The Morning Brew

Software

• Application Insights SDK (0.9.0) – Crystal Maly highlights the latest release of the Application Insights SDK, supporting Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Store 8.1, JavaScript and Web Applications as well as logging adapters

Information

• Copy-paste defects – Eric Lippert answers a question from his webcast, discussing the dangers of copy paste of code.
• Conventional HTML in ASP.NET MVC: Baseline behavior – Jimmy Bogard continues his series looking at the generation of HTML in ASP.NET MVC with a look at defining the common baseline for the output HTML.
• Unusual Ways of Boosting Up App Performance. Strings – Alexey Totin continues this series from the team over at JetBrains looking at some of the things you can do to improve performance of your applications, this time exploring some of the things to do with strings which may be harming your performance.
• Switch statement alternative – CodeProject – Nitin Sawant takes a look at an alternative technique for use in place of Switch Statements which may be more readable.
• Web developers, Visual Studio could be a great free tool to develop with… – David Catuhe takes a look at how Visual Studio provides a very good experience for web developers even if they aren’t working on the .NET Stack, looking at some of the great features of the IDE which are available in the free Express Edition
• Flattening Groups for ListView – Ian Griffiths continues his series sharing experiences and technical challenges when writing his Agenda View Windows Phone application

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Software

• dotPeek 1.2 Is Released – Daria Dovzhikova and the team at JetBrains announce the release of dotPeek 1.2, their free decompiler and assembly browser which mimics the user experience of ReSharper for navigation. This release includes new features around acting as a symbol server, a process explorer window and improved searching.

Information

• When "safe by default", isn’t – Paul Stovell discusses some of the potential problems with strict opinions in software APIs, illustrating with an example regarding enforced record limits in RavenDB. Be sure to read the comments to see how Raven does allow the configuration to be altered.
• Passing arrays, key value pairs, and other collections to SQL stored procedures using table valued parameters – Keith Babinec discusses the support for passing tables of data to SQL Server Stored Procedures via Data Table Parameters, introduced in SQL Server 2008
• Tools for unit testing in JavaScript – Pam Selle takes a high level look at some of the testing frameworks for testing JavaScript code
• Avoid the pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern – Martin Hinshelwood discusses the pick-n-mix branching anti-pattern, discussing real world experiences of it, the problems it introduces, the reasons it comes about, and how you can get out of the anti-pattern.
• X things every JavaScript developer should know: Comparisons – Maurice De Beijer discusses one of the common areas of confusion with JavaScript development, the differences in ways of comparing values and objects. (Note: This site seems to be responding slowly this morning, so may appear down for some of you)
• When a race condition is what you want… – Ayende discusses the difficulties in maintaining a last accessed date when you have thousands of threads accessing a resource. Check out the comments for good discussion of possible solutions.
• Is it Really Better to ‘Return an Empty List Instead of null’? / Part 1 & Is it Really Better to ‘Return an Empty List Instead of null’? – Part 2 – Christian Neumanns discusses API design and looks at if returning an empty list or null is better in this CodeProject article series.

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I got stuck in a traffic jam this morning which cut my Morning Brew preparation time down considerably, so today is also going to be a links only edition I’m afraid.

Software

• NuGet 3.0 CTP 1 Released – Jeff Handley
• West Wind WebSurge – an easy way to Load Test Web Applications – Rick Strahl

Information

• TDD Chess Game Part 9: God Save the Queen – Erik Dietrich
• Analysis vs code review – Eric Lippert
• Ensure You Are Not Adding To Global Scope in JavaScript – Steve Smith
• An Overview of Structured Logging with Serilog – Jason Roberts
• Integrate NodeJS tools in Visual Studio/TFS – Vincenzo Chianese
• Windows Phone ListView and Grouping – Ian Griffiths
• Message passing, performance–take 2 – Ayende
• NServiceBus vs. MassTransit – Leonid Ganeline
• Understanding, Using and Customizing ASP.NET Identity System for Authentication and Authorization – Rahul Rajat Singh

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A little short on time this morning, so its links only today I’m afraid

Software

• Project Siena Beta 3: Enabling business users to create custom apps to transform business processes – Somasegar
• SQL Server Data Tools July Update – Jill McClenahan
• Rolling out the Windows Developer Program for IoT – Steve Teixeira

