The Morning Brew

Software

• NCache 3.1 Open Sourced – Kay Ewbank highlights the open sourcing of the NCache project with their 3.1 release
• New handy Visual Studio extensions – part 2 – Mads Kristensen discusses a number of his recent Visual Studio Extensions, including an open website from Azure, Visual Studio Extension Updater, and Command Prompt here extensions.

Information

• .NET Core API Review 2015-01-14 – The .NET Core team share the video recording of their January API Review Meeting, an interesting watch and glimpse into the now open source process of developing .NET Core.
• Upgrading Visual Studio 2015 Preview to ASP.NET 5/MVC 6 RC – Stephen Walther takes a look at the process of updating Visual Studio 2015 Preview to use the latest ASP.NET 5 MVC6 Nightly Builds, providing a walk through of the process.
• Why I write unit tests and why you should too – Jaime González García shares what was a work email response about unit testing, and why he believes in it strongly as a practice for good software development.
• Excerpts from the RavenDB Performance team report: Etags and evil code, Part I – Ayende discusses the ETag, and looks at the performance of code to parse their value from a string.
• ASP.NET 5 and AngularJS Part 1, Configuring Grunt, Uglify, and AngularJS, ASP.NET 5 and AngularJS Part 2, Using the MVC 6 Web API, ASP.NET 5 and AngularJS Part 3, Adding Client Routing, ASP.NET 5 and AngularJS Part 4, Using Entity Framework 7 &ASP.NET 5 and AngularJS Part 5, Form Validation – Stephen Walther has started a series looking at using Angular JS and ASP.NET 5 (MVC and WebAPI) and Entity Framework
• Markdown in Visual Studio Online – Allen Clark takes a look at the support for Markdown in Visual Studio Online

Community

• Hot Off the Press! Azure Technical Webinars Published – Mike Heald announces the release of the programme of Webinar and in person Windows Azure events for the next 6 months

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Big post today following yesterday’s significant announcements

Software

• Opening up Visual Studio and .NET to Every Developer, Any Application: .NET Server Core open source and cross platform, Visual Studio Community 2013 and preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 – Somasegar shares the major announcements from today regarding Visual Studio 2015, Community Edition and the open sourcing of the .NET Framework
• Announcing Open Source of .NET Core Framework, .NET Core Distribution for Linux/OSX, and Free Visual Studio Community Edition – Scott Guthrie weighs in on the announcement of the open sourcing of the .NET framework runtime and libraries, support for .NET Core on Linux and OSX, and community edition of Visual Studio 2013
• .NET Core is Open Source – Immo Landwerth discusses the announcement of the .NET Core becoming open source, the development in the open, rolling your own builds of the framework and much more
• Announcing .NET 2015 – .NET as Open Source, .NET on Mac and Linux, and Visual Studio Community – Scott Hanselman shares his perspectives on the announcements both open sourcing and the Visual Studio announcements
• Microsoft Open Sources .NET and Mono – Miguel de Icaza shares the Mono and Xamarin perspective on the open sourcing of the .NET Framework core.
• Visual Studio 2015 Preview, Visual Studio Community 2013, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, and More – John Montgomery of the Visual Studio team announces three different releases – the latest preview of Visual Studio vNext (now called 2015), Update 4 for VS 2013 and a new Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition which really opens up the availability of professional grade tools to all developers.
• Announcing .NET 2015 Preview: A New Era for .NET – The .NET Team share an overview of what is in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release, good for a hich level outlook on everything included
• Announcing Visual Studio 2015 Preview and Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 Availability – Charles Sterling highlights the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) aspects of the Visual Studio Preview and Update 4 release
• Announcing ASP.NET features in Visual Studio 2015 Preview and VS2013 Update 4 – .NET Web Development and Tools Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Xinyang Qiu shares the ASP.NET Features included in both the Update 4 to Visual Studio 2013 and the new features in Visual Studio 2015 Preview.
• Introducing the Visual Studio 2015 Preview for C# and VB – Kasey Uhlenhuth highlights a series of upcoming posts focusing on the languages updates in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview
• Visual Studio 2015 Preview is Now Available – Eric Battalio shares the new features available for C++ developers in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview
• Visual Studio 2015 Preview – The Offical Download and release notes for the Visual Studio 2015 Preview Release
• Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (2013.4) RTM – The Offical Download and release notes for the Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 Release
• Visual Studio Community 2013 – The Offical Download and release notes for the Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition Release
• Announcing TypeScript 1.3 – TypeScript – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Jonathan Turner annoucnes the release of TypeScript 1.3 in both the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release and as a VS2013 Extension and NPM packageand sources.
• Announcing a preview of F# 4.0 and the Visual F# Tools in VS 2015 – The F# Team announce the release of F#4 Preview as a part of the VS 2015 Preview
• NuGet 3.0 Preview – The NuGet Team also announce a preview release of their V3 as a part of the Visual Studio 2015 Preview Release, with preview releases planned for VS 2012 and 2013 soon.

