The Morning Brew

Software

• Node.js Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 Beta - Somasegar announces the beta release of the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio 2013, bringing all the features you’ve come to expect for Visual Studio development to the Node.js platform including debugging, diagnostics, editor integration, package management and much more.
• BUILD 2014 Round-Up - Part 1 & A run down of the Build 2014 keynote announcements - Steve Fox and Lee Stott provide nice roundups of the various announcements from last week’s Build event

Information

• C# 6: First reactions - Jon Skeet follows on from last weeks Build announcements about C# 6 sharing his own thoughts on the implementation of the new features
• Xamarin and Microsoft Launch the .NET Foundation - Miguel de Icaza discusses the announcement of the newly formed .NET Foundation, to which Xamarin are contributing 6 projects to
• The Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 - The Visual Studio team highlight the announcement of the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2
• Visual Studio extensions for web developers - Mads Kristensen highlights some of the best Visual Studio extensions for Web Developers, covering all aspects of web development
• Introducing Web Hosting Plans for Azure Web Sites - Byron Tardif highlights the new Web Hosting Plans feature of Azure Websites which allows for grouping and scaling of sites within a subscription making it ever easier to manage multiple sites and multiple instances of sites within a single subscription.
• How does TypeScript help prevent bugs in JavaScript - Derik Whittaker takes a look at TypeScript discussing how it makes it easier to detect bugs and mistakes in JavaScript code by providing some degree of typing to the core JavaScript language.
• ASP.NET Web API/AngularJS SPA Demo App Updated - Shiju Varghese shares an updated version of this sample application demonstrating Single Page Application development using ASP.NET and Angular
• Using Coded UI to test XAML-based Windows Phone apps - Prachi Bora takes a look at the newly supported Coded UI Tests for XAML based Windows Phone applications, providing a good way of performing automated tests of the UI of your Windows Phone applications.
• F#14 : Recursion - Sacha Barber continues his series looking at the concepts and language of F#, exploring the application and implementation of recursion in F#
• Stand-up: Developing a node.js application using Monaco (Part 2) - Visual Studio Online "Monaco" - Benjamin Pasero continues this series looking at building applications using Node.js in the Visual Studio online Monaco editor.

Community

• Live Webinar: Deconstructing Clippy - Common Issues for an Uncommon Extension, April 16th - The JetBrains team capitalise on their well received Clippy April Fool extension with a webinar looking at the building of the extension to ReSharper.

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Software

• The .NET Foundation and .NET Platform Innovation - Somasegar shares some further significant announcements, including the creation of an independent foundation to support open source development on the .NET Platform, a number of new technology innovations, including the open sourcing of Roslyn and C# / VB, an update on the partnership with Xamarin and much more
• Visual Studio Online Integration in the Azure portal - Brian Harry announces the integration of Visual Studio online into the Microsoft Azure portal along with a much enhanced protal, this brings the code editor capabilites of VS Online into the fore.
• Visual Studio Online “General Availability” - Also announcing today, Brian Harry highlights the general availability of Visual Studio Online
• Announcing Preview of New Portal and Exciting Updates to other Azure Services - Steven Martin shares the announcement of a number of new Microsoft Azure features, including the new portal, updated SDK, General Availability of Azure Active Directory Premium and partnerships with Chef and Puppet Labs
• The Next Generation of .NET - The .NET Team outline their plans for the next generation of .NET and discuss their guiding themes of Core innovation and cross platform applications, highlighting and discussing the various parts of this plan that they are releasing now.
• Taking a tour of Roslyn - The C# and VB teams share the significant announcements of a new preview release of Roslyn, along with their decision to open source all the work in this area, and have it maintained by MS Open Tech.
• C# and VB are open sourced - Eric Lippert shares his views and congratulations on the open sourcing of Roslyn, and especially their choice of Apache 2 license.
• RyuJIT CTP3: How to use SIMD - Kevin Frei discusses the latest CTP release of RyuJIT and highlights the SIMD features, showing how to get up and running with it.
• Facilitating Open Contributions for the F# Compiler, Library and Visual F# Tools - The F# Team are also embracing open source, and are now accepting open contributions for Compiler, library and tooling
• NuGet 2.8.1 Released, April 2nd-3rd Downtime, and the New Search Service - The NuGet Team announce their 2.8.1 release of NuGet, and discuss the recent downtime of the NuGet services
• Announcing Azure Mobile Service managed client SDK 1.3 alpha with Offline support - Hasan Khan highlights the pre-release version of Azure Mobile Services 1.3, and the new offline support, making it easier to have good application performance, with offline behaviours.

