The Morning Brew

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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Information

• Visual Studio Web Development Survey – Suresh Jayabalan launches the latest Visual Studio Survey looking at (web) developers experiences working with UI Frameworks – if you have experiences or opinions in this area give them 5 minutes of your time to help make Visual Studio better.
• Single Point Testing Using Fiddler AutoResponder – Eric Lawrence discusses how you can use Fiddler to help simulate slow and non-responsive servers when testing your applications
• Sorting and Pagination in ASP.NET 4.5 – Paul Cociuba shares part 10 of his video based series on the ASP.NET Data Driven Controls
• Various strategies to initialize Database in Entity Framework – Sourav Kayal takes a look at some of the hooks provided to initialise your database when working with and managing it using Entity Framework
• TFS Upgrade Improvements in TFS 2013.3 & TFS Adoption at Microsoft – July 2014 – Brian Harry discusses some recent improvements to the upgrade process for TFS in Update 3, and also shares an interesting look at the statistics and use of TFS within Microsoft
• Loading CSS Asynchronously – Dean Hume takes a look at loading CSS asynchronously using the LoadCSS library
• Using ODataUriParser for OData V4 – Karata Liu discusses the use of the ODataUriParser and the updates made in OData 4
• Exploring F# through modeling #3 – Per Ökvist continues this series exploring the F# language looking at how you go about using the language to model the well known game Rock-Paper-Scissors (I wonder if there will be an extension post to add in the ‘Lizard Spock’ components of the Big Bang version of the game )
• Puzzle: Boxing Megaspheres – Craig Gidney discusses the concept of higher dimensional boxing of spheres, a good brain teaser to get your thinking going this morning.

Community

• Herding Code 193: Mark Rendle on Zudio, developing with Angular and Typescript, The History of Programming, and Simple.Data – Friend of the Brew Mark Rendle joins Jon Galloway for a discussion of Zudio, his Azure Storage tooling, and building applications using TypeScript and AngualrJS

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Software

• Updates to RoslynDom 1.0.8 Alpha – Kathleen Dollard announce an updated and experimental release of RoslynDOM containing a number of new features

Information

• Know thy .NET object memory layout – Matt Warren shares some knowledge and experience gained porting HdrHistogram from Java to .NET, learning plenty about the layout of memory in .NET along the way.
• SYSK 390: String.Format vs. concatenation – ‘irenake’ takes a look at the relative performance of string concatenation and the use of String.Format.
• CodeLens Processing pipeline performance improvements – Mathew Aniyan discusses some of the performance improvements made to CodeLens in the Update 3 release
• On Staying Positive and Subconscious Prejudices, Using Server Side Timers and SignalR in ASP.NET MVC Applications & Consuming Server-Side SignalR Events in Universal Windows App Clients – Jason Roberts takes a look at the use of SignalR in browser and Universal Windows Applications
• Unobtrusive JavaScript Validation in ASP.NET – Paul Cociuba shares the 9th part in a series on ASP.NET, taking a look at the improvements in Validation controls in ASP.NET 4.5
• ASP.NET Anti-Forgery Tokens internals – Sebastian Solnica takes a look under the hood at how ASP.NET Anti-Forgery Tokens work in this CodeProject article

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Happy Independence Day to my US readers – enjoy your long weekend

Software

• ODataLib 6.5.0 Release – ‘LeoHu1′ announces the release of the latest version of the ODataLib, introducing a couple of bugfixes and a number of new features

Information

• Avoiding conditionals to improve code – ‘Cellfish’ discusses the idea of programming without (or with minimal) conditional expressions
• Catch up on all the videos from DotNetConf Spring 2014 – Scott Hanselman highlights the range of great recorded content from the dotNetConf event
• ASP.NET Session State using SQL Server In-Memory – Ken Kilty explores the in-memry features of SQL server 2014 to provide shared session backing for ASP.NET applications
• View Source in the CPU Usage tool – Dan J Taylor highlights another new and useful feature of the Performance and Diagnostic Hub in Update 2 of Visual Studio 2013
• Best Practices – Code Coverage Metrics – The NCover team kick off a 4 part video series looking at best practices for code coverage, starting with a look at code coverage metrics in this first part
• A design pattern for caching – two tier caching with strong consistency between servers | Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing – Paul Lou – Paul Lou takes a look at a pattern for working with non-scalable data sources with minimal data churn
• Cancelling Long Promise Chains – Karl Seguin continues looking at promises, exploring how you go about cancelling a chain or promises
• DOCTYPE Explored – Mohit Jain gives a useful reminder of the role of the DocType in HTML and how it affects rendering in this CodeProject Article

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Software

• Announcing the Release of ASP.NET MVC 5.2, Web API 2.2 and Web Pages 3.2 – Daniel Roth
• VS/TFS 2013.3 (Update 3) RC – Brian Harry
• Update 3 Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2013 – John Montgomery
• Microsoft acquires SyntaxTree, creator of UnityVS plugin for Visual Studio – Somasegar
• CodeLens for Git improvements in Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Update 3 RC – Jean-Marc Prieur
• Application Insights tools for Visual Studio included in Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 RC – Vlad Joanovic
• Fiddler for Linux Updated – Eric Lawrence

Information

• Maximize Compression with Zopfli – Eric Lawrence
• Domain-Driven Design with ASP.NET MVC – Steve Smith
• Loan calculator – Phil Trelford
• Threadsafe Incrementing in C# – Eli Weinstock-Herman
• Write 30% Less Test Code With AutoFixture – Jaime González García
• Build Your Own App Specific REPL For Your NodeJS App – Derick Bailey

Community

• DDD East Anglia Sessions – Voting has opened for DD East Anglia Sessions
• dotnetConf 2014 Wrapup – The dotnetConf team
• An Invite to the Palace! – Andrew Westgarth

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Links only edition today as I’m pressed for time

Information

• Scaling a standard Azure website to 380k queries per minute of 163M records with loader.io – Troy Hunt
• Back To Basics: On The Use And Abuse Of The Humble Boolean – Ian Nelson
• The Simpsons in CSS – Chris Pattle
• The Working Programmer – Fun with C# – Ted Neward
• Another tool in the fight against spelling errors. [Added HtmlStringExtractor for pulling strings, attributes, and comments from HTML/XML files and URLs] – David Anson
• Expression Studio Support – Irfan-k
• Using AngularJs, ASP.NET MVC, Web API and EntityFramework to build NLayered Single Page Web Applications – Halil ibrahim Kalkan
• Sharing Code from WinForms to iOS – Rockford Lhotka

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