The Morning Brew

Information

• Mobile Services .NET support + Source Control - Paul Batum walks through the basic steps to getting up and running with the new support for .NET code in Mobile services via the git Source Control publishing
• Take advantage of native integration with Notification Hubs - Elio Damaggio highlights the new support for push notifications to Windows Store and Phone applications available in the 1.1.4 version of the Azure SDK.
• Windows Azure Mobile Services with .NET Backend - Shiju Varghese also looks at the Mobile Services support for .NET walking through the steps to create a Mobile Services API using ASP.NET Web API
• Running the OWIN pipeline in the new .NET Azure Mobile Services - Filip W focuses on the OWIN aspects of the Mobile Services support for .NET code, looking at the power that it provides to allow you to plug in other frameworks.
• Monads in JavaScript - curiosity-driven.org has a nice article exploring the implementation of monads in JavaScript taking a look at Identity, Maybe, List and Continuation Monads.
• C# Code Writing Tips from Eric Lippert: Math is Hard; Let’s Go Shopping! - Eric Lippert has an article features on DevPro which looks at how even simple mathematics can include all kinds of interesting bugs, exploring a variety of common causes of defects relating to performing math operations.
• EF6 on Xamarin: Progress (or lack thereof) - Eric Sink discusses getting Entity Framework to run on the Xamarin platform, discussing his efforts to get the ‘Code First with existing database’ up and running with a SQLite backend.
• Baby Steps with Xamarin on Android - Part 1 - Mike Taulty takes a look at the Xamarin platform for developing Android applications and starts to walk through taking a .NET application for Windows Store and converting it to be an android application.

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Software

• Azure: ExpressRoute Dedicated Networking, Web Site Backup Restore, Mobile Services .NET support, Hadoop 2.2, and more - Scott Guthrie shares the latest batch of Windows Azure Updates, released yesterday, bringing new features for networking, Virtual machines, HDInsight Hadoop upgrades, Azure Websites backup and restore, along with support for Mobile Services development in .NET and integration of Notification Hubs and support for PhoneGap.
• Announcing Windows Azure ExpressRoute, new partnership with Level 3 and exciting updates to other Azure Services - Steven Martin also discusses some of the new Azure Features released yesterday, looking at ExpressRoute networking and Azure Active directory.
• Introducing ReSharper 8.2 EAP - The Team over at JetBrains announce the opening of the ReSharper 8.2 Early Access Programme

Information

• Visualizations of Continuous Delivery - Jez Humble shares some fantastic illustrated visualisations of Continuous Delivery practices from Nhan Ngo.
• Script Bundling in NancyFx & Asset Bundling in NancyFx – Part 2 - Mike Ward takes a look at Script and Asset Bundling in NancyFX, exploring creating his own implementation of this over the two parts.
• SquishIt and Nancy - Part Deux - Alex Ullrich is also looking at this area with a look at how support for SquishIt in NanxyFx has changed since he last explored it
• ASP.NET MVC 5 New Features - Ashish Shukla takes a look at some of the significant new features introduced in the ASP.NET MVC release, exploring routing, filters, Identity and scaffolding.
• ASP.NET MVC 5 Identity: Implementing Group-Based Permissions Management Part I & Part II - John Atten takes a look at working with ASP.NET MVC5 and ASP.NET Identity to implement group based permissions.
• A Look At NServiceBus Sagas - Sacha Barber explores NService Bus Sagas in some detail in this article which explores the basics and theory before diving into examples to illustrate.

Community

• Watch the Build Keynotes at Microsoft, London with UK Developers (2nd April) - Mike Taulty highlights an event where you can watch the Build Keynotes with other developers streamed live to Microsoft’s offices in London on 2nd April.

