The Morning Brew

Software

• jQuery 1.8.2 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.8.2, a bugfix and performance regression fix release. As usual the files are available from the jQuery site, and should be making their way to the various content delivery networks.
• IE 9.0.10 Available via Windows Update – The Internet Explorer Team have released a high importance security patch for Internet Explorer 9 to address recently reported security issues. Additionally there is an update for Internet Explorer 10 to address a Adobe Flash issue.

Information

• New TaskCreationOptions and TaskContinuationOptions in .NET 4.5 – Stephen Toub discusses soem new options introduced to help further control the creation and continuation of tasks in .NET 4.5, taking a look at the use of DenyChildAttach, HideScheduler, and LazyCancellation.
• await is not ALWAYS your friend – (Looks like the author has removed this post on MSDN, but it can be found here – thanks to @westleyl for letting me know) Julien Dollon discusses how, as with all things, you should use async/await in a responsible fashion to avoid harming your applications performance.
• Adding NuGet Support to F# Interactive in VS2012 – Daniel Mohl follows up the technique for getting NuGet support in Visual Studio 2010′s F# Interactive window with a look at achieving the same in Visual Studio 2012
• The F# 3.0 Freebase Type Provider Sample – Integrating Internet-Scale Data Sources into a Strongly Typed Language – Don Syme highlights a new F# 3.0 Sample Pack Sample which implements a Freebase Type provider in F#, and highlights an academic research paper which discusses the background on working with this entity graph model.
• An Introduction To F# Type Providers – F# tutorial – Keith Battocchi discusses the new Type Provider feature in F# 3.0, looking at what they are, and how they are implemented and used.
• ASP.NET 4.5 ScriptManager Improvements in WebForms – Pranav Rastogi discusses some of the key improvements to the Script Manager in .NET 4.5 WebForms, looking at the improved jQuery support, Remapping of Framework scripts, and script manager registration.
• .Net CLR Injection : Modify IL Codes on Run-time – Jerry Wang takes a look at manipulating .NET IL at runtime to provide injection capabilities
• IlPad – icemanind shares a neat looking utility for taking C# and compiling it to IL, providing a useful reference for dynamic compiling (and decompiling to IL), and also a way of learning more about the IL that underpins language constructs.

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Software

• C# Yellow Book 2012 Now Available – Rob Miles announces the 2012 edition of his C# Yellow Book, a free pdf download now in its 5th year of being updated. This edition contains updates and corrections, along with moving the GUI section onto XAML rather than WinForms.
• #mvvmlight V4 update for Win8 RTM – Laurent Bugnion has updated his MVVM Light framework for the Windows 8 RTM release, including a few updates, and discusses upgrading your applications to the RTM release in this post.
• FsCheck 0.8.3 and FsCheck.Xunit 0.3 – Kurt Schelfthout announces the latest versions of FsCheck and , adding support for running tests through NCrunch, and use of Assembly binding redirects to ensure that thte correct versions of assemblies are used.

Information

• An "is" operator puzzle, part two – Eric Lippert returns with the answer and reasoning behind his latest teaser puzzle looking at the use of the ‘is’ operator in C#
• Windows 8 productivity: Who moved my cheese? Oh, there it is. – Scott Hanselman gives a nice overview of the new, changed and rearranged features in Windows 8, sharing his own personal feelings on the Windows8 RTM release.
• Greenfield Development with ASP.NET MVC & S#arp Lite – Day 1 – Billy McCafferty kicks off his new series of posts looking at creating greenfields applications using the ASP.NET MVC stack with his S#arp architecture extensions. This posts is the first real one in the series taking a look at requirements, user stories and actors in the system.
• Building an End-to-End Windows Store App – Part 1 – S. Somasegar takes a look building Windows Store applications in this first part of a two part series exploring the building of a simple RSS Consuming application using the new tooling and OS.
• Build Single Page Apps – Part 8 – JavaScript Data Services – John Papa continues his series of posts looking at building single page web applications with a look at Data Access / Data Services features that you need and want to structure your Single Page Applications code in a good, SRP observing way.
• List of ASP.NET Web API and HttpClient Samples – Henrik F Nielsen highlights a selection of WebAPI and HTTPClient samples available online, covering all aspects of using the latest Web Framework from Microsoft.
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Providers – Ricardo Peres discusses the various provider models which permit extensibility of ASP.NET and Web Forms, and looking at new areas of extensibility introduced in ASP.NET 4.0, which many have forgotten about.

