The Morning Brew

Software

• Knockout-ES5: a plugin to simplify your syntax - Steve Sanderson shares Knockout-ES5, a plugin for Knockout which takes advantage of modern browser’s support for ECMAScript 5 to simplify and give a more natural syntax for the model and binding code.
• ripple: Fubu-inspired dependency management - Josh Arnold highlights the Ripple Project which aims to provide an alternative to the standard NuGet Package Manager client whcih deals with Continuous Integration scenarios better, while using the standard NuGet feed and package format.
• 64 bits ought to be enough for everybody [TextAnalysisTool.NET update for .NET 2.0 and 64-bit enables the analysis of larger files!] - David Anson provides an update to his TextAnalysisTool.NET tool for reading, searching and navigating large files efficiently. This update brings it onto .NET 2.0 and adds 64-bit support allowing you even more memory space for loading and working with large text files.

Information

• What is lexical scoping? - Eric Lippert discusses the use of the word ‘Scope’ in development, and looks at the two different styles of scoping, dynamic scoping and lexical scoping
• Traversing the GC Heap with ClrMd - Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at working with the ClrMd library to programatically work with the CLR debugging API, exploring how you can walk across the Garbage Collection Heap and explore its contents.
• Some "Laws" of Software Development - Al Noel takes a look at some of the ‘enduring truths’ of software development encapsulated in a variety of named ‘laws’ including Ziv’s, Conway’s and Humphrey’s Laws, before sharing his own software development ‘law’
• Play with Packages, programmatically! - The NuGet Team give a taste of the API available for the NuGet package Manager allowing your code to easily interact with NuGet.
• Modern Art - Phil Trelford proves that F# isn’t just for scientists and financiers, turning his hand to recreating works of art using the F# Language

Community

• Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon at DevTeach - Bill Wagner highlights the Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon event being held at the DevTeach conference at the end of the month, and is a great opportunity to turn your development skills for the power of good.
• Windows 8 for Developers Online Camp - Joe Mayo highlights a Windows 8 Developer Camp Online event, with three hours of content on developing applications for Windows 8 from Joe and Greg Levenhagen on the 21st May.

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Software

• YUICompressor 2.4.8 Released - Joey Smith announces the latest release of the YUICompressor, and the first since they shifted to a contributor model. As a result this release contains contributions from over 10 individuals, and includes updates to both CSS and JavaScript minification
• Just released - Prism for Windows Runtime - Blaine Wastell of the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft announces the release of Prism for the Windows Runtime, previously codenamed ‘Kona’ targeting the development of Windows 8 applications. The release is amde along with an AdventureWorks based reference implementation, three quickstarts and associated documentation.

Information

• Express names in code: Bad vs Clean - Mateusz Roszczak discusses guidelines and recommendations to help with naming in your code, one of the trickiest skills to master in programming
• Creating a Basic CRUD Application with Backbone.js Starter Kit - Kazi Manzur Rashid kicks off a new series of posts looking at building a Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) style application using his Backbone.js based application starter kit
• Working with TypeScript in Visual Studio 2012 - Gaston Hillar gives a nice introduction to TypeScript development in Visual Studio in this Dr Dobbs article
• Overwhelmed by JavaScript Dependencies - Martijn Faassen discusses dependency management in JavaScript based applications, and shares how he has automated some of the processes. Be sure to check out his followup post JS Dependency Tools Redux for more discussion about the various dependency management libraries also available
• The CORRECT Way to Code a Custom Exception Class - Doug Seelinger shares a templates for implementing exception classes which includes all the best practice techniques, along with support for correct serialisation of the data within the exception.
• Getting Started With Glimpse In ASP.NET MVC - John Sonmez shares an introductory tutorial on working with Glimpse with ASP,NET to see what is going on at the server end from right within your browser

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Information

• Spot the defect: rounding, part two - Eric Lippert returns with the second half of his look at rounding, and looks into the detail behind the subtle bug in the previous post and the exciting (and troublesome) world of double precision decimals represented as binary fractions.
• .NET Security Part 3 - Simon Cooper continues his series looking at the security features of the .NET Framework, exploring running full trust code in its own sandboxed appdomain yet still allowing partially trusted code call it.
• Step-by-Step creating an app to find the nearest - Susan Ibach walks through the process of building a ‘Find the nearest’ type application for Windows 8 based upon an application template provided by Mark Arteaga.
• Looking at Kotlin - a few notes made - Rob Ashton shares some thoughts and notes made during a Kotlin workshop given by Hadi Hariri, giving a useful introduction to what Kotlin is and some getting started pointers.
• Game Development Using JavaScript - Shai Raiten shares a passion for building games with JavaScript in this CodeProject article, discussing some of the game development concepts, and looking at how they apply in JavaSCript and HTML5 development.
• How to customize Twitter Bootstrap to fit your web design - Sojaner takes a look at how you can go about customising the styling of Twitter Bootstrap to have it reflect your purposes, showing how browser developer tools can help you understand what is going on, and how the LESS CSS processor allows you to easily customise the styling.
• Where Is .NET Headed? - K. Scott Allen shares some thoughts on the future direction of the .NET Framework and associated platforms,. Well worth reading through the numerous comments on this one too.
• New Windows Dev Center release - Brian Harry highlights the new and improved Windows Dev Center website (something which his team is responsible for) which includes a new navigation structure based on the development lifecycle, new section landing pages, and a Windows look and feel.
• Red Gate Is Looking For Feedback On Its ASP.NET MVC Web Development Education Website - While on the subject of Websites, RedGate have a nice ASP.NET MVC resource site which they are looking for feedback on as Paulo Morgado highlights in this post.

