The Morning Brew

Software

• March 2014 Update - Visual Studio Online "Monaco" - Jeff Fisher highlights the latest batch of improvements and new features made available on the Visual Studio Online product.
• Android and Java developers: MS Open Tech has a SignalR SDK for you! - Olivier Bloch highlights the release of a SignalR SDK for Java and Android developers from Microsoft Open Technologies.

Information

• Living with unchecked exceptions, part two - Eric Lippert thanks the community for their feedback on his last post and continues discussion of uncheced exceptions and how C# provides for handing exceptions
• Back To Basics: Regular Expressions and Formal Languages - Sasha Goldshtein goes back to basics and looks at the computer science concept of Formal Language and looks at the use of regular expressions
• JSON Redux AKA RFC7159 - Tim Bray highlights an updated revision of the JSON specification
• CircuitBreaker - Martin Fowler takes a look at the concept of a Circuit Breaker in software architectures, exploring their use in working with remote systems
• F#6 : Tuples - Sacha Barber continues his series exploring the F# language and programming techniques with a short look at the use of the Tuple type
• async and await -Simplified-Internals - Saurabh Saxena takes a look under the hood at how the framework and compiler implement async and await in this CodeProject article
• Azure Storage Bindings Part 3 - Tables - Mike Stall continues his series looking at the different storage bindings provided in the Windows Azure Platform and SDK. This part explores the use of table storage.

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Monday is a bank/public holiday here in the UK, so as is the usual Morning Brew tradition, I will be taking the day off from publishing here, and will return on Tuesday. Enjoy the weekend.

Information

• Producing permutations, part six - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at generation of permutations, with a discussion on the potential for bias in the random elements of generating random permutations, along with setting a challenge to predict the next cards picked by a sample program.
• .NET Security Part 1 - Simon Cooper takes a look at the built in Code Access Security included in the .NET Framework exploring partial and full trust assemblies, the testing of permissions and the different security modes/levels.
• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Three Tech.Pro Tutorials - James Michael Hare shares three tutorial articles he wrote for Tech.Pro exploring Linq, Tuples and Anonymous Types, and extension methods
• Configuring Nancy to use views in a separate assembly - Colin Angus Mackay takes a look at an alternative way of loading views when working with the Nancy Framework, looking at embedding views as resources in assemblies, and how to bootstrap Nancy to load these.
• Communication with Cross Domain IFrame - A Cross Browser Solution - Tadit Dash takes a look at the solution to passing information between browser frames, and even moving information across two different domains using message passing using postMessage
• Developers and Depression - Killing our Knowledge Workers - AgileScout discusses the importance of good mental health, and some of the typical developer traits and work patterns which don’t help - Important stuff which isn’t discussed often enough.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Cross platform game / app dev - Simon Jackson is giving a session on the issues and solutions for developing games to run on the multitude of different platforms available these days at the Manchester/Warrington NxtGenUG on the evening of Wednesday 15th May.
• NxtGenUG - Typescript - Mark Rendle journeys north to Birmingham to deliver a session on TypeScript on the evening of Tuesday 21st May
• Utilize Roslyn to create the next level plugin capability - Filip Ekberg shares the video of his dotnetConf session which looks at using the Compiler as a Service functionality provided by Roslyn as an alternative way of creating plugins for applications. Don’t forget all the other dotnetConf sessions are also available online and are well worth checking out.

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Another later edition today - normal service resumes tomorrow

Software

• Windows Server "8" Beta - Mark Michelet highlights the Windows 8 Beta release, released last week in amidst the excitement of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview release.
• ReSharper 7 EAP for Visual Studio 11 Beta is now OPEN! - The team over at JetBrains announce the opening of their Early Access Program for ReSharper 7, which now targets the Visual Studio 11 Beta release, giving you a taste (and them valuable feedback) about the next major version of the product.
• CSLA 4 version 4.3 release - Rockford Lhotka announces the v4.3 release of his CSLA 4 application Framework. This release adds support for Silverlight 5 to the extensive lists of supported platforms and technologies

Information

• MSDN Magazine: March 2012 - The March edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online with articles looking at the StreamInsight technology, the use of streaming on Windows Phone, building HTML 5 applications in Sharepoint, AppFabric Service Bus, and much more
• Visual Studio 11 Beta currently incompatible with AsyncCtpLibrary*.dll - Stephen Toub highlights the incompatibility between the current Async CTP for C# and VB.NET and the new Visual Studio 11 beta release, before moving on to look at Implementing a simple ForEachAsync,in response to a question from Jon Skeet, and shares slides and code from his session "The Zen of Async" at the MVP Summit 2012.
• Async Mashups using ASP.NET Web API - Henrik F Nielsen takes a look at combining multiple WebAPI services using Tasks and Asynchronous programming , looking and querying and combining multiple services without blocking the server thread
• ASP.NET Web API & Http Messaging - Sankarsan Bose takes a look at how the various parts of the WebAPI framework architecture come together to for the request processing piepline
• Looking Forward: Single Page Apps, Client-Side Databinding, Entity Change Tracking, and Windows 8 - Dan Wahlin highlights some of the new features of the releases of the last few weeks, discussing Windows 8 and the new Single Page Web Application features in the ASP.Net MVC beta, along with some further resources on the subjects
• What is Single Page Application? - Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the architecture and some of the features behind the ASP.NET MVC Single Page web applications, looking at how they come together to provide for this new style of application.
• HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript improvements in Visual Studio 11 - Pawel Bejger discusses some of the new functionality and improvements to the Visual Studio IDE for those working in web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
• ASP.NET Internals � Managed runtime loader - Jose Reyes discusses the Managed Runtime Loader and how you can control the CLR settings for the instance of the runtime loaded for specific application pools in IIS
• What’s new in WCF 4.5? WebSocket support (Part 1 of 2) - Ido Flatow continues his CodeProject series looking at the new features of WCF in .NET 4.5, with this part being the first of two looking at support for Web Sockets in the platform, giving an overview of the concepts of Web Sockets and how they are implemented in WCF.
• 5. Generic Parameters � Static typing without typing - Dorian Corompt continues this series on F# and Functional Programming with a look at static typing, and how F# performs analysis on the types used to infer the types being used, and how it differs from the imperative languages like C#
• XNA for Windows Phone Walkthrough�Creating the Bizzy Bees game - Tess Ferrandez shares a 7 part series looking at the creation of her first XNA game for Windows Phone 7, focusing on certain interesting aspects of the game’s creation
• Introducing MEF Lightweight Composition and an Updated Composition Provider for ASP.NET MVC - Nick, of the BCL team highlights the latest preview for the Managed Extensibility Framework for .NET which focuses on Lightweight composition, for a wider range of applications, based upon the feedback received for the MEF Composition Provider for ASP.NET MVC, looking at some of the changes and improvements made in this preview which is available via NuGet
• Moving The Philosophy Into Machinery - The latest chapter of the great RESTful debate continues, with Rob Conery issuing a challenge to some of the people involved in recent debates to help him design the most appropriate API for his Alt.Tekpub site, with John Sheehan weighing in with his suggestion in ‘Don�t build the best REST API, build the best HTTP API ‘ and Sean Fao following up in ‘Building a RESTful API - A Followup to John Sheehan‘

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Software

• OpenWrap 1.0.2 available - Seb Lambla announces an updated version of his OpenWrap package manager for .NET. This update introduces the features necessary to support compatibility with the future 2.0 release
• OData Service for Team Foundation Server 2010 v1.0 RTW! - Greg Duncan highlights the release of the RTM of the OData Service for TFS, providing a powerful API to get data from TFS onto other devices and applications.