Community

• Event: Windows Azure User Group Meeting – Manchester inc Special Guest – Sarah Lamb highlights the Manchester Azure Usergroup event this Thursday (30th) which features a special guest speaker, Cory Fowler, an Azure Technical Evangelist from Microsoft’s Redmond offices, who will be taking a look at building PHP applications on Azure.
• Free One Day Windows Azure Developer Camp Edinburgh, Thursday 30th August – Planky also highlights a Windows Azure Event taking place on Thursday (30th), this time a DevCamp event taking place in Edinburgh

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Update: Fixed a typo suggesting that Scott Hanselman’s Videos were for .NET 3.5 – Thanks to Graham for letting me know via the comments

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours you will already be aware of some of what follows….

Visual Studio 2012, .NET 4.5 and Windows 8 RTM

• Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 now available! – Somasegar announces the RTM availability of Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 available now to download for MSDN Subscribers
• Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 released to the web! – Jason Zander also announces the release, as well as taking a look at the top 12 features of Visual Studio 2012
• Announcing the release of .NET Framework 4.5 RTM – Product and Source Code – Brandon Bray highlights the framework release specifically, and takes a look at what is new and improved in the various areas of the framework.
• Final versions of Windows 8, .NET Framework 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 now available for download – Aaron Stebner provides direct download links and some installation tips for the Visual Studio, .NET and Windows 8 releases
• Windows 8 RTM is available for developers – Ian LeGrow highlights the availability of Windows 8 RTM to developers via MSDN and TechNet, along with a 90 day evaluation version available to everyone to allow developers to continue testing and developing for Windows8
• Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 is RELEASED – Here’s 5 minute videos to get you up to speed quick – Scott Hanselman shares the news of the .NET 3.5 4.5 and Visual Studio release along with sharing thirteen 5 minute videos which look at key features for Web Development in Visual Studio 2012

Software

• ASP.NET Web API Released and a Preview of What’s Next – Henrik F Nielsen proudly announces the release of ASP.NET Web API as a part of the Visual Studio and .NET releases, and looks to what the future holds for WebAPI
• EF5 Released – The Entity Framework Team announce the official release of Entity Framework 5 both on NuGet and also in the box in Visual Studio 2012
• Web Essentials 2012 released – Mads Kristensen announces the release of Web Essentials 2012, a Visual Studio Extension for Visual Studio 2012 which further enhances the capabilities of the Visual Studio IDE foe all sorts of Web Development tasks.
• WCF Data Services 5.0.2-rc Prerelease – The WCF Data Services Team announce their next preview release of the WCF Data Services, available as a prerelease package on NuGet.
• Reactive Extensions v2.0 has arrived! – Bart J.F. De Smet announces the release of the Reactive Extensions 2.0 as a part of the Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 release. This version also supports .NET 4.0 developments as well as Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.5 in addition to the expected .NET 4.5

Information

• A Troubleshooting Guide for Entity Framework Connections & Migrations – K. Scott Allen shares a useful guide to troubleshooting common issues with Entity Framework Connection and the Entity Framework Migrations functionality
• Implementing Then with Await – Stephen Toub takes a look at how you can implement ‘Then’ methods in your code when using the new Async / Await functionality in C# and VB.NET
• OData support in ASP.NET Web API – Alex D James discusses the support for OData query options in ASP.NET WebAPI highlighting the availability of a preview NuGet package to assist in making OData services using WebAPI
• Adding Web Optimization to a Web Pages Site – Rick Anderson takes a look at implementing Web Optimization on a Windows Azure Web Pages site, showing how to configure bundling in your site
• Keeping in touch with the Web optimization team – Howard Dierking talks about plans to get the Web Optimization functionality rolled into the Open Source ASP.NET Stack hosted on CodePlex
• OAuth/OpenID Support for WebForms, MVC and WebPages – Pranav Rastogi discusses one fo the new exciting features of ASP.NET 4.5, the ability to have consumers log into your site using OAuth from Twitter, Facebook and the like

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It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

• Introducing jQuery++ – Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
• Bundler.NET – Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
• bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy – Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
• #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
• Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 – Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
• Tree Surgeon – Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? – Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
• Introducing RabbitBus – Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

• Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject – Stephen Toub discusses in detail the story behind the performance improvements in the Release Candidate implementation of StreamReader.ReadLineAsync over that of the beta release.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages with VS 2012 RC & ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages RC NuGet Packages – Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can use the latest nightly builds of the ASP.NET Web Stack, made available as NuGet packages, with the Visual Studio 2012 RC release, and also provides details of the offical packages for the RC release.
• AspectMap – Part 2 – An Exception Handling Helper – Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.
• 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5] – Martin Beeby highlights 5 key concepts which you should explore when implementing your Windows 8 Metro Style applications in JavaScript and HTML5
• My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods – Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.
• Setup Improvements for Visual Studio – David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App – Part 6 Selecting HTML with JQuery, Part 7 Local Storage, Part 8 Building a Better Form, Part 9 Show-Hide Wizard Using jQuery & Part 10 Validate, Validate, Validate – Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at using HTML5 and JavaScript to construct a Line of Business application, looking at using jQuery to work with HTML, exploring the use of Local Storage, and examining how you can use HTML5 to create better user input forms and validate the input.
• Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service – Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections
• Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata &Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W continues his series looking at the use of WebAPI with a look adding additional metadata such as the number of results found and the number returned, and look at how you can add in the ability to control the order of filters being applied to requests.
• Analyzing some "˜Big" Data Using C#, Azure And Apache Hadoop – Analyzing Stack Overflow Data Dumps – Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at some of the concepts of ‘Big Data’ analysis on the Azure platform making use of MapReduce via Apache Hadoop, digging into a set of data from StackOverflow in this CodeProject article.
• Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express – Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.
• Anders Hejlsberg Is Right: You Cannot Maintain Large Programs In JavaScript – In a recent Channel 9 discussion Anders Hejlsberg suggested that maintaining large programs in JavaScript was very difficult. In this short post Derek Bailey shares his thoughts. Be sure to have a read of the comments on this one for some further discussion.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

• DDD Southwest – Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)
  • Session Notes 1 : Performance & Scalability
  • Session Notes 2 : Web Sockets & SignalR
  • Session Notes 3 : Defensive Programming 101
  • Session Notes 4 : Redis Is the New Black
• DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 – Async 20/20 presentation – Liam Westley shares the audio recording along side the slides from his 20/20 lunch time presentation at DDD SW looking at Async in .NET 4.5
• My impressions of dddsw 4, DDDSW 4 – StyleCop: Breaking down the barriers to entry & Feedback from StyleCop presentation at DDDSW – Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of DDD South west, along with the details of his presentation on StyleCop, and the feedback received.
• My DDDSW AppHarbor 20/20 talk – Phil Jones shares the slides from his hastily compiled but well received 20/20 presentation on the use of AppHarbor for hosting your .NET applications.
• Is your code solid &< Is-your-code-SOLID – GitHub – Nathan Gloyn shares the slides and code from his DDD SW session on the application of the SOLID Principles of object oriented programming.
• NuGet-PackageNPublish – Joel Hammond-Turner shares the code for the NuGet Package and Publish tooling that he presented in his DDD SW session on NuGet in the enterprise,
• Developer Developer Developer South West 2012 – Jackie Pollock shares her experiences as an attendee at DDDSW, giving a summary of each of the talks she attended.
• Agenda – The DDDSW agenda has been updated with links to the various slides and downloads for many of the sessions presented.

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Disaster struck this morning – I pressed post, waited until the page reloaded and shut my laptop as usual, but for reasons unexplained the post never made it onto the site – So here is today’s edition, a little later than planned – at least its still morning *somewhere* in the world!

Thanks to Libor or letting me know something was wrong

Update: In my haste to resurect today’s post a ‘smart quote’ snook into some HTML merging Sankarsan & Jon Skeets links together – fixed now – thanks to EF for letting me know

Software

• Simple.Data for Mono – Mark Rendle has got his Simple.Data Dynamic Data Access library up and running under Mono, with most of the tests passing. The Mono release is available as a tgz download from the project’s GitHub Site.