Information

• Video Tutorial and Screenshots: Windows 8.1 Update 1 - Scott Hanselman gives a taste of the new Windows 8.1 Update 1 release outlining some of the key changes and features introduced - very useful, especially when the update reaches general availability in the next few weeks.
• Free book from Syncfusion on Visual Studio 2013 Succinctly - Tatworth highlights a free ebook on the Visual Studio 2013 IDE from Alessandro Del Sole and the folks over at Syncfusion.
• I’m throwing in the towel in FubuMVC - Jeremy D Miller makes the sad announcement that he is ceasing work on the FubuMVC project, sharing some history of the project, along with looking at where he feels it went wrong.
• Performance Profiling on Windows Phone 8.1 with Visual Studio - Haseeb Ah shares a look at the performance profiling features of the Performance and Diagnostic Hub which now include support for profiling Windows Phone 8.1 applications
• BUILD Day 2: Keynote Summary - Steve Fox shares a nice summary of the announcements in the Day 2 keynote at Build 2014
• Sublime is Sublime 12 - Greg Young round out his series of posts looking at the use of Sublime as an IDE for .NET code
• Orleans - Phil Trelford shares his views on the Orleans Project, announced at Build 2014, comparing it to other actor frameworks, and highlighting the good and bad parts of this new contender.
• Continuous Javascript Testing with Karma - Eli Weinstock-Herman takes a look at continuous testing of JavaScript code using the Karma framework, walking through the setup, and discussing the experience.

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Software

• Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC: Windows Phone 8.1 Tools, Shared Projects and Universal Windows Apps - Somasegar shares the high level announcements from //Build2014, including significant developments for Windows App Development, the Release Candidate for Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, TFS 2013 Update 2 RTW, .NET Native and TypeScript 1.0 RTM
• Announcing new web features in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC - Xinyang Qiu shares the details of the Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 Release, focusing on the Web Development Features included,
• TFS 2013.2 (Update 2) Released - Brian Harry discusses the TFS 2013 Update 2 Release, giving an overview of the features included
• Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 (April Release) - The Official Visual Studio Site has full details of both the Visual Studio Update 2 and TFS Update 2 releases
• Announcing .NET Native Preview - Subramanian Ramaswamy and Andrew Pardoe of the .NET Team discuss .NET Native, and release the preview of this technology which allows you to write C# code, but gain much more of the performance of native code.
• Available Now: Preview of Project "Orleans" - Cloud Services at Scale - Niklas Gustafsson shares another preview from the .NET Team, a project which started out as a MS Research project which provides a straightforward approach to building distributed high-scale computing applications
• Announcing an updated version of Internet Explorer 11 - available on Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 8.1 - The Internet Explorer team announce a new version of Internet Explorer to be deployed acorss Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, on both phone and desktop
• Caliburn.Micro 2.0 Beta 2 - Rob Eisenberg shares the release of Caliburn.Micro Beta 2 which supports both the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK and Common Xaml UI, both new announcements at Build.
• Announcing TypeScript 1.0 - The TypeScript team make their announcement of the 1.0 RTM Release

Information

• MSDN Magazine: April 2014 - The April Edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online
• F#13 : Pattern Matching - Sacha Barber continues his series looking at the F# language and features, exploring the interesting topic of pattern matching in this latest part.
• Windows/Phone 8. - Building for Both, Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3 - Mike Taulty takes a look at the newly announced Universal Windows Apps support, exploring step by step how this allows you to build applications for both phone and desktop
• Introducing status.modern.ie, F12 Refresh - CSS editor,F12 Refresh - The JavaScript Console &F12 Refresh - The JavaScript Debugger - Aaron Powell takes a look at the various announcements from the Internet Explorer Team, discussing their new feature status page, and the improvements made to the JavaScript Debugger, CSS Editor and JavaScript Console in the F12 Developer tools.
• BUILD 2014 day 1 Keynote recap - Laurent Duveau has a nice set of notes on the Build Keynote, providing links off to the various announcements.

Community

• Happy 10th Channel 9 - Channel 9 Turns 10 - best wishes to all the team who have been involved over the years

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Software

• Code Metrics PowerTool for Visual Studio 2013 Available on Microsoft Download Center - Charles Willis highlights the availability of the Code Metrics PowerTool for Visual Studio 2013, providing a number of different metrics to give insight into your code
• Style Cop 4.7.49.0 now released - Tatworth highlights the latest release of StyleCop for Visual Studio 2008-2013, and ReSharper 5.1-8.2

Information

• Building 2Day for Windows 8: under the hood - Jeremy Alles shares a look at the techniques and approaches used to build 2Day, a powerful real world ToDo lists application with synchronisation features, on the Windows 8 platform.
• Bringing Responsive Images to Browsers - Mat Marquis shares an update on the plans for supporting Responsive Images in browsers in the form of the picture element
• Xamarin F# - Experience Report - Faisal shares some notes on a recent project using F# on the Android platform through Xamarin.
• 9 Reasons Your Project is Going to Fail - Steve Smith shares 9 common reasons why your latest development project might fail, giving food for thought
• Clippy for ReSharper - JetBrains win the April Fools day announcements in my mind, with an announcement of bringing Clippy back to life with ReSharper, and as Roland Weigelt highlights, they actually go one stage further and release the functionality as Clippy for ReSharper 1.0.0 a ReSharper Plugin.