Information

• Visual Studio 11 .NET Advances - Somasegar continues his series looking at the features included with Visual Studio 11. This part discusses some of the significant updates to the .NET Framework in the 4.5 release.
• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis - Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts looking at the Roslyn CTP release. This part explores the use of Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis illustrating the use of these techniques to look for ignored method return values ins some code.
• Building Visual Studio Extensions with Roslyn - Jonathan Allen is also exploring the use of Roslyn in a series of articles on InfoQ, and in this piece he discusses the various features and providers which enable you to bolt Roslyn powered functionality into Visual Studio, extending the IDE.
• MSDN Magazine November Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives his usual preview of the content coming in next month’s edition of MSDN Magazine, due out next week.
• Async messaging realities - Jimmy Bogard highlights a short post from Ayende which helps to illustrate one of the key concepts in message based architectures, discussing the concept, and how it can make migrating to message based architectures more difficult.
• Effective Techniques and Tools for Reducing Leaks in .NET (C#) - Chuck England discusses a variety of techniques and things you can do to help ensure that your code does not leak memory, ranging from coding standards o the use of profiling.
• Nokia’s First Two Windows Phones Are Here. And They’re Awesome. - The Windows Phone Blog highlights yesterday’s launch of Nokia’s first Windows Phone 7 devices - the moment I and many others have been waiting for to jump on board the WP7 bandwagon.
• Using Windows Azure Regions efficiently - Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the notion of Windows Azure regions and how they map to particular data centres around the world, looking at how the choice of where to host affects performance and reliability, discussing the use of the Windows Azure Traffic Manager CTP, the Content Delivery Network and SQL Azure Data Sync.
• Tombstoning with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7 (and KnockoutJS) - Colin Eberhardt discusses handling the Windows Phone 7 application lifecycle states and transitions in HTML 5 / KnockoutJS based applications running on the phone within PhoneGap

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and EventStore @ E-VAN 25 October 2011 - Jan Van Ryswyck shares the recording of this week’s European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup event, featuring Jonathan Oliver discussing Event sourcing, CQRS, and is EventStore project.
• The Tablet Show - "Resist the Drama" - Dan Wahlin highlights a new podcast series from the chaps behind .NET Rocks (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) where they will be discussing all things tablet development, featuring Dan in show #2 discussing WinRT Development.

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Software

• Code First Migrations: August 2011 CTP Released - The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announce the release of the August 2011 CTP (first CTP) of Entity Framework Code First Migrations. This library adds support for migrating the database schema from one model setup to a later version of the same model. This early CTP requires the Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1, As is usual with CTP release, the team are very interested in your feedback.
• Announcing the Windows Azure AppFabric July release - The Windows Azure AppFabric Team announced the release of their July update and enhancements to the Windows Azure AppFabric Management Portal and the Access Control service, including improved localisation for the Management Portal, support for Access Control rules with 2 input claims, UTF-8 support for O-Auth and the removal of ACS quotas on configuration data.