Community

• What has The Next Generation User Group ever done for us? - Guy Smith Ferrier highlights the sterling work done by Richard Costall, Dave McMahon and John Price over the years running the NxtGenUG, and the evolution of some of the NxtGenUG chapters into fresh new Usergroups. I couldn’t agree more with Guy, the community owes them all a debt of gratitude for their efforts.

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Software

• WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Prerelease - The WCF Data Services team announce the Release Candidate of their 5.5.0 release, which will be made via NuGet only. The major new features in this release are public data source providers and enhancements to their URL parsing support

Information

• OSS from the trenches - 7 Tips for Maintainers & Contributors - Anthony van der Hoorn continues the Open Source .NET discussions sharing 7 tips to help foster a good Open Source community around projects which you are a contributor or maintainer
• Saga patterns: wrap up & Eventual consistency in REST APIs - Jimmy Bogard wraps up his interesting post series looking at the implementation of the various saga related patterns. Jimmy then moves on to discuss some of the concerns around eventual consistency, and the construction of REST based APIs around systems which are eventually consistent.
• Announcing some new capabilities in Azure Active Directory Graph Service - Windows Azure Active Directory Graph Team announce some of the new features added to the Azure Active Directory Graph service in the release a few days ago
• Creating plugins for dotPeek - Maarten Balliauw digs into the creation of plugins for ReSharper’s dotPeek assembly browser tool, looking at obtaining and working with the framework provided by a NuGet package, and how you go about deploying/distributing a plugin.
• Hack yourself first - how to go on the offence before online attackers do - Troy Hunt discusses how ‘friendly’ hacking of your own systems is a great idea in learning about your weaknesses before actual ‘hackers’ do, discussing a number of attack vectors to consider.

Community

• F# UK ton of Meetups - Phil Trelford highlights the impressive array of F# related Usergroup sessions taking place in the UK, and a few further afield. One of the events is tonight in London, so if you are at a loose end in the city it might be worth checking out.
• NxtGenUG - Event: What is Devops anyway - Another event which is taking place tonight is NxtGenUG Coventry Usergroup, who will be entertained by Alex Papadimoulis of ‘The Daily WTF’ fame, discussing the DevOps revolution.

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Software

• TouchDevelop v3.0 beta for Windows Phone 8 - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop 3.0 Beta, targeting Windows Phone 8, and includes its new execution engine based on TypeScript. Its a closed beta release which you can get hold of by emailing the team
• May 2013 Internet Explorer Updates - Ceri Gallacher highlights the latest security fixes for Internet Explorer released yesterday as a part of the regular Patch Tuesday
• Windows Keeps Getting Better - Brandon LeBlanc shares more news on the forthcoming Windows Blue (8.1) release which will be made available free of charge via the Windows Store.

Information

• Scripting ease with Script Packs - Glenn Block discusses the nature of Script Packs in scriptcs, discussing how they are intended to make the experience of working with scriptcs better and provide a neat way of extending.
• Deeper dive into ScriptCS - Scott Smith follows on from his introductory post on ScriptCS with a more in-depth look at ScriptCS and the use and creation of Script Packs.
• CLR Diagnostics with ClrMD and ScriptCS REPL - ScriptCS.ClrDiagnostics - Piotr Walat takes a look at using the CLR Diagnostics and ClrMD with ScriptCS, sharig a script pack which combines the two.
• Benchmarking mistakes, part one - Eric Lippert highlights an article he has written for TechPro looking at the common mistakes people make when attempting to benchmark their code, discussing first the concept of benchmarking, and looking in detail at the first 4 key common mistakes.
• Using Web Workers to Improve Performance of Image Manipulation - David Catuhe takes a look at the use of Web Workers to provide improved performance in HTML5 based applications, exploring their use in processing and manipulating images

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Update: A missing quote on one of todays links merged Ron Conery and Jeremy Miller’s links - corrected now, and thanks to Alistair and Daniel for letting me know.

Software

• SignalR/ReleaseNotes - The SignalR Team announce the release of SignalR 1.1, a release which includes significant improvements to the scale-out story, along with a healthy number of other bugfixes and improvements.
• Introducing Backbone.js StarterKit - Kazi Manzur Rashid shares three NuGet packages which provide a basis for Knockout based Single Page Applications, with code written in JavaScript, CoffeeScript or TypeScript.

Information

• Applying Conway’s Law - Phil Haack discusses Conway’s Law on software reflecting the organisational structure which created it, discussing his experiences at Microsoft and also how GitHub organise themselves.
• Spot the defect: rounding - Eric Lippert shares a seemingly very simple piece of code, with a subtle but significant bug, and challenges his readers to find the bug - the answer is in the comments, and will be the focus of a later blog post too.
• Troy Hunt: Clickjack attack - the hidden threat right in front of you - Troy Hunt discusses in detail the anatomy and security risks exposed by Clickjacking exploits, and looking at what you can do to protect your ASP.NET applications from such attacks.
• SQL Server Performance Crib Sheet - Grant Fritchey has an updated version of his SQL Server Performance Crib Sheet, detailing a goodly number of things that are well worth knowing if you have to manage SQL Server at any level.
• Knowing More Programming Languages Will Make You Smarter - Rob Conery discusses the benefits with learning new languages, both spoken and more specifically programming.
• Would I use RavenDb again? - Jeremy D Miller shares his thoughts and experiences of using RavenDB as a backend database for an application, discussing some of the benefits and some of the limitations that his team ran into during implementation
• New Contributor? Jump In! - Nik Molnar shares thoughts on Open source projects having a ‘Jump In’ list of easier issues ideal for someone looking to get involved with an Open Source project but unsure of what to start work with - a great idea, and certainly well worth maintaining from a project lead point of view - the OSS world can only be better off from more contributors.

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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

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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

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