The Morning Brew

Short edition today mostly due to the Thanksgiving caused shortage of posts ion my RSS reader this morning.

Software

• Announcing the F# 3.1 Compiler/Library Code Drop (from the Visual F# Tools Team at Microsoft) - The F# Team announce the availability of a code drop release of the F# 3.1 Compiler and libraries, along with tests

Information

• Accessing the Location header in a CORS-enabled AP - Aaron Powell shares a gotcha when working with CORS support in WebAPI, in that the number of headers returned by default is restricted somewhat, including the one he needed, location.
• Automatic camel casing of properties with SignalR hubs (SignalR v2) - Stuart Leeks takes a look at re-enabling the convention in SignalR 1.x which meant that casing of properties on the Hub was camel cased in JavaScript, meaning that the server side and client side have a different model (casing wise) to follow the conventions of each langauge.
• NHibernate.RunFaster() secret toggle - Ayende shares a useful hint to help improve the performance of NHibernate solutions, applying a default batching size for all requests.
• Mixing Command and Transaction Script Patterns - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at the mixing of design patterns combining the Transaction Script pattern with the Command Pattern, sharing a real world example.
• Repository Pattern and Unit of Work with Entity Framework in ASP.NET MVC - Amir Hamza Md. Kayes shares a look at working with Entity Framework in ASP.NET MVC using the Unit of Work pattern and Repository pattern in this CodeProject article.

Community

• NDC London - are you ready? - Sara Allison highlights the great speaker lineup from Microsoft at NDC London next week. A nice selection of sessions being delivered, and certainly some that will be well worth watching the recordings of (assuming they are made available as usual).

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Happy Thanksgiving to my American Readers!

Software

• Windows Azure Storage Release - Introducing CORS, JSON, Minute Metrics, and More - Windows Azure Storage Team announce the release of their 2013-08-15 version which includes support for Cross Origin Resource Sharing on Blobs, queues and tables, OData 3.0 JSON Support and minute granularity metrics.
• dotMemory 4.0 EAP: .NET Memory Profiler Resuscitation - JetBrains announce the release of dotMemory 4.0 a memory profiler for .NET, a new update to a product which hasn’t seen a new release since 2010

Information

• Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Was Learning How to Code - Cecily Carver shares some thoughts on things we as programmers should accept and understand.
• A peek into a performance issue of a .net 2.0 assembely - Nandeesh Swami discusses an interesting case of a badly performing application assembly, looking through tracing the problem, and the underlying cause due to security settings.
• Organize that Sass! - Tim Smith takes a look at organising your style sheets with SASS
• Minty: Sanity Check One - Rob Conery continues his series looking at building a blogging engine in Node.JS, taking the opportunity to stop and perform a sanity check that what he has so far is good and fit for purpose.
• Using Autofac as the DependancyResolver for SignalR - Derik Whittaker takes a look at hooking up AutoFac as a dependency resolver for use with SignalR

Community

• #AzureChat - AutoScale and Virtual Machines - The Windows Azure team are hosting a Twitter chat event on Thursday 5th December starting 9am PST where Corey Sanders and Stephen Siciliano will be available to answer questions on Virtual Machines and AutoScale.

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Software

• RTM Version of Visual Studio 2013 ALM Virtual Machine & Happy VM Day! The Visual Studio 2013 RTM ALM Virtual Machine is now available - Brian Keller and Greg Duncan highlight the RTM versions of the Application Lifecycle Virtual Machine images for Visual Studio 2013
• EF6.0.2 Beta 1 Available on NuGet - Rowan Miller announces the beta 1 release of Entity Framework 6.0.2, a patch release addressing some reported issues.
• NCrunch V2 Beta Is Now Available! - Remco Mulder announces the beta release of NCrunch 2, the second major version of this concurrent testing extension for Visual Studio, which includes a number of major new features.

Information

• Modified ASP.NET 4.5 CPU Throttling - Christy Henriksson takes a look at some of the changes to the ASP.NET CPU throttling feature made in .NET 4.5
• Not Crying Over Old Code - Craig Gidney discusses the idea of continuous improvement in software as developers, and considers if always improving actually means we never get to being good.
• Unit testing OWIN applications using TestServer - Praburaj Thiagarajan takes a look at the use of TestServer to allow testing of OWIN Pipelines with the Microsoft.Owin.Testing package
• Frameworkless JS - A module per widget - Rob Ashton continues his Frameworkless JavaScript discussion getting started working on building a minimalist implementation of the features needed for the project hiding behind a single function as jQuery does.