Information

• Open Source .NET – why should you care? – Filip W discusses the significance of the Open Source announcements for the .NET Framework
• Q & A on Visual Studio Community 2013 and 2015 Preview – Dr. Doris Chen shares a Question and Answer document on te Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition and VS 2015 Preview releases answering many of the most common questions
• Microsoft gets wild on GitHub – Repo-repo of the Day: microsoft.github.io – Greg Duncan highlights the Microsoft GitHub site, where all the action ha occured yesterday regarding the Open Source releases.
• The Roadmap for WPF – The WPF Team share a look at their roadmap for the future of WPF, looking at the areas they are prioritizing and the improvements planned for the tooling, showing that WPF is very much alive and well.
• Constructor Functions and Controllers in AngularJS – K.Scott Allen discusses a point from ‘AngularJS: The Bad Parts’ which looks at controller constructor functions
• My essential Visual Studio extensions – Mark Rendle uses the opportunity created by the release of Visual Studio Community Edition which supports extensions to share some of his favourite extensions.
• ASP.NET 5: New configuration files and containers – Gunnar Peipman takes a look at the ASP.NET 5 new configuration capabailities including support for a variety of configuration file types.
• Optimizing memory footprint: Compression in .Net 4.5 – Sharad Cornejo Altuzar takes a look at the compression capabilities of the .NET Framework out of the box.

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Software

• Fix for SQL Server 2012 SP2 Data Corruption Issue Now Available – Greg Low highlights an important update for anyone on Microsoft SQL Server 2012 SP2

Information

• NuGet Package of the Week: ASP.NET Web API Caching with CacheCow and CacheOutput – Continues his perpetual series looking at some of the great NuGet Packages available, exploring CacheCow a client and server caching library for ASP.NET
• Strong-typed Metadata, Code-first Metadata, Roadmap for RoslynDom, CodeFirst Strong-typed Metadata and ExpansionFirst Templates, RoslynDom and Friends – Just the Facts, Creating Strong-typed Metadata Classes & Public Annotations – Kathleen Dollard discusses metadata in programming, and looks at three projects she has been working on, RoslynDom, CodeFirst String Typed Metadata and ExpansionFirst Templates, taking a look at the problems each solves and outlining the roadmaps for the projects
• Fun with Custom C# Collection Initializers – Marius Schulz explores the use of custom collection initializers and looks at their implementation as well as the background to object and collection initialization.
• ASP.NET Identity 2.0: Customizing Users and Roles – John Atten continues his series looking at the use of ASP.NET Identity 2 with a look at extending the capabilities of ApplicationUser and ApplicationRole
• P, NP And Decision Problems (Really, It’s Not that Bad) – Erik Dietrich resumes an old series on practical maths, and expands its scope to include everything up to and including computer science, taking a look at some common classes of problems in computing
• Partial Application vs. Currying – Calvin Bottoms takes a look at partial application and currying in Haskell, looking at how such techniques are applied in functional programming
• Using `Environment.SpecialFolder` to Maximize Portability – _Noctis_ discusses how using the various Environment settings available via the Environment class will enable your applications to run in a wider range of situations,

Community

• .NET Conf June 2014 – Recorded sessions available for free! – Cesar de la Torre highlights the availability of the session recordings for the sessions from last week’s dotNetConf, where you can catch up with the latest and greatest technology from the people who are actually working on it

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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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