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Congratulations to the New and Renewed MVPs

Software

• StructureMap 3.0 is Live - Jeremy D Miller announces the release of StructureMap 3.0, the first major release in quite some time, and a significant clean up and improvement of the code and development experience
• Rhino Mocks 4.0.0 Alpha Released - Mike Meisinger announces the first Alpha release of Rhino Mocks 4.0
• Announcing preview of WebJobs SDK - Pranav Rastogi announces the latest preview release of the Windows Azure WebJobs SDK to add background processing to web applications running as a part of Windows Azure Websites.
• OWIN security components in ASP.NET: OpenID Connect! - Vittorio Bertocci alos announcse a newly update preview release of the OWIN based secuirty components which provide claims based authentication support with Open ID.

Information

• Previewing the April issue of MSDN Magazine - Michael Desmond gives a taste of what is to come in the April Edition of MSDN Magazine which will be available online shortly.
• Updated ASP.NET Database Resource Provider - Rick Strahl provides a update to an old component which reads resource strings from databases providing a useful way of easily managing your applications translations.
• Preparing for Durandal NextGen - Rob Eisenberg shares a look at the Next Generation release of Durandal, which includes a considerable number of breaking changes with the overall aim of a better platform
• On that Microservices thing - Udi Dahan shares his thoughts on the recent discussions of Micro Services.
• .NET Runtime for Azure Mobile Services - First Impressions - Carlos Figueira compares and contrasts the .NET Runtime engine for Mobile Services with that of the original Node.js based runtime.

Community

• Build 2014 sessions announced! - Eduardo ‘Technical Evangelist’ Ortega highlights some of the coverage of the //Build conference which kicks off tomorrow, with sessions being live streamed to the web.

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Clocks changing, and a bit of urgent gardening this morning means today is a links only edition….sorry.

Information

• Announcing Understanding ECMAScript 6 - Nicholas C. Zakas
• Analysis Paralysis: Over-thinking and Knowing Too Much to Just CODE - Scott Hanselman
• Why I Don’t Inherit from Collection Types - Erik Dietrich
• F#12 : Arrays - Sacha Barber
• Git for Team Foundation Developers - Merging - Kirk Evans
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Aggregating Non-Nullable Numerical Values Without Records - Ricardo Peres
• Introduction to Azure Mobile Services - Tim Benham
• Making it Yours: Configuring Mobile Services .NET Backend - Henrik F Nielsen
• Mobile Services node.js backend updates - Mar 30 2014 - Carlos Figueira
• Stand-up: Developing a node.js application using Monaco (Part 1) - Visual Studio Online "Monaco" - Benjamin Pasero
• Byte Sex - Paul Watt
• "What is Open Source…" the LEGO movie - Greg Duncan

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Information

• Auto Selecting Cultures for Localization in ASP.NET - Rick Strahl takes a look at how you can go about setting the initial culture for users in ASP.NET to ensure that your applications send content in the correct language and cultural context.
• Don’t Make JavaScript Equality Look Worse Than It Is - Craig Gidney discusses the debate over the equalaity == operator in JavaScript, looking at how it gets a slightly worse than deserved reputation from the way people report its behaviour
• My New Free C# Tips eBook - Jason Roberts shares the first instalment of his latest LeanPub eBook containing C# tips - available for free, or any amount you consider it to be worth, with plenty more content to be added in the future
• Future Direction of WCF Data Services - Michael Pizzo of the OData Team sets out the future plans for the WCF Data Services
• Some Useful IIS Rewrite Rules - K.Scott Allen shares some useful rules for IIS URL Rewriting, along with some pointers to other useful resources
• Azure Traffic Manager can now integrate with Azure Web sites! - Jim Cheshire discusses the use of the Windows Azure Traffic Manager, and how it can be used with Windows Azure Websites sites
• Git for Team Foundation Developers - Branches - Kirk Evans shares the second part of a series exploring the use of Git, aiming to give sufficient understanding to allow users to use Git with Visual Studio online. This part explores Branching

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Information

• Speaking JavaScript - Dr Axel Rauschmayer’s latest book, ‘Speaking JavaScript’ is available entirely on line, combining a mix of language and reference, along with historical context this looks like an interesting read. Print editions are also available from O’Reilly.
• JavaScript Frameworks | How to Learn Them Quickly - Craig McKeachie looks at various JavaScript MV* frameworks, decomposing them into the key features of such frameworks to make learning about them easier.
• Tips For JavaScript Promises - K. Scott Allen shares some advice for structuring your JavaScript code using Promises.
• Back to Basics: When allowing user uploads, don’t allow uploads to execute code - Scott Hanselman discusses an important security consideration when allowing user supplied content - don’t trust it ever, and don’t whatever you do allow it to run on your server.
• Get rid of deep null checks - Jakub Niemyjski discusses how extension methods can dramatically improve the readability of code when dealing with nested null checking
• Reordering optimizations - Eric Lippert follows on from his previous ‘Ask the Bug Guys’ article on how locks prevent optimisations with a look at when omitting locks leads to surprising results.
• F#11 : Sequences - Sacha Barber continues his series looking at the F# Language with an exploration of the concept and use of Sequences.
• Git for Team Foundation Developers - Kirk Evans shares a useful summary of Git Version control, providing you with enough information to get up and running with Giit on Visual Studio Online.

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