Information

• Entity Framework Code First Migrations: Alpha - NuGet Package of the Week #10 - Scott Hanselman explores the newly released Entity Framework Code First Migrations CTP release as a part of his NuGet Package of the Week series, sharing some information about the package and looking at it in use.
• Code First Migrations: Walkthrough of August 2011 CTP - Reco of the ADO.NET team also gives a walkthrough of the functionality provided by the Code First Migrations CTP discussing the different types of migration it supports and how it scripts these changes.
• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Default Parameters are Compile-Time Substitutions - James Michael Hare continues his C#/.NET Little Pitfalls series with a look at the use of Default Parameters in C# 4 and how they are implemented using a compiler trick which bakes the default values at compile time
• Simple way of null parameter validation - Ishtiyaq Sheikh shares a simple helper extension method to make writing some of the common parameter validation code that appears in lots of methods shorter and simpler.
• Preprocessor? .NET don’t need no stinkin’ preprocessor! - David Anson also is looking at parameter and other variable validation using Debug.Assert, showing its default use, discussing how the message often duplicates the expression being asserted upon and shares an custom extension of the Debug.Assert which takes away this duplication using expression trees.
• Entity Framework v4.1 update 1, the Kill-The-Tool-Eco-system version & Entity Framework June 2011 CTP (v4.2) is now supported in Entity Framework Profiler - Frans Bouma and the Hibernating Rhinos team discuss a breaking change in Entity Framework 4.1 Update 1 which breaks the integration of their respective data access profilers in this version of Entity Framework, discussing how their integtration works, and what in this update caused them problems, and both look at work around solutions.
• MEF Features - with Examples - Mahadesh Mahalingappa digs into a number of the key features of the Managed Extensibility Framework, looking at the background to the feature and illustrating with examples of each.
• My eBook and articles series on OData for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 is complete. - Michael Crump has updated his OData for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 article series, and has also compiled it into e-book format, available for $2.99 via SilverlightShow.Net, All the article content is also available free of charge on the SilverlightShow site.
• Windows Phone Mango Feature Videos - Mike Ormond highlights a series of videos from the Windows Phone team where the people responsible for each of the new features discusses their feature and its use.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: .Net Minimalist Web Dev - The Manchester / Warrington chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Mark Rendle on Wednesday 17th August for a session looking at two lightweight alternative frameworks on the .NET platform, Simple.Data for data access and Nancy for a Sinatra like web framework
• Coding for PowerShell - DevEvening - The DevEvening User Group in Woking welcome Jimmy Skowronski for a session exploring PowerShell development, from the basics upwards on Wednesday 31st August

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Windows Phone Mango

• Microsoft Previews Next Release of Windows Phone - Microsoft official Press Release announcing the preview release of the next release of Windows Phone (7.1 / Mango)
• Microsoft officially unveils Mango; Hundreds of improvements on the way - The Windows Phone Team Blog also make the announcement, highlighting the recordings of the announcement which include demos and a live chat and discussing some of the new features.
• Developer News: Beta Mango Tools Available Today - Along with the Platform preview release, the Windows Phone Team also announces the availability of the Beta Mango Developer Tools
• Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 - Beta & Resources for Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta - Nikita Polyakov highlights the various download and documentation links for the Developer Tools for the beta release of the Mango tool set
• See Microsoft Windows Phone"Mango" Video Collection - Eric Ligman highlights a series of videos demonstrating some of the new features of the Windows Phone Mango release, exploring the various phone features new in this release.
• OData Updates in Windows Phone "Mango" - Glenn Gailey highlights some of the new features for working with OData data feeds in the Mango release.
• MVVM Light Toolkit patch for WP7 Mango Beta - Laurent Bugnion releases an update to his MVVM Light framework to make it compatible with the Windows Phone 7.1 platform and tooling.
• Augmented Mango - SLARToolkit for Windows Phone - Rene Schulte announces the release of the SLARToolkit for Windows Phone (Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit) which takes advantage of the new Mango APIs for accessing the devices camera, showing it in use, and discussing how you write code against the library.

Information

• Windows Phone Mango - Whatâ’s New? ("Overview"- Part 0 of - Alex Golesh shares a comprehensive 8 part series of posts looking at the various aspects and features of the Mango Windows Phone Release. Further parts of the series explore:
  • Local Database - Part 1 of 8
  • Local Data - Part 2 of 8
  • New Sensors & Tooling Enhancements- Part 3 of 8 -
  • Camera - Part 4 of 8
  • Background Agents -Part 5 of 8
  • Fast Application Switch (FAS) - Part 6 of 8
  • Silverlight/XNA Interoperability - Part 7 of 8
  • Push Notifications & Tiles - Part 8 of 8
• Mango from the trenches part 1: Adding a new live tile to the start page #wp7dev - Laurent Bugnion also takes a look at the new release, kicking off a series looking at the new features, and in this first part explores the new Live Tile support.
• NuGet for the Enterprise: NuGet in a Continuous Integration Automated Build System - Scott Hanselman follows on from his TechEd talk on using NuGet in the Enterprise, discussing how NuGet can be integrated into your software development lifecycle, highlighting the videos of the session, and walking through the process of automating NuGet package creation using Continuous Integration.
• Don’t Do Role-Based Authorization Checks; Do Activity-Based Checks - Derick Bailey discusses developing Authorisation systems, discussing how he finds Role Based authorisation doesn’t always fit well, and discussing authorising using an Activity based approach.
• MVVM Backlash - Ward Bell discusses his like of the MVVM pattern, and then proceeds to take an objective view of the pattern discussing its major advantages, and how if you don’t care about those aspects then MVVM may not be the best fit for you.
• Creating a Line Chart using the HTML 5 Canvas - Dan Wahlin takes a look at programming against the HTML 5 Canvas using JavaScript, illustrating with the creation of a simple charting control which draws line graphs.
• The Darkness Behind DateTime.Now - Keyvan Nayyeri discusses the use of DateTime.Now, DateTime.UtcNow and the Stopwatch class, talking about where each should be used, and looking internal implementations and the relative performance of each.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Specifying Event Listeners in XML Configuration , Collection Restrictions & The SaveOrUpdate Event - Ricardo Peres highlights a few NHibenate Pitfalls and Gotchas, some caused by bugs, others by misunderstandings, along with showing workarounds where appropriate
• What’s New in Silverlight 5? - Mohammad Elsheimy gives a run through of the features of Silverlight 5, illustrating with some shared demo code in this CodeProject article

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event - MVC 3 - The Coventry NxtGenUG welcome Ian Russell for a session on ASP.NET MVC3 on the evening of Monday 20th June at the The Royal British Legion in Coventry
• TechDays 2011: dev session recordings, slides and content online - The MSDN ‘Belux’ team highlight the recordings of the sessions from their recent TechDays events featuring an excellent range of speakers and topics allowing those not able to attend to gain considerable benefit from the event.

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Software

• Improved HTML Copy in the latest Productivity Power Tools - Kirill Osenkov highlights the latest release of the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010 which includes a major improvement to the HTML Copy functionality. ‘nmarun’ also reports that VS2010 crashes fixed with Productivity Power Tools upgrade

Information

• Task Parallel Library: 5 of n - CodeProject - Sacha Barber continues his Code Project series on the Task Parallel Library. In this part Sacha takes a look at some of the classes in the Framework which while not part of the TPL, support the scenarios of TPL by providing concurrent safe collection implementations.
• Lessons Learned developing a Windows Phone 7 App - Cameron Skinner shares a collection of lessons that he learned during writing his first Windows Phone 7 application, a game which is now available on the marketplace.
• Removing the IE9 Compatibility Button, and HTML1115 warning - Jon Box discusses how you can remove the compatibility button from the Internet Explorer 9 Toolbar by specifying which mode you want IE to use explicitly in your markup.
• IE9 Standards Mode Accepts only text/css for stylesheets - Eric Lawrence highlights an important gotcha about using the correct mime types when serving content to Internet Explorer 9 when it is running in standards mode.
• Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper Updated - Greg Duncan highlights an update to the Visual Studio 2010 and MSDN Licensing Whitepaper, a great readbale guide to what you are allowed to do with the licenses you have for VS / MSDN
• Introducing the Kinect WPF Toolkit - VBandi discusses some of the functionality of the Kinect WPF toolkit which allows you to use the Kinect technology in your own WPF applications.
• Associations in EF 4.1 Code First: Part 1 - Introduction and Basic Concepts - Morteza Manavi starts a series of posts looking at Entity Framework 4.1’s Code First functionality, setting the scene and exploring the basics of code first in this first part.
• Comparing MVC 3 Helpers: Using Extension Methods and Declarative Razor @helper Syntax - Jon Galloway takes a look at the use of Extension Methods and Razor Declarative Helpers, comparing and contrasting the two implementations
• Multiparadigmatic .NET series from Ted Neward - Arun highlights a nice series of articles from Ted Neward which have been featured in MSDN magazine over the past 7 months.

