The Morning Brew

Tomorrow is the start of the Easter long weekend holiday, and in keeping with Morning Brew tradition there will be no edition tomorrow, or Monday. The Morning Brew will return on Tuesday 26th April (for three days, as we have another 4 day weekend next weekend too, thanks to the Royal Wedding public holiday and another regular public holiday.)

Software

• Knockout.js 1.2.0 released – Steve Sanderson announces the release of Knockout.js 1.2.0, his ClientSide MVVM implementation which makes building complex responsive user interfaces on the client side easier. This release is a significant one adding a wealth of new features including new extensibility points, additional bindings, improved templating, along with performance improvements, and a change to the license to move to a more permissive MIT license.
• Sound Code: NAudio 1.4 Release Notes – Mark Heath announces the release of NAudio 1.4 (currently a release candidate), an opensource .NET audio and MIDI library which deals with playing and working with a variety of audio formats, capture of audio, and a variety of other audio related tasks. This release brings support for x64 platforms, a samples project showing how to use the library, improvements to the support of many of the formats the library deals with, along with the usual bug fixing and cleaning of the codebase.
• What’s new in Orchard 1.1? & Orchard 1.1: what’s in it for developers? – Bertrand Le Roy highlights the release of Orchard 1.1 earlier this month and takes a look at the new features of the release both generally in the project as a whole, and specifically focusing on the features that are significant for developers working with and extending the CMS.

Information

• Uses and misuses of implicit typing – Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Eric Lippert wades into the oft discussed topic of ‘the use of var’ in C#, discussing the purpose of code (to deliver business value) the places where you can use var with and without semantic differences in meaning, ending up with 5 nice bullet points of advice regarding the use of var.
• You Sniffers: Watchout for the new IE10 User-Agent – Out Of The Box – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Jon Box highlights the dangers of User Agent sniffing illustrated by an example where Internet Explorer 10 (currently available as a preview release) was incorrectly identified as Internet Explorer 1 as the sniffing code assumed the version number would only ever be a single digit.
• NESL: Native Extension for Silverlight or No (Except Seven) Limits for Silverlight? Experimenting the Sensor API with a Wiimote – Walter Ferrari takes a look at the use of the Native Extensions for Silverlight, discussing the evolution of the Silverlight platform and where NESL came into the picture, before discussing the use of NESL to build a Silverlight application which can interact with (or be interacted with by) a Wii Remote.
• Silverlight 5 – What’s new #1, #2, #3 and #4 – Alex Golesh shares a 4 part series of posts looking at the new features of Silverlight 5, exploring the data binding and handling features in part 1, multiple windows in out of browser mode in part 2, Text display improvements in part 3 and 3D graphics features in part 4.
• Don’t shoot the messenger [A WebBrowserExtensions workaround for Windows Phone and a BestFitPanel tweak for infinite layout bounds on Windows Phone/Silverlight/WPF] – David Anson discusses the benefit of releasing code to the community, and the value of community bug reports, discussing two community reported issues in two pieces of code he had released, discussing the nature of the issues and some workarounds.
• Create user friendly date fields with ASP.NET MVC EditorTemplates & jQueryU – Rachel Appel takes a look at how the MVC Editor and Display templates give you an easy way of providing standard look and feel for certain types of input and display fields, allowing you to improve their behaviour with client side extensions using jQuery UI.
• Securely Passing Identity Tokens Between Websites – Scott Mitchell discusses approaches to passing identity of users between websites in a secure way, building up to the good solution from the first principles, and discussing the flaws in the basic more approaches and how the better approaches address these flaws.
• Declarative Codesnippet Automation with T4 Templates – Colin Eberhardt shares a technique for automating code snippets using T4 templates to generate attributes which can be applied to your code, resulting in code generation occurring in a partial class alongside your code, allowing your code to be kept clear of boiler plate code.

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