Information

• New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of ASP.NET 4.5, currently available in the Developer Preview Release. In this post Scott discusses the new support for bundling and minification of CSS and JavaScript Resources.
• Inside ASP.NET 4.5 Bundling and Minification – Sankarsan discusses some of the details behind the Bundling and minification, looking at how the functionality is implemented in the framework, discussing how the functionality is called and the interactions between the parts.
• Eduasync part 17: unit testing – Jon Skeet continues his exploration of the Async / Await functionality of C#5 discussing how it is possible to unit test async code (sometimes), illustrating by showing and discussing some of the tests for his Majority Voting implementation.
• Razor Donut Caching – Phil Haack discusses the possible look and feel for the re-introduction of donut caching in ASP.NET MVC4, highlighting a package available for MVC3 which adds the functionality and discussing some of the limitations and possible changes to Razor to make creating donut holes easy.
• REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011 – Chris Sells discusses the Roslyn CTP release and the Read Evaluate Print Loop (REPL) environment, looking into creating a console based REPL environment using Roslyn, showing how easy executing lines of code becomes with Roslyn.
• Reflection, performance and runtime code generation – Ivan Towlson discusses the use of reflection and code generation with regard to the performance of code where you need to work with types you don’t know at compile time.
• Building F# Solutions in Visual Studio 11 &
  Traffic Cop – Fresh Brewed Code, a new blogging community site for developers kicks off with posts from Dan Mohl highlighting resources for working with F# in Visual Studio 11, and Jim Cowart sharing an implementation he calls Traffic Cop for situations where he needed to avoid multiple jQuery Ajax requests for the same resources.
• Method Stubs – Phil Trelford discusses Test Driven Development in F#, focusing particularly on how you don’t need frameworks to implement stubs and spies in F#.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #26: Background File Transfer , Day #27: Microphone API &amp Day #28: Media Library – Jeff Blankenburg’s series of posts on Windows Phone Mango continues with three more guest posts, first another from Gary Johnson discussing background file transfer. Next Parag Joshi discusses the Microphone API and the recording of audio, and finally Jeff Fansler takes a look at the Media Library.
• 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10) – Michael Crump continues his Silverlight 5 series with part 7 exploring operating system integration with a look at power awareness, 64 bit browser support and Save Dialogs.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Santa Westley – Liam Westley joins the NxtGenUG in Coventry of their User Group meeting on Monday 12th December. There are no details of the session to be delivered, but Liam is an excelent speaker, and will nodoubt be brings some swat and probably some tasty treats too!

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In the presentation about Good API Design I talked about in yesterdays post one of the key points made was that once an API is defined you should never make changes to it that will break your client’s code. An example cited throwing exceptions based on values previously considered fine.

As luck would have it I encountered an actual example of precisely this problem today while installing the .NET 2.0 Runtime on a development server. This server runs a number of .NET 1.1 applications and a number of classic ASP applications consuming COM components written in .NET 1.1.

Things didn’t start well, with the framework installer stopping the IIS instance for the better part of 10 minutes while installing, however it did restart it again once it was done (unlike MSDTC and SQL Server when installing anything from the Windows Components section of Add Remove Programs on Windows 2003).

Matters got worse when someone mentioned that one of the components on the server was now misbehaving – specifically one that uses the ASP.NET Cache to provide caching capabilities.

Whenever a web application tried to create this object (via Server.CreateObject) it was getting an invalid pointer error. Other COM components developed in a similar way were working fine, so I assumed there was something wrong with the registration of the component. Un-registering and re-registering the component gave no joy – neither did calling it from a simple VBScript file.

To make matters worse, a simple .NET test application was working just fine using the exact same library.

After a bit of head scratching and pondering the SysInternals (Now a part of Microsoft) Process Explorer revealed that instead of using the .NET 1.1 version of System.Web both CScript and the IIS DLLHost were loading the .NET 2.0 version. The code for the component hadn’t changed, so maybe the .NET framework had.

Loading the source code for the component into Visual Studio 2005 and attempting to compile and run a the simple test application revealed the problem, a Null Reference Exception from within the framework.

As the COM Component was using the ASP.NET System.Web.Cache it was creating a HTTP Context instance internally. This code looked like this:

private System.Web.HttpContext context = new System.Web.HttpContext(null);

Poking round the disassembled code of System.Web in Reflector didn’t reveal what it was that was causing the exceptions, although I did only go a few functions deep, however it did reveal an alternative way of getting to the cache.

Changing our code to use a call to System.Web.HttpRuntime.Cache to obtain the cache instance fixed our problem, and a quick rebuild of the component against .NET 2 and redeploy to the server and we were back up and running.

Lessons learned from all this:

• The .NET Framework installer will stop IIS and keep it stopped for a large part of the install – useful to know considering I’ll be installing it on some production servers soon
• Both IIS and CScript seem to run all .NET COM Components through the most up to date version of the .NET framework, regardless of the version the component is registered or compiled with
• .NET applications (like our test applet) will run in the .NET framework version they were compiled against if available

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