Community

• The Stack - Liverpool .NET User Group - April 2011 - Wednesday 20th April sees the launch of a new .NET Usergroup in Liverpool, UK. This first event has two sessions covering Windows Azure and Silverlight
• Seb Lambla: Building hypermedia-driven applications with OpenRasta 3 - Seb Lambla will be giving a session on implementing hypermedia applications using his OpenRasta 3 framework, exploring the implementation of the RestBucks sample application. The event is tomorrow (Tues 29th March) and his hosted at Skills Matter in London.
• Mix11 recap - Windows Phone 7 - WP7Dev User group - The Windows Phone 7 Usergroup welcome Paul Foster for a recap of the key announcements from Mix 11 and also demos of peoples applications on the evening of Wednesday 20th April

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Update: Looks like I forgot to assign the Tags/Categories to this post, so some of you may have missed out on it. I’ve added them now - thanks to Dan Puzey for spotting it

Software

• Microsoft Project Code-Named ‘Houston’� CTP 1 (August 2010 Update) - The SQL Azure team announce the August 2010 CTP release of ‘Houston’ their light weight database management tool for SQL Azure. This CTP update features improved navigation and search, better visibility of database statistics, table, view and stored procedure designers. This preview version has also been deployed to all datacenters allowing you to experience better performance by using an instance local to your database.

Information

• Introduction to the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript - Buffering - Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts exploring the Reactive Extension for JavaScript with a look at the various techniques the framework provides for collecting values from observables and buffering them into an array which is then returned to your code.
• A quick primer on .NET web frameworks - Chad Myers gives an overview of some of the more common ASP.NET based web frameworks, looking briefly at what each does well and does badly.
• Chakra: Interoperability Means More Than Just Standards - Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses some of the types of decision the team implementing the Internet Explorer 9 JavaScript engine had to make relating to the standards compliant implementation they are creating
• MSDEV Video Series Highlights Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) - Bruce Kyle highlights a new series of videos from MSDev exploring some of the new key concepts in the Internet Explorer 9
• LightSwitch & Source Control & LightSwitch on the wire - Ayende rounds up this series of posts sharing his initial impressions of Visual Studio LightSwitch with a look at how LightSwitch’s generated code will work in Version Control system environments, and finds that if you include images in your data (and those images are large) then you are in for a wait while the LightSwitch screens download.
• Profilers, in-process side-by-side CLR instances, and a free test harness - David Broman looks at the requirement for profilers in .NET 4 which implement ICorProfilerCallback3 to be aware of side-by-side CLR instances, exploring what this Side-By-Side feature is, and how your profiling code can be made to accommodate it.
• Inspecting Local Root Lifetime - Sasha Goldshtein looks at the SOS debugger command !GCInfo which allows you to workout when local variables become active or inactive
• MVC 3 Preview 1 VS 2010 Template w/ Razor, Html 5 Boilerplate and OpenId Authentication | Adventures in HttpContext - Michael Hamrah shares an ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 Visual Studio 2010 project template which combines the Razor view engine with HTML5 Boilerplate from Paul Irish, and replaces the MembershipProvider with OpenID authentication implemented using DotNetOpenAuth.
• Experiments with WindowChrome - ‘ jwalk’ explores the WindowChrome WPF class included in the WPF Shell Integration Library which shipped as a part of the WPF Microsoft Ribbon Control, looking at some of the additional window styling that this class enables.
• An easier way to unit test INotifyPropertyChanged in Silverlight/WPF - Benjamin Day shares a simple class to help make testing IPropertyNotified implementations in classes much easier

Community

• Behind the scenes at mvcConf: How we ran a free virtual conference - Jon Galloway talks about his experience as one of the organisers of the very successful mvcConf virtual conference, discussing how the team organised the virtual event, the things that worked and the things that they could improve on for next time.
• Open Source? There’s an annual award for that… "Welcome to the 2010 Open Source Awards" - Greg Duncan highlights the Open Source Awards 2010, a virtual award organised by Packt Publishing, with projects nominated and voted on by you. Nominations are open unitl 17th September, so if you know of a worthy project get it nominated.

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