Information

• A JavaScript survival guide – Dr. Axel Rauschmayer
• Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype – Dino Esposito
• Conventional HTML in ASP.NET MVC: Adopting Fubu conventions – Jimmy Bogard
• Improvements to the F# Web Templates – Daniel Mohl
• Message passing, performance – Ayende
• Catching Bad Data in Entity Framework – Jon Smith
• C# Specifications: Using Visual Studio 2013 to compile a DLL and EXE – Surf4Fun
• How I failed when I tried to implement C# Generics to enable serializing and saving a variety of C# object types to disk for Windows Store applications – Bruno Terkaly
• Learn AngularJS : Hour 1 – Dhananjay kumar

Community

• Avoiding C# defects talk Tuesday – Eric Lippert

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Software

• Welcome to ReactiveUI 6.0 & What’s new in ReactiveUI 6: ReactiveCommand<T> – Paul Betts announces the release of ReactiveUI 6.0, a significant milestone in the project, with over 8 months work going into this release which adds support for Windows Phone, Xamarin Forms, improved support for list based views, and a new Reactive Command implementation
• Viasfora 2.0 Released! – Tomas Restrepo announces the release of version 2.0 of his Visual Studio Extension Viasfora which brings numerous extensions to the text editor, extending the features of Rainbow Braces in this release
• Orchard 1.8.1 Released and Website Upgrades – David Hayden announces the release of Orchard 1.8.1 a bugfix release on top of the 1.8 platform addressing 36 reported bugs

Information

• Building a strongly typed route provider for ASP.NET Web API – Filip W takes a look at the new capabilities to extend andadd in custom logic to the routing engine in ASP.NET WebAPI 2.2 via attribute routing.
• RoslynDom: Structural Interrogation Walk-throughs – Kathleen Dollard discusses the use of RoslynDom to inspect the structure of code, discussing the design aims to have it represent code the way we as developers think about it, and not as a compiler would.
• Free eBook on Model View View Model design pattern – Surf4Fun highlights a useful guide to the MVVM pattern from Jerry Nixon
• Playing with WinJS as a cross-platform UI layer? – Mike Taulty takes a look at reusing WinJS code across 4 different platform use cases, exploring the Windows 8.1 Native App, C# Hybrid Application, Web Page and Android application
• Hooking Trello Into Visual Studio Online – Garry Pilkington shows how you can wire in the Trello ‘Kanban-style’ boards into the Visual Studio Online setup via Service Hooks
• The NuGet.org Architecture – Jeff Handley shares an interesting look at the NuGet system architecture for running NuGet.org, and how it has evolved over time
• Implement Observer Pattern in .NET (3 techniques) – Chinmoy Mohanty takes a look at making use of the Observer pattern and the way in which .NET framework versions have assisted in this over time.
• Get Application Performance Counters of your choice during load runs with Visual Studio Online – Manas Maheshwari walks through the use of Cloud Load Testing in Visual Studio Online and how you can monitor the performance counters from your load testing.
• BackBone Tutorial – Part 1: Introduction to Backbone.Js & BackBone Tutorial – Part 2: Understanding the basics of Backbone Models – Rahul Rajat Singh shares the first two parts of a series looking at the Backbone JavaScript Framework, with the first part providing an introduction to the framework, and the second focusing in on the role of the Model in Backbone.

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Software

• Release Candidate for Katana 3 and the ASP.NET Security Components – Vittorio Bertocci highlights the second Release Candidate release of the ASP. NET Security Components for Katana 3
• Updates to RoslynDom 1.0.9 Alpha – Kathleen Dollard shares the next alpha version of RoslynDom, featuring a substantial number of changes and improvements to the library since the last release
• A community created GuidGen, GuidGen 2.0 (a replacement for Guid tool you love to hate, hate to love) – Greg Duncan highlights GUIDGEN 2.0, available now from the Visual Studio Gallery, providing new integration with the IDE for all your GUID creation needs

Information

• Over 1 Million FREE Microsoft eBooks Given Away in 2 days! (and soon to be 2 MILLION!) – Eric Ligman is having a fantastic time giving away free e-Books with a remarkable uptake, and some good titles available in his latest collection of free Microsoft eBooks.
• Setting up billing alert for Azure (preview) – Iris Classon takes a look at the new preview feature of Azure which allows to to define rules for notification of the billing status of your services, and something well worth putting in place to help monitor your costs before services get cut off.
• JSON: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly – Tim Murphy takes a look a the pros and cons of the JSON data format for services, over that of SOAP and XML
• Unusual Ways of Boosting Up App Performance. Boxing and Collections – Alexey Totin takes a look at two things to watch out for in your code which can have a dramatic effect on your applications performance.
• Adding an Overload is a Breaking Change – Anders Abel explores how adding overloads to methods may result in a breaking change to your library
• Continuous JavaScript Testing – Simon Harriyott shares a neat tip to give you a more continuous testing experience when working with JavaScript tests
• IIS 8.0 Asp.net warm up Auto Start & Application Initialization – CodeProject – Santosh Poojari gives a run through of the configuration and use of the IIS8 Warmup Auto Start features
• Capturing Traffic via Virtual Router – Eric Lawrence discusses how you can use Fiddler to intercept traffic from mobile devices using the Virtual Router to assist in situations when you can’t configure proxy settings

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Software

• Version 1.7.3 for ADO Released (Glimpse) – Anthony van der Hoorn highlights a bugfix release of Glimpse to fix an issue with Glimpse’s use with Entity Framework 6.1
• openFrameworks Developers Can Now Create Universal Apps for Windows – Eric Mitt highlights an open source release of a project generator which allows openFrameworks developers to build native Universal Apps for Windows Phone, tablets and PCs
• Upcoming VS Online Licensing Changes – Brian Harry discusses some licensing changes for Visual Studio Online based upon the feedback and research the team have performed.

Information

• Stop Cheating the Type System – Marius Schulz discusses the type system in strongly typed languages like C# and the benefits it brings with it, also looking at the things that you can do (but shouldn’t) which reduce these benefits
• Durandal — your new favourite client-side framework – Patryk Borowa takes a look at the Durandal JavaScript Framework for building complex single page applications
• NodeJs, Azure and IIS – Ugo Lattanzi explores some of the differences between hosting Node applications in their own process and hosting them in the Cloud under Azure and IISNode.
• The Repository Pattern in ASP.NET – Part 2 – Paul Cociuba rounds out his series on building applications on ASP.NET 4.5 with a final part concluding his look at the repository pattern
• Fun with .NET – Windows Phone, LEGO Mindstorms, and Azure – dotnetConf 2014 – Dan Fernandez squeezes in all manner of cool and fun technology into a single recorded virtual conference session
• Automatic NGEN PDB generation – Aditya Mandaleeka discusses the generation of PDB files as a part of the NGEN process for building native images
• On Programmers Productivity – Patrick Smacchia shares some interesting thoughts on developer productivity, motivation and practices.

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Software

• Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 Available – John Montgomery annouces the release of the second CTP of Visual Studio ’14′, containing a vast array of new stuff, include a non-all-caps menu bar. As always the team are interested to hear your feedback on this latest preview.
• Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 Available – Brian Harry also highlights the CTP2 release of Visual Studio ’14′ along with a note explaining why there is no CTP release of TFS to go along with this preview
• ASP.NET vNext in Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 – Xinyang Qiu discusses and highlights what is in the CTP2 release in terms of ASP.NET vNext
• Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 and Entity Framework – Rowan Miller also highlights the Visual Studio "14" CTP 2 Release, along with explaining what bits of Entity Framework are included in the box
• Visual Studio "14" CTP release notes – The official release notes for the CPT2 Release of Visual Studio "14"
• July 2014 Internet Explorer Updates – Wilson Guo of the Internet Explorer Team highlights the latest batch of updates to all supported versions of Internet Explorer.
• OData Client Code Generator 2.0.0 release – Yi Ding announces the release of the OData Client Code Generator Extension for Visual Studio available now from the Visual Studio Gallery, offering a wealth of new and improved functionality

Information

• Client Delayed Query – Junlin Zheng of the OData Team highlights the combination of OData Client 6.5.0 and OData Client Code Generator 2.0.0, looking at the generated functionality, and some of the differences from previous versions.
• ASP.NET vNext and Visual Studio 2014 CTP: The Bright Future – Pravinkumar Dabade takes a look at the ASP.NET vNext functionality available in the Visual Studio "14" CTP (note: looks like CTP1)
• The Repository Pattern in ASP.NET – Part 1 – Paul Cociuba continues his series of Video Tutorials with a look at the implementation of a Repository for use in an ASP.NET application.
• It’s Tuples All The Way Down! – Josh Eastburn takes a look at the Tuple type, discussing what it is useful for, as well as looking at when you should probably not use them,

Community

• .NET Rocks! – Web Security Breaches with Troy Hunt – Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell are joined by Troy Hunt for an edition of .NET Rocks looking at common Web Security flaws

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