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Software

• Hello Biggy - Rob Conery shares ‘Biggy’, a simple file based document store for .NET, in some ways similar to NeDB on Node, making use of JSON, dynamic types and Linq

Information

• Gulp.js : A Better Alternative to Grunt.js - Shiju Varghese takes a look at the use of Gulp.js, a task automation framework, similar to Grunt.js, giving an overview of its use in automating the build process for a Single Page Application using Angular.
• Converting AutoMapper to a Portable Class Library - Jimmy Bogard discusses his journey to having a Portable Class Library for AutoMapper, sharing what he learnt along the way in turning a traditional class library into a PCL.
• "Everybody Lies" - Eric Lawrence discusses the lies that software sometimes tells regarding its version, focusing on some of the lies that browsers tell, and how API methods which return a version are sometimes wrong.
• Distributed Automated Browser Testing with Selenium and BrowserStack - Scott Hanselman shares a look at performing browser testing in a wide range of browsers using the BrowserStack service and Selenium.
• A Method Object Helper - Putting More Class in Method Refactoring - George Henry discusses refactoring of methods with large numbers of parameters, replacing them with a single parameter object, walking through the steps of such a refactoring in this CodeProject article.
• It Was 2001, and I Had a Decision To Make - Darcy Lussier follows on from Rob Conery’s post, ‘PHP or ASP.NET: Did I Do The Right Thing?‘ discussing how he decided on a Microsoft technology path to set the tone for his career, sharing his story.

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Software

• Exceptionless Error Reporting Service Goes Open Source - Blake Niemyjski announces the news that Exceptionless is now an open source project, allowing you to get your hands on the code and add to it and improve it.

Information

• Introducing ASP.NET Project "Helios" & Supplemental to ASP.NET Project "Helios" - Levi Broderick discusses the ASP.NET Team’s ‘Helios’ project, which allows the hosting of a managed we application directly on IIS, skipping the standard ASP.NET pipeline, discussing how this fits in with OWIN and Katana, nad much more.
• Getting started with OData v4 in ASP.NET Web API - Filip W takes a look at working with OData 4 in ASP.NET WebAPI, with the new support added (yesterday) in the latest nightly builds
• Azure Storage Bindings Part 1 - Blobs & Azure Storage Bindings Part 2 - Queues - Mike Stall shares two posts looking at two of the different forms of Azure Storage, and how you go about connecting to them using the Azure SDK, and exploring the diagnostics available.
• .NET: NGEN, explicit loads and load-context promotion - Abhinaba Basu continues his discussion of NGEN and native images on .NET with a look where NGEN images can be used when loading assemblies in certain ways
• What’s the Role of the Server in Single Page Applications (SPAs)? - Dan Wahlin discusses the part the server still has to play when writing Single Page Applications (regardless of the framework used)

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Software

• Introducing Bing Code Search for C# - The Visual Studio Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Ala Shiban highlights a new Visual Studio Dev Labs project which brings the power of Bing into the IDE providing code search inside the IDE, and using some of the Roslyn technology under the covers.
• Need a Bulk Solution Scoped Assembly Version Editor? AsmVer! - Greg Duncan highlights a useful little tool for updating the version numbers of multiple projects that are part of a solution - a viable alternative to a shared and linked assemblyinfo file, and ideal when you need different versions on different projects.

Information

• Thoughts On JavaScript Generators - K.Scott Allen discusses the pain of callbacks, looks at promises to improve on them, and then moves on to explore ECMA Script 6 Generators
• JavaScript Promises: A Journey To The "Promise Land" - Derick Bailey is also discussing promises, and sharing a freely available screencast video whcih he produced on the subject.
• Evergreen Browsers - Rob Eisenberg discusses what he considers to be the most significant feature of the latest crop of browsers, their auto update capability. Rob discusses how this is a significant feature, and considers how different the world would be if IE6 had had this ability.
• Does Garbage Collection Hurt? - Alois Kraus discusses the pain and performance and responsiveness problems which garbage collection can be at the root of, discussing techniques to help identify the problems,
• Segregate your code commits into tiny topical changes. - Jason Jarrett discusses the way you should structure your commits when working with source code control, explaining the reason for doing many small commits to ensure that your changes are clear.
• StructureMap 3 is gonna tell you what’s wrong and where it hurts - Jeremy D Miller discusses the diagnostic features of StructureMap 3, sharing a look at how it will help you identify problems in your configuration and setup in ways better than other Inversion of Control frameworks.
• JavaScript time values: dates as milliseconds since 1970-01-01 - Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a look at the representation of dates in JavaScript, looking at the internals, and how you can interact with value.

