The Morning Brew

Software

• Log Parser Studio 2.0 now out (Log Parser GUI++) - Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of LogParser Studio, a GUI environment for working with the LogParser 2.2 which allows you to issue SQL like queries against a wide range of log file formats.

Information

• String concatenation behind the scenes, part one - Eric Lippert kicks off a new series of posts looking the art and science of string concatenation, looking at some of the optimisations he worked on that got included in the C# compiler.
• Don’t Write Code You Don’t Need - Erik Dietrich shares some sage advice about writing too much code and exposing too much of your code to the consumers of that code, along with the perils of Mutability.
• Hidden Code Mines - Phil Haack discusses a concept he is calling code mines, those bits of innocuous code which would get skipped over in a code review, but actually contain some subtle bug which will explode when you least expect.
• 3 Pillars of Pragmatic Agility - David Starr highlights his latest article for Visual Studio Magazine which proposes a new standard for agile software development which builds on the work of the last 12 years of being agile in a variety of forms.
• AGENT: The World’s Smartest Watch - Rob Chartier takes a look at AGENT, the smart watch which is based upon the .NET Micro Framework with an API allowing .NET developer to leverage the power of a small write mounted device.

Community

• DareDevs: TDD, where did it all go wrong - DareDevs (formerly Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG) welcome Ian Cooper for a session on TDD, and how it has evolved since the original TDD rules, this Wednesday evening (19 June)
• Events | CraftyCoders - The Crafy Coders (Bromsgrove) have a sessions from Dan Kendall, Neil Barnwell and Jay McGuiness/James Morcom on Thursday 20th June 2013 where they will all be exploring Builds and Deployment. Crafty Coders are also running a whole day (Saturday) Code Retreat on Saturday 31st August.

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Software

• Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development - Scott Guthrie announces the latest batch of improvements to the Windows Azure Mobile Services, including a .NET API available via NuGet, Android push notifications, free database and websites and much more
• Glimpse 1.4.2 released - Anthony van der Hoorn announces another minor update to address some reported issues in Glimpse 1.4, with a handful of issues addressed in the Glimpse.Core module.
• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v6.0-ASP.NET MVC Edition) is Released - Ashraful Alam Joy highlights the release of the 6th version of the Employee Info Starter Kit, a fully formed application running on ASP.NET MVC4, Entity Framework 4.3 and SQL Compact, a great learning tool, and also a starting point for your own applications of this nature.

Information

• Overriding filters in ASP.NET Web API vNext - Filip W takes a look at the next release of Web API and explores how you can override filters, addressing one of the things which is currently very difficult to achieve.
• Logging: The Most Important Part of Any Application - NSProgrammer discusses the importance of good logging in your applications, looking the top 10 features that logging must provide to be useful
• Using Raygun for Logging in Windows Phone Applications - Tendulkar takes a look at integrating the Raygun.Io logging service/framework into a Windows Phone application to help gather information about your applications issues.
• Stop Doing Internet Wrong - Scott Hanselman discusses a bunch of things that we as web developers are still getting wrong when developing sites, ranging from bad linking to mobile sites to not marking up checkboxes correctly.

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Software

• Architecture Tools in ReSharper 8 - The JetBrains team show off some of their new Architecture related features for exploring inter project dependencies and relationships.
• !Exploitable crash analyzer version 1.6 - The Security Development Lifecycle - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Andy Renk of the Microsoft SDL Team highlights the release last month of the !Exploitable crash analyzer version 1.6, a WinDbg extension which provides crash analysis and security risk assessment

Information

• What’s the difference? sizeof and Marshal.SizeOf - Eric Lippert discusses why these two seemingly similar methods give different values, one dealing with the managed memory requirements of the type and the other dealing with the unmanaged memory size.
• System.BadImageFormatException: Bad IL Range - what it is going on! - Carmelo Pulvirent discusses an interesting problem as a result of a BadImageFormatException being thrown due to bad IL in an assembly
• Plan Operator Tuesday round-up - Rob Farley rounds up all the SQL Plan Operator related posts from Tuesday, linking to them all from a fake execution plan - nice idea, and some really geat content there too.
• SQL Injection: What’s That? - The Daily WTF reminds that not all developers are as enlightened as we would like regarding security concepts such as SQL Injection.
• How my company uses Windows Azure in development process - Gunnar Peipman discusses the why and how of his companies use of Windows Azure, the various benefits its gives them, and some of the impacts on their architecture from using Azure.

Community

• Upcoming Speaking events: Aberdeen and Edinburgh - Bill Wagner is visiting Scotland this summer, and as part of his golfing holiday will be giving two talks, one in Aberdeen on 4th July and one in Glasgow on 13th July where he will discuss C# and async.

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Software

• Announcing the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension BETA - Willy Peter Schaub highlights the beta release of the ALM Rangers Unit Test Generator Extension for Visual Studio. The team are very keen for people to try it out and to give feedback
• Glimpse 1.4.1 Released - Glimpse gets a minor update to address a couple of reported issues with Glimpse 1.4. There are updated packages for Glimpse.Core and Glimpse.MVC*
• Getting a Fix on Fixie - Sharon Cichelli highlights Fixie a new testing framework from Patrick Lioi, giving a brief overview of its use, and suggesting how you can get involved in the project.

Information

• NuGet Package Restore Issues - Immo Landwerth discusses some problems people are running into with the Microsoft.Bcl.Build and Microsoft.Bcl.Compression pacakges and the NuGet Package Restore caused by its custom build targets. This post discusses the issues in depth and shares some workarounds.
• Replacing jQuery.live() with jQuery.on() - Rick Strahl looks at one of the more significant changes between jQuery 1.9 and 1.10, the removal of the jQuery,live() function, and looks at migrating to the newer jQuery.on().
• SQL Is Hard - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses some of the difficulties people have in learning SQL properly, and highlights the launch of SQLisHard.com, a new learning resource to help people get up to speed.
• Painless management of a logging table in SQL Server - Hugo Kornelis discusses techniques for managing and removing records from logging tables, along the way discussing some best practices for design, and highlighting some of the difficulties encountered when working with tables with billions of rows.

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Software

• Glimpse Heads-Up Display released - The Glimpse Team announce the release of the Glimpse ‘Heads Up Display’ an significant new UI to their excellent profiling and debugging tool. I won’t say much more here, as Yesterday’s ‘Afternoon Tea’ had lots of information
• NuDoc: A .NET XML API Documentation Reader - Daniel Cazzulino shares NuDoc an NuGet package which reads the XML Documentation files generated by the build process which can form the basis of tooling to generate human readable documentation in any format you choose.
• June 2013 Internet Explorer Updates - The Internet Explorer Team highlight their latest updates package which addresses 19 privately reported vulnerabilities across Internet Explorer 6-10

Information

• All about promises (for Windows Store apps written in JavaScript) - Kraig Brockschmidt shares a detailed discussion on the use of Promises in Windows 8 Application Development in JavaScript which allow you to work correctly with asynchronous APIs, a critical part of Win8 application development.
• Simple Validation with MVVM for Windows Store apps - Jeremy Likness takes a look at validation in an MVVM setting and explores the creation of your own simple validation implementation.
• Understanding PowerShell’s Type Conversion Magic - Lee Holmes takes a look at the magic ‘it just works’ world of type conversion in PowerShell, looking at the hard work that PowerShell does behind the scenes to make it ‘just work’
• Doing the Time-Warp - Andy Harman takes a look at making code which makes repeated use of DateTime.Now behave as intended by creating time bubbles which freeze the time for that block of code.

Community

• F# London Meetup, Thursday: Machine Learning Hands On with F# - Don Syme highlights the F# London Meetup being held tomorrow (Thursday) at Skills Matter where Phil Trelford will be running a Hands On session on machine learning.

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A couple of weeks ago I watched the dotNetConf Open Source .NET Panel’ discussion which brought together a number of people from the .NET Open Source communities to discuss the state of Open Source in our community. The discussion was a good one, well worth watching and made me start to think about some of the Open Source projects I like – one of which features in this post.

Glimpse

Glimpse provides the answer for server side code that the likes of Firebug and Chrome Developer Tools provide for the client side developer. The project was originally conceived by Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar back in early 2011, and launched at Mix11’s Open Source Fest.

Glimpse did the usual Open Source project dance through many <1.0 releases, and mid last year became a project supported by Red Gate. Since then things have rapidly accelerated, and the community team have blasted beyond the 1.0 release threshold.

Today sees the announcement of Glimpse 1.4, along with a significant new look and feel introducing a Heads Up Display to make the most significant and useful information always available when Glimpse is enabled. Check out the announcement post over on the Glimpse Blog for the full lowdown, including a short video which gives a real impression of how the new Heads Up Display actually works.

Get Your Head Up!

I love that adding Glimpse to a project while working is as simple as adding a NuGet package

Install-Package Glimpse.MVC4

Once installed, build and run your solution, and then hit up the Glimpse Handler to see what’s installed and to enable the tool

http://localhost:12345/glimpse.axd

So far all as expected. Now head back to your web application, and you will be greeted by the new look Heads Up Display at the bottom of the page, in all its Metro’esque glory.

The Heads Up Display appears across the bottom of all pages when enabled, providing at a glance key metrics about the page:

• Key Overall Timing Metrics
  • Overall Time
  • Time spent network communicating
  • Time Spent processing Server Side Code
  • Time until DOM Ready
• Server Side Processing Breakdown
  • In the MVC case identifying the Controller
  • The Action processing time
  • The View processing time
  • The Time taken by Database queries triggered by the page
• Realtime updating view of the Ajax Requests

Hovering the mouse over each of these sections gives further information about the metrics in a concise and clear, yet information dense way:

More new UI awaits you on clicking the ‘g’ logo in the corner, the traditional way to summon Glimpse’s detailed FireBug like UI to the foreground, which has also had the Metro style make over. If you’ve ever used Glimpse before you will be familiar with the range of information available in here, including the very useful (and even prettier now) Timeline view:

Why Glimpse Works for me

1. Very, very easy to get up and running
   The ‘Pit Of Success’ is easy to get into, install the package, enable via a URL, and you are reaping the rewards.
2. Tells me useful information
   Glimpse has the useful metrics, configuration and information readily available – other than enabling it there is nothing more that needs to be done
3. Friendly and far reaching community
   Nik and Anthony are nice chaps and have fostered a good community round Glimpse, and care about engagement in the open source community. The community is growing with with ever increasing numbers of contributors and extensions for all kinds of things ranging from pure ADO to SignalR - I’ve found the SignalR one useful on a number of occasions
4. Easy Extension
   It’s pretty simple to start adding your monitoring for your own functionality to a custom Glimpse tab (so easy I’ve managed it!)

I’ve found having the metrics Glimpse provides to be invaluable on a countless occasions, and I encourage you to try it out, or even better, get involved with the project itself.

Full Disclosure – Anthony & Nik gave me a preview of the new Head Up Display functionality a few days ago, which prompted me to tell you how much I’ve liked Glimpse for quite some time – No money exchanged hands, but I might let them buy me a drink when I finally get to meet them both

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Update: Getting lots and lots of comment spam at the moment so am going to disable comments for a few days - If you want to feed back you can always Tweet Me

Information

• Construction destruction - Eric Lippert takes a look at the birth and death of objects, and how these events can cause side effects, along with the usual twist to what you might expect to take place.
• When the Google beats on your SignalR - Jeff Putz highlights how he received a large number of exceptions from his SignalR endpoint caused by GoogleBot, and shares a robots.txt exclusion to make Google and other well behaved bots avoid the SignalR endpoint.
• Understanding the risk of mixed content warnings - Troy Hunt continues his discussion of website security with a look at the dangers of mixed content, where items on a ‘Secure’ page are loaded over a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS.
• JSON vs. XML: Some hard numbers about verbosity - We all know that XML is quite a bloated data transfer form, and the Json is more concise, and in this article ‘Pragmateek’ takes a look at this and provides some actual numbers, including a look at applying compression to the data.
• Download C# Language Specification 5.0 & Download Visual Basic Language Specification 11.0 - The official language specification documents for C#5 and VB11 are now available for download from the Microsoft Downloads site - these are a great reference, and actually make interesting reading too - what better way to learn about how your language of choice works than to look at the original specification.
• Do you really need API Versioning? - Andreas Krohn reviews the arguments for and against API versioning strategies discussing the problems it tries to solve, as well as looking at how to go about it, and questions if you really need to do it.
• Spooling in SQL execution plans - Rob Farley takes a look at the Spool operators in SQL execution plans, explaining what their purpose is and why certain statements include them. I really love database query performance tuning, and this is a nice article to explain a common operator.
• Get Your Map of the Microsoft Developer Platform World - Vitor Ciaramella has created a nice map outlining the various branches of the Microsoft Development eco-sphere - useful to see what is out there and how some bits related, especially if you are a specialist in a particular area.

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Software

• Introducing VsixCompres - a NuGet package to compress your Visual Studio Package - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi shares a NuGet package which manipulates the build process for your Visual Studio Extension projects to add in generation of a fully compressed VSIX build artefact.

Information

• Reactive benefits with commodity option barrier events - Wes McClure takes a look at refactoring some code to make use of the reactive extensions and along the way making the code clearer and simpler
• CSI: Visual Studio - Unable to translate Unicode character at index X to specified code page - Scott Hanselman discusses the tracking down of a bizarre build error caused by some invalid characters in the PATH environment variables.
• WintellectNOW FTW - Wintellect now providing on-demand learning for everyone (and there&#39;s even a few free sessions too) - Greg Duncan highlights some free and some paid for trainign content from Wintellect. The free modules available include jQuery, Azure and IntelliTrace content.
• Using Environment.FailFast - Richard Carr takes a look at how to get your application to bail out completely in the case that something very serious has gone wrong using Environment.FailFast.
• Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them. - Monjurul Habib shares a nice overview of all things Agile, looking at the guiding principles and the various skills , practices and techniques which under pin in this CodeProject article.

Community

• TechEd North America 2013 - Channel 9 now has all the session recordings from TechEd available online, giving you access to what appears to be over 700 sessions of content covering all aspects of the Microsoft world.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Making Windows Store Dance - The Birmingham NxtGenUG welcome Christopher Myhill for a session on building applications for the Windows Store, sharing key lessons learnt when crafting your application for the store. The event takes place the evening of Tuesday 18th June

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