hearing from potential Sponsors with a range of sponsorship opportunities available – full details can be found on their dedicated ‘Sponsors Flyer’

• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper Belfast – Saturday 1st October –
  University of Ulster

  DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper makes a return to Belfast this year with a free to attend all day event on Saturday 1st October. As with DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North, the Belfast event will feature a community voted agenda drawn from sessions submitted by potential speakers. As usual the event welcomes submissions from speakers both new and old (in age and experience), and the submission process is currently running – so if you are interested get your session abstract in soon.

• GiveCamp UK – 21st to 23rd October 2011 – London

  Following the success of GiveCamp in the US, 2011 sees the first GiveCamp event here in the UK. Over the weekend of 21st-23rd October teams of volunteers will combine with representatives from charities to work on producing technology solutions for the charity organisations. The event proved to e very popular when registration opened, and now the team are accepting registrations on a waiting list should places become available.

  The GiveCamp team are still very interested in hearing from organisations interested in sponsoring the event – pledges of either financial assistance or swag (or even both!) are very welcome. Further details (including news about the venue) can be found in this post on the Team’s official blog.

• NRW Conf – 8th & 9th September – Wuppertal, Germany

  Daniel Fisher dropped me an email to let me know about NRW Conf, a Community conference organised by JustCommunity e.V, bringing together speakers from across Germany (and the rest of Europe). The conference opens with a day of workshops covering PowerShell, Scrum and ASP.NET MVC, and the second day consisting of a traditional conference format over 4 tracks. Daniel has some more information over on his blog.

If you are involved in running a conference or similar community event either here in the UK, or further afield that you think Morning Brew readers may be interested in then please drop me a note.

Link Overflow

Quite a few people have been emailing me links to articles they have written or found intersting recently – some have made their way into the normal Morning Brew posts, but I’ve also been overrun with good content recently so not as many as I would like have made the transition. If you email me a link that is of Brew interest I generally subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog so I will see future posts when preparing the Morning Brew – and I always welcome link suggestions – if you’ve found something interested, or written something you think the rest of the world needs to see please drop me a note.

So, without further ado, here are a few links which slipped through the cracks:

• Create optimization programs dynamically with C# and the Microsoft Solver Foundation – Mathias Brandewinder has been exploring the use of Microsoft Solver Foundation from C# to solve a variety of Mathematical problems, taking an introductory look at its use before looking at more complex dynamic cases such as this post, and has started a series of posts looking at different approaches to solving a fabricated brewery problem
• Expression Tree Basics – Abul Kayes takes gives a nice introduction to Expression Trees in this CodeProject article, introducing them and taking a look at using them to create a strongly typed way or ordering objects based on the value of an arbitrary property.
• ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – Every quarter the team over at ThroughtWorks produce their Technology Radar whcih looks at the acceptance level, maturity and stability of various new and emerging technologies, classifying them and sharing their findings in the form of this report. This Quarter PowerShell made its entrance into the ‘Trial’ classification, as noted by Doug Finke
• A Better Team: Arrogance And Accepting Your Own Strengths – Derick Bailey posted an interesting discussion about taming some of the traits good developers are prone to, such as Arrogance, and accepting and becoming aware of our own strengths and weaknesses in order to be a better part of a team.
• Package that resizes and compresses images used with an ASP.NET web site and combines them into CSS sprites – Matt Perdeck shares a library which takes the hard work out of optimising and combining images into CSS Sprites. This CodeProject article discusses in detail the various features and parameters of the library , and the full source is available to download and try out.

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