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• Angular App Structuring Guidelines - John Papa shares thoughts and guidelines on structuring AngularJS applications, discussing the LIFT guidelines, and looking at applying them to an Angular app.
• How do we know if mobile apps are secure? - Scott Hanselman discusses the state of not-knowing that mobile applications leave us in wondering how they are doing communications to their server side resources.
• Ember.js and accessibility - Steve Klabnik shares a video on Ember;js and making applications accessible, discussing the importance of conforming to the ARIA standards
• Some advanced AngularJS concepts & Writing E-2-E tests for AngularJS using Protractor - nmarun shares two videos on Angualr Development, looking at some of the more advanced features, focusing on directives, and also explores end to end testing of Angular applications.
• Visualizing Data with D3 - Dan Schaefer shares in introduction to D3, a very powerful data visualisation framework.
• On NHibernate Performance - Ricardo Peres takes a look at NHibernate’s performance characteristics, sharing some performance benchmarks.
• A Lua Test Adapter and Framework for Visual Studio & Some things I learned while building my Visual Studio Test Adapter - Danny Tuppeny shares his first Visual Studio Extension, a test runner for Lua code (which can be extened to other languages too), and shares some of the lessons he learnt about Visual Studio Test Adapters.

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Software

• February 2014 .NET Updates - Th .NET Framework team highlight their recent security patch, released as a part of the standard ‘Patch Tuesday’ cycle, which addresses an Elevation of Privilege issue.

Information

• Interface Segregation Principle: A Practical Example - Erik Dietrich discusses the Interface Segregation Principle, with a practical tale which illustrates its use and importance as one of the less used parts of the SOLID Principles.
• Cost of Delay Due to Technical Debt, Part 4 - Johanna Rothman discusses the role of technical debt as something which can introduce delays and therefore costs into your product development cycle
• Troy Hunt: The Tesco hack - here’s how it (probably) happened - Troy Hunt discusses the latest security incident, with a look at how Tesco may have been compromised, exploring best practices for credential management, login, and associated actions.
• Listening to Leaves - Patrick Lioi discusses the importance of gettin the right abstraction for your application, discussing a situation in the runner part of his Fixie test framework.
• re: Create benchmarks and results that have value - Frans Bouma responds to Kelly Sommer’s piece on benchmarks linked to yesterday.
• Recursively descending test-driven development aided by thinking &Informed TDD - Using Mocks to Allow for True Stepwise Refinement - Ralf Westphal discusses a proces for designing and implementing software using TDD and takign time to think before coding, sharing a dialog based example, before talking about it in a more theoretical standing.

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Software

• Glimpse 1.8.3 released - Insights removed - The Glimpse Team announce an updated 1.8 release which, based upon community feedback, removes the Insights functionality which was introduced in 1.8.2 as a way of getting better insight into how users used Glimpse.

Information

• How does locking work in C#? - Eric Lippert blogs over on the Coverity Blog, presenting a simplified yeet useful view of how locking works in C#
• Create benchmarks and results that have value « kellabyte - Kelly Sommers discusses the art and science of benchmarking, talks about how benchmarks can be bad, before discussing how she goes about benchmarking.
• Per request lifetime management for UserManager class in ASP.NET Identity - suhasbj discusses the role of the UserManager class in the latest preview release of ASP.NET Identity, walking through its use in an example.
• Leak shows Microsoft unifying Windows Phone and Windows RT app development - Todd Bishop highlights news, sourced from a leak (so how accurate it actually is remains to be seen) about work at Microsoft to unify Windows Phone and WinRT development - this certainly sounds like good news
• Struggling with unit tests (again) & Struggling with unit tests (what happened next) - tilovell09 discusses the tradeoffs between code coverage and testing code that doesn’t really need testing in these two posts on the subject.
• Inspiring the next generation of programmers - developer tools from Microsoft - Lee Stott discusses the variety of development languages, schemes and programmes for getting the next generation of developers interested.

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