The Morning Brew

Software

• Now Available: Windows Azure SDK 1.4 Refresh with Web Deploy Integration – The Windows Azure Team announces the Windows azure SDK 1.4 Refresh – the latest update of the tools for building applications on the Windows Azure platform. This release introduces improved deployment using Web Deploy which can make deploying much easier under certain circumstances.
• StyleCop 4.5 RC1 – Tatworth highlights the release of StyleCop 4.5 Release Candidate 1. The StyleCop team have been hard at work on this release with a vast number of releases along the way, and this release candidate release is the result. If you haven’t already tried V4.5 give this release a go and help the team out with your feedback.

Information

• Algorithm Tutorials – Karl Seguin announces a side project of his, a site dedicated to some of the key basic algorithms and data structures in computer science. As a non-computer-science educated developer these sorts of site are very valuable.
• Async CTP Refresh – compiler bug fixes – Lucian Wischik discusses some of the compiler bugfixes introduced in the Async CTP Refresh, illustrating how the compiler used to generate code (and illustrate the bug) and what the new compiler output looks like.
• Creating a Markup Extension for MEF with Silverlight 5 – Jeremy Likness takes a look at one of the new features of Silverlight 5, the ability to create custom markup extensions for use in XAML which allow you to pass further information through to the generated object graph. In this post Jeremy shows how you can easily create one of these and register it for use with MEF.
• Update on the Microsoft jQuery Plugins – Scott Hunter shares an update on the work that has been going on with the jQuery Plugins that Microsoft are working on, and discusses the changes in the management of plugin projects at jQuery.
• Configuration Settings Are A Dependency That Should Be Injected – Paul Hiles discusses how configuration is often overlooked as something that you should be injecting into your business logic using Dependency Injection in order to have properly unit testable classes.
• Indexed Sequences – Chris Eargle builds on a class from Phil Haacks recent post on Better Razor ForEach Loops giving a class which allows for additional information to be attached to entries allowing order to be changed whilst maintaining the original indexing.
• /Platform:AnyCPU, /Platform:x64, /Platform:x86, what do they mean – Li Chen discusses the various platform compilation switches and what they mean for the executing CLR and the use of ActiveX / COM /COM+ components.
• A Collection of JavaScript Gotchas – Jonathan Cardy shares a collection of areas in which JavaScript differs from other programming languages which can result in un-intended behaviour and misunderstandings

Community

• DDDMelbourne 28th May 2011 09:00-17:00, Swinburne University Hawthorn Campus – The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper series of events has broken out into the wider world, and the 28th May sees Melbourne Australia host their second DDD event. If you are in the area (or fancy a holiday) and would like to speak at the event there is still 1 week to submit your session.
• [New Webinar] How to Overcome the Timeless Challenges of Building Fast, Scalable Systems – Gael Fraiteur and Kendall Miller of Gibraltar Software are joined by Gary Short of DevExpress for a Webinar sharing an early glimpse of Gary’s new session on Asymptotics and Algorithms, and Kendall Miller’s new session on Natural Laws of Software Performance.

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Software

• MVVM Light V4 preview 3 (BL16, MIX11 edition!!) #mvvmlight – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of a new Preview Release of his MVVM Light V4 framework. This release includes a renaming of a class to a better name suggested by the community, along with a new Inversion of Control Container implementation
• Announcing YUI Test 1.0.0 Beta 2 – The Yahoo! User Interface team announce their second beta release of YUI Test 1.0.0. This release builds on feedback from the first beta release, and now includes init and destroy methods allowing you to have fixture setup and teardown like behaviour for your tests, along with a context which is shared between init, destroy, setup and teardown methods
• New Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework “Sample Browser” v3 Released – Jialiang gives a tour of the new All-In-One Code Framework browser application which allows you to explore and search and obtain the 600+ code samples that make up the All-In-One Code Framework.
• Coming soon: Kinect for Windows SDK beta – Microsoft Press – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Devon Musgrave highlights the details of the Kinect SDK, a much discussed item at Mix (judging by the blog posts I’ve seen), sharing some details of the features that will be included as well as highlighting the link to register to receive more information when it is publically released.
• Afterthought – Jamie Thomas highlights the release of Afterthought, billed as an Open Source Compile Time Code Amender, giving AOP like capabilities. The development of this project was influenced by PostSharp and its conversion to being a commercial concern. This is the project’s first public release, and the code is available over on GitHub.

