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.

1 Comment »

Software

• Team Foundation Server explorer application for Windows Phone 7 – Eric Nelson highlights a new Windows Phone 7 application which allows you to access and interact with your TFS 2008 or 2010 created by the folks over at Black Marble.
• RazorJS – Write Razor inside your JavaScript files – John Katsiotis shares a package which brings Razor syntax to the output of JavaScript on the server side allowing you to easily insert conditional code, etc in Razor syntax and have the output included as external or inline JavaScript using a HTML Helper method.
• Introducing 14 new ASP.NET and Azure code samples released in April – Jialiang announces the latest update to the All-In-One Code sample library which brings a further 14 samples in the area of Windows Azure and ASP.NET. Jialiang has the full details of all the new samples in this post, and they can be obtained using the new Sample Browser V3.

Information

• NuGet Was The Star of MIX 11 – Rob Conery reflects back on MIX11, declaring the NuGet project to be the star of the conference, discussing Nuget and some possible improvements that could be made to it, along with talking about how NuGet introduces a PowerShell command shell to the Visual Studio IDE
• Writing a NuGet Package That Adds A Command To The PowerShell Console – Phil Haack also focuses on the PowerShell side of the NuGet package manager with a look at implementing a NuGet package which adds commands to the console, creating a simple Magic 8 Ball command.
• NuGet Package of the Week #5 – Debugging ASP.NET MVC applications with Glimpse – Scott Hanselman also continues spreading the NuGet love with the 5th instalment of his NuGet Package of the week series, taking a look at the Glimpse project which allows you to see what is going on inside the web server to help debug problems.
• April 19th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio – Jason Zander gives an update on all things Visual Studio Service Pack 1 and related releases, highlighting the various blog posts from the various teams detailing releases, workarounds and installation information
• EF 4.1 Code First Validation – Wriju shares a nice simple example of using the server side Validation features of Entity Framework with the 4.1 Code First release, showing how the validation is created using either the Fluent API or the Attribute based mapping.
• Building a better MessageBox for WP7 with the help of XNA. – Michael Crump takes a look at how you can leverage the XNA Framework on Windows Phone 7 to create a better MessageBox implementation which allows for custom button text
• Code coverage on MVC projects – Could not find WebDev.WebServer40.Exe. – Barry Dorrans looks into a problem with code coverage reporting on his ASP.NET MVC 2 application where the code coverage was looking to include the Development Web Server as a part of the Code Coverage report. Barry tracks this down to an incorrect project selection and shares the notes in case anyone else experiences the problem.

Community

• ADO.NET Entity Framework Code First 4.1 – Online – Wriju highlights a virtual event to be held today (Wednesday 20th April) at 11am Pacific which will be looking at the new features of Entity Framework Code First 4.1. Registration via the partner site is required to virtually attend.
• NxtGenUG – Real World Dynamic C# – Mark Rendle will be visiting the Oxford NxtGenUG Group on the evening of Tuesday 3rd May where he will be delivering his session on real world uses of the dynamic keyword in C# 4 code.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #838

Software

• Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1 – Steve Danielson highlights the release of the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Platform Update 1, an update which addresses top customer requests by adding functionality, principally in Windows Workflow Foundation, adding StateMachine, State, FinalState, Transition, StateMachineStateQuery, StateMachineStateRecord classes along with support for storing workflow in SQL Azure. There is also a corresponding tooling update which updates intellisense and multi-targeting to support these changes
• Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.5 now available! – Xiang Li announces the release of Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.5. This release fixes over 60 bugs as well as adding a number of new features such as detection of model changes, multiple machine support allowing you to use more compute resource for exploration.
• MSBuild Extension Pack April 2011 Release – "If you MSBuild it, they will…" – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the April 2011 release of the MSBuild Extension Pack, a completely backwardly compatible release available for both .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 which introduces 20 new tasks / task actions along with a variety of improvements and bugfixes.

Information

• Microsoft datajs API: A 5 Minutes Quick Start – Ashraful Alam takes a brief look at the latest release of of the datajs API from Microsoft, updated last week, which makes it easier to build data-centric JavaScript applications consuming oData (and other formats) and making use of HTML5 browser features. This post explores a simple sample using datajs.
• WCF Extensibility – Message Inspectors – Carlos Figueira is mid-way through a series of posts looking at the various extensibility points available in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and in his most recent post looks at the use of Message Inspectors to interact with the messages being communicated. Well worth checking out the other posts in the series if you haven’t already.
• Exploring ECMAScript 5 with a Simple Game of Poker – Jared Straub discusses the latest Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive demo application, a game of Texas Hold’Em implemented in object oriented JavaScript, illustrating some of the more advanced features of IE9’s JavaScript implementation.
• Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes – Multiple Window Support – Mike Taulty shares his notes on the newly introduced Silverlight 5 feature of Multiple Window support available in out of browser and elevated trust scenarios
• Mix 11 Videos – Download them all with RSS – Scott Hanselman shares the easiest way to get all the great content from Mix 11 delivered to your computer by subscribing to the RSS feed for the event in your favourite PodCast downloader.
• Presentation Tips Learned From My (Many) Mistakes – Phil Haack shares a collection of presentation tips based on his experiences moving from his intense stage fright to talking to large groups across the world, revealing a number of great tips about preparation and demos, as well as giving some of the secrets of the level of preparation used of large keynote events.

Community

• HTML5 Community Night: streamed from Silicon Valley – Jon Box highlights the HTML5 Community Night, a joint venture with the silicon Valley JavaScript group. The event is a joint physical and virtual event with sessions from both the IE and Google Chrome teams being streamed online. The event takes place on Tuesday 26th April at 6pm EST (making it the early hours of the morning in the UK)

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #837