The Morning Brew

It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

• Introducing jQuery++ - Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
• Bundler.NET - Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
• bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy - Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
• #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available - Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
• Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 - Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
• Tree Surgeon - Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? - Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
• Introducing RabbitBus - Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

• Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject - Stephen Toub discusses in detail the story behind the performance improvements in the Release Candidate implementation of StreamReader.ReadLineAsync over that of the beta release.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages with VS 2012 RC & ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages RC NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can use the latest nightly builds of the ASP.NET Web Stack, made available as NuGet packages, with the Visual Studio 2012 RC release, and also provides details of the offical packages for the RC release.
• AspectMap - Part 2 - An Exception Handling Helper - Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.
• 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5] - Martin Beeby highlights 5 key concepts which you should explore when implementing your Windows 8 Metro Style applications in JavaScript and HTML5
• My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods - Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.
• Setup Improvements for Visual Studio - David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App - Part 6 Selecting HTML with JQuery, Part 7 Local Storage, Part 8 Building a Better Form, Part 9 Show-Hide Wizard Using jQuery & Part 10 Validate, Validate, Validate - Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at using HTML5 and JavaScript to construct a Line of Business application, looking at using jQuery to work with HTML, exploring the use of Local Storage, and examining how you can use HTML5 to create better user input forms and validate the input.
• Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service - Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections
• Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata &Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API - Filip W continues his series looking at the use of WebAPI with a look adding additional metadata such as the number of results found and the number returned, and look at how you can add in the ability to control the order of filters being applied to requests.
• Analyzing some "˜Big" Data Using C#, Azure And Apache Hadoop - Analyzing Stack Overflow Data Dumps - Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at some of the concepts of ‘Big Data’ analysis on the Azure platform making use of MapReduce via Apache Hadoop, digging into a set of data from StackOverflow in this CodeProject article.
• Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express - Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.
• Anders Hejlsberg Is Right: You Cannot Maintain Large Programs In JavaScript - In a recent Channel 9 discussion Anders Hejlsberg suggested that maintaining large programs in JavaScript was very difficult. In this short post Derek Bailey shares his thoughts. Be sure to have a read of the comments on this one for some further discussion.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

• DDD Southwest - Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)
  • Session Notes 1 : Performance & Scalability
  • Session Notes 2 : Web Sockets & SignalR
  • Session Notes 3 : Defensive Programming 101
  • Session Notes 4 : Redis Is the New Black
• DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 - Async 20/20 presentation - Liam Westley shares the audio recording along side the slides from his 20/20 lunch time presentation at DDD SW looking at Async in .NET 4.5
• My impressions of dddsw 4, DDDSW 4 - StyleCop: Breaking down the barriers to entry & Feedback from StyleCop presentation at DDDSW - Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of DDD South west, along with the details of his presentation on StyleCop, and the feedback received.
• My DDDSW AppHarbor 20/20 talk - Phil Jones shares the slides from his hastily compiled but well received 20/20 presentation on the use of AppHarbor for hosting your .NET applications.
• Is your code solid &< Is-your-code-SOLID - GitHub - Nathan Gloyn shares the slides and code from his DDD SW session on the application of the SOLID Principles of object oriented programming.
• NuGet-PackageNPublish - Joel Hammond-Turner shares the code for the NuGet Package and Publish tooling that he presented in his DDD SW session on NuGet in the enterprise,
• Developer Developer Developer South West 2012 - Jackie Pollock shares her experiences as an attendee at DDDSW, giving a summary of each of the talks she attended.
• Agenda - The DDDSW agenda has been updated with links to the various slides and downloads for many of the sessions presented.

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Last Thursday (15th May) I presented at the Liverpool Users of .NET monthly meeting on F#, the Microsoft Research Language demonstrating that the CLR is a good basis for Functional Programming. My talk was mainly a language overview, with the intention to give the audience a grounding upon which they could get started with the language and functional programming in general.

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The code samples from the presentation, including one or two I skipped out can be found here:
F# Presentation - Demo Code

My thanks to the audience - you made giving the talk very easy, and enjoyable and especially to Hakim Cassimally for the nice write up of the talk over on his blog.

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Last night I gave a presentation to the Liverpool Geekup group about NHibernate, thanks to everyone who came along - you were all a very nice audience. The slides from the presentation entitled Getting a Good Nights Sleep - ORM with NHibernate are available as a PDF, here. There are a number of links in the slides, but here is a more comprehensive list of links that people may find useful or interesting

• NHibernateDataSource: A DataSourceControl for ASP.NET 2.0
  The Article and code for the 2 way databinding library of NHibernate objects
• NHibernate Best Practices with ASP.NET, 1.2nd Ed.
  A good source of information about using NHibernate within web applications
• NHibernate Reference Documentation
  The official documentation for NHibernate
• TheServerSide: NHibernate
  Excellent Introductory article from TheServerSide.NET covering most of the basics of NHibernate
• NHibernate Query Analyser
  NHibernate query analyser allows you to work interactively with your NHibernate Mapped objects
• Ayende@Rahien - Presentations
  A collection of great NHibernate presentations, covering lots of the more advanced functionality

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