Community

• Presentations I’m doing in Dublin and London Dec 2nd->5th - Scott Guthrie is on the road visiting Dublin and London early in December, with two talks planned at each venue. The Dublin events are free to attend, and the London ones are part of NDC London.

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Software

• Caliburn.Micro 2.0.0-alpha2 Is Here - Rob Eisenberg announces the release of the first alpha of Caliburn 2.0, available as three NuGet Packages and featuring a number of changes, features, and lots of hard work from Nigel Sampson and Thomas Ibel
• Beta Updates to ReSharper 8 and .NET Tools - JetBrains announce a combined refresh of the beta releases of ReSharper, dotCover and dotTrace, with the RTM just round the corner this is the ideal opportunity to try out the new features.

Information

• 30 Days of TDD - Day 24 - Strictly Mocking - James Bender continues this series of posts looking at Test Driven development from a variety of aspects, in this post exploring how the tooling can support Test Eventually Development.
• ASP.NET Core Identity - K. Scott Allen discusses the new ‘Membership Framework’ included in Visual Studio 2013 ASP.NET, available in the NuGet package Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core. This post explores some of the key interfaces of the framework and looks briefly at the async nature of the framework.
• If you’re not cheating, you’re not… using these new Windows Runtime Network API cheat sheets - Greg Duncan highlights some useful cheat sheets for the WinRT APIs
• Opening Files from SkyDrive using .NET - Gaye Oncul Kok discusses the opening of files through SkyDrive and the new Windows 8.1 feature of ‘Smart Files’, looking at how you can work with them using the .NET API
• Minty: Writing The First Specs - Rob Connery continues his series looking at writing a blogging engine in Node.js from the ground up, with a look at writing specification tests and separating things from processes
• Just My Code for ASP.NET in Visual Studio 2013 - Patrick Nelson discusses the ‘Just MY Code’ option for debugging in Visual Studio 2013, highlighting the support now included for JavaScript making Web Developer’s lives easier

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Software

• Viasfora v1.1 Published // Winterdom - Tomas Restrepo shares the latest version of Viasfora, a Visual Studio extension which provides a number of capabilities not present in the core IDE. This release addresses issues with Visual Studio 2013 and adds a new feature, Rainbow Parentheses which colour each matching set of parentheses a different colour making matching them up easier.
• Visual Studio Updates - Survey - Phil Lee, a Program Manager on the Visual Studio team invites you to give feedback on the quarterly updates to Visual Studio in this short survey.

Information

• Checking out the Helios IIS Owin Web Server Host - Rick Strahl highlights the Helios project, an OWIN Web Server host which sits directly on top of the IIS Native interfaces. In this post Rick takes a look at using it and how it performs.
• Debugging OWIN app or framework - .NET Web Development and Tools Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Praburaj Thiagarajan takes a brief look at adding some error handling which reveals some debugging information using the Microsoft.Owin.Diagnostics package.
• Page Instrumentation in ASP.NET 4.5 - Imran Baloch explores the Page Instrumentation feature new in ASP.NET 4.5 which allows you to get some performance figures from various stages in your pages lifecycle.
• Why not use polling threads with ASP.NET web applications? - Gunnar Peipman takes a look at some of the considerations you need to make when considering using threads in an ASP.NET Application.
• Asynchronous action filters in ASP.NET Web API - FilipW takes a look at making actions filters asynchronous, exploring some concepts behind Async void and sharing an implementation of an action filter which is async.
• Node.js Development in Visual Studio - Life After Visual Node with Node Tools for Visual Studio
  - Bart Read takes a look at the new Node.JS features for Visual Studio that he was involved in the development of.
• Building a Node.js Web Site on Windows Azure using Node.js Tools for Visual Studio - Shiju Varghese also explores this new capability, walking through the process of getting a simple web application up and running.
• Starting with a Node.js webserver - Marco Franssen goes a little lower level taking a more detailed look at building your first web server application in Node.

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Software

• Windows Azure: General Availability Release of BizTalk Services, Traffic Manager, Azure AD App Access + Xamarin support for Mobile Services & Announcing the General Availability of Biz Talk Services, Azure Active Directory and Traffic Manager, and Preview of Azure Active Directory Premium - Scott Guthrie and Steven Martin announce the latest raft of update to the Windows Azure Platform with the general availability of a number of services, along with a new preview of Azure Active Directory Premium.
• Introducing node.js Tools for Visual Studio & Node.js Tool for Visual Studio - Scott Hanselman and Shaun Xu highlight the new Visual Studio tooling for Node.JS making Node development in Visual Studio even easier, including package management with NPM, project structure support and debugging capabilities
• Umbraco - Umbraco 7 - Niels Hartvig and the Umbracco Team announce he release of Umbracco 7, the latest generation of this content management system, which has been 18 months in the making.
• Set process memory limit with Process Governor - Sebastian Solnica shares a useful looking utility which allows you to constrain memory of a process.

Information

• Frameworkless JS - What jQuery did right - Rob Ashton presses on with his series on minimising the impact of JavaScript library use, exploring what jQuery is useful for.
• How to massively improve SQLite Performance (using SqlWinRT) - Andy Wigley takes a look at a number of scenarios where SQLite performance can be optimised, sharing a sample project to illustrate the concepts.
• Visual Studio 2013 ‘Could not evaluate Expression’ Debugger Abnormality - Rick Strahl takes a look at a change in the debugger in Visual Studio 2013 which caused him problems debugging older WebForms applications, highlight a solution via enabling the Managed Compatibility Mode on the debugger.

Community

• Azure Bootcamp (UK): Building out Windows Azure Infrastructures and Services (Saturday, 14th December 2013, Central London) - Planky highlights an all day Windows Azure event running in London from the UK Windows Azure User Group. The event takes place on Saturday 14th December at The Hub Westminster. Registration is required.

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Information

• The Mature Optimization Handbook - Carlos Bueno shares the ‘Mature Optimization Handbook’ a free eBook from FaceBook available in ePub, Mobi and PDF formats. The book is based upon an internal FaceBook training class on performance and optimisation and is sure to be an interesting read.
• Declare Don’t Tell - Phil Haack continues his discussion of declarative code and reduction of control statements with a look at an example using the Reactive Extensions to perform a simple sounding use case which is elegant when solved in a reactive / functional way, and surprisingly difficult in procedural code.
• 30 Days of TDD - Day 23 - Mocking - FROM THE FUTURE! - James Bender presses on with his series looking at Test Driven Development from first principles. In this post James continues to look at mocking, and delves into some of the premium features of JustMock
• Collection Asserts with NUnit - Jakub Chodounsky takes a look at the collection assert capabilities of NUnit
• Unit tests for HttpClient using HttpMessageHandler - Abhishek Anand explores writing tests for HTTP Client based code, looking at using capturing the messages and preventing them going over the wire.
• Discovering .NET Open Source: up-for-grabs.net - Keith Dahlby shares a simple site which aims to collect together links for ‘up for grabs’ bugs and feature request from .NET Open Source Projects. These ‘up for grabs’ issues provide the ideal way for a developer to get started and get involved with an Open Source project.
• Hello Minty, Minty: The First Steps & Minty: Defining the Model - Rob Conery kicks off a new series looking at building a Node.JS based blogging engine, sharing his process as he goes. The source accompanying the series is available, and Rob is keen to get others involved in the project.
• Properties vs. Methods - Abhishek Anand explores some of the issues and considerations surrounding the decision to use properties or methods for a particular piece of functionality.
• How much data can you put on VSOnline? - Brian Harry discusses the amount of data which you can successfully manage within Visual Studio Online, sharing some numbers from some of the biggest tenants of the service.

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Software

• Time to get the WCF Data Services 5.6.0 RTM Tools - Glenn Gailey highlights the release of the WCF Data Services 5.6.0 RTM Tools, resolving an issue which prevented installation due to certificates, discussing why you should get the tooling in addition to the NuGet packages.
• Announcing FogJS for Windows Azure with Node.js - Daniel Mohl shares FogJS, a library based on Fog (for F#) which makes it easy to interact with the Windows Azure APIs for Blob Storage, Table Storage, and the Service Bus from JavaScript code.

Information

• Don’t trust the .NET web forms email regex validator (or most others) - Troy Hunt discusses the complexities of validating email addresses, looking at the default ASP.NET Web Forms Validation regular expression, and some possible improvements.
• Build your continuous delivery strategy - Mario Fontana highlights a white paper / eBook from Microsoft which looks at building a Release Pipeline using Team Foundation Server, and how that pipeline can be streamlined to give continuous delivery.
• Steps to Log all .net Exceptions to a Log file with Debug Diag 2.0 - Christopher Haun walks though the process of setting up DebugDiag to log all .NET exceptions, providing useful information when analysing problems.
• Lessons in Good Naming through Absurdity | DaedTech - Erik Dietrich discusses the art and science of picking good names, probably one of the hardest problems in software development.
• Frameworkless JS - encapsulation of views - Rob Ashton continues his series looking at frameworkless JavaScript development, exploring how much of a mess the view is in his sample project, and setting the scene for improving the mess.

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