Information

• The easy way to publish NuGet packages with sources – David Ebbo discusses new NuGet.exe features which makes it easier to package up source with your normal package content, support debugging with the use of Symbols servers with publishing of symbols to SymbolSource.org, walking through the 7 steps of publishing and the 5 for consuming this wonderfulness.
• A Better Razor Foreach Loop – Phil Haack shares a simple use of the Razor Templated Delegates feature which iterates through a collection calling a passed template each time but rather than passing the item it passes an instance of a class containing the item and some additional information
• Parsing Non-Standard Date and Time Formats – Ron Petrusha takes a look at parsing date and time values from unusual formats of supplied information using the .NET Frameworks ParseExact and TryParseExact methods, illustrating with plenty of examples
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: First() and Single() – Similar Yet Different – James Michael Hare continues his series of less known C# and .NET features with a look at two LINQ extension Methods which at first glance seem to do the same type of thing but differ in actual fact, sharing advice on when to use each.
• Serializing Continuations – Mike Hadlow takes a fascinating look at serializing Continuations allowing you to create them, allow them to capture their variables, and then store them away for later execution, illustrating this powerful idea with a simple sample.
• NHibernate 3.2: mapping by code conventions – Fabio Maulo shares a look at the new Mapping functionality included in NHIbernate 3.2 allowing for convention based mappings to be performed in code using native NHibernate
• IE10 Platform Preview and CSS Features for Adaptive Layouts – The Internet Explorer team share some detail on the use of some of the new CSS features for creating adaptive layouts, exploring CSS3 Grid Layouts, Multi-Column layouts and Flexible Box Layouts, some of the features being implemented in IE10 and demoed at MIX11.
• Async CTP Refresh – its state and direction – Lucian Wischik shares some information about the future work being undertaken on the Async CTP and answers some of the more common questions on this release

Community

• Pair programming – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly – Canary Wharf .NET User Group – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group welcome Rachel Laycock and Sara Stephens and their previously well-received session on Pair Programming, looking at both patterns and anti-patterns of the pair programming process in this event being held on Wednesday 4th May.
• UK hosted Twitter Q&A on Cloud – 12pm to 1pm on Friday 15th April – Eric Nelson highlights an online event being run on the UK TechNet Twitter account where for one hour today a team of experts will be available to answer any and all questions on the cloud.
• Register for webcast with Scott Hanselman LIVE from TechDays 2011 in Belgium on 27 April – Katrien DG highlights the Belgium TechDAys KeyNote address from Scott Hanselman which will be broadcast live online. Scot will also be doing an Q&A session, so if you have a question you’d like to know the answer to, submit it to the organising team.

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A browser crash at too later stage in my Morning Brew Prep has curtailed today’s Information section – anything from yesterday that didn’t go in today will be in tomorrow’s edition

MIX, Silverlight and Windows Phone

• Silverlight 5 Beta – A guide to the new features – Following on from the Keynote announcement of Silverlight 5 Beta, Tim Heuer gives the lowdown on the tools and features that make up the beta SDK release. With new features in the areas of text, media, data binding, 3D graphics, as well as improvements to out of browser support, and much much more.
• Announcing the Silverlight 5 Beta Release and the Silverlight.net Redesign – Pete Brown highlights the release of Silverlight 5 beta, the launch of the redesigned Silverlight Site, and shares a series of blogposts and videos about some of the new functionality:
  • Working with Implicit Templates
  • Supporting Double and Even Triple Click for the Mouse
  • Using the SoundEffect Class for Low-Latency Sound (and play WAV files in Silverlight)
  • Advancements in Text
  • Working with Operating System Windows
  • Debugging Bindings with Xaml Breakpoints
• Silverlight 5 3D + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Win! – René Schulte shares a demo using Silverlight 5 and his Silverlight Augmented Reality Toolkit library, showing some of the power of the new Silverlight 5 hardware accelerated 3D API.
• A Quick Wrap-Up of Today’s Windows Phone Announcements at MIX – Joey deVilla shares a summary of the announcements regarding the Windows Phone platform from yesterday’s MIX keynote, highlighting improvements in the emulator for working with tilt, GeoLocation, improvements for profiling applications, the arival of Angry Bird on Windows Phone and browser improvements.
• Mix 11 – Web Platform and Tools Keynote Demo Script – Scott Hanselman shares blog based walk through of the MIX Keynote Demos for ASP,NET, looking at the construction of the ThisDevelopersLife backend and frontend site. In other MIX related news, Scott also took a ride in "Jellybean" the Kinect-Controlled Lounge Chair which uses the much discussed Kinect SDK, and Joey deVilla captured it on video for posterity.

Software

• Refreshing the Async CTP – Eric Lippert announces the release of the next Community Preview of the Async Language Features. This release brings Async features to the Windows Phone Platform, works in non-english versions of Visual Studio, and includes a Go Live License allowing you to use these features in production (at your own risk). This release also contains features and fixes to address the top issues raised with the previous CTP and is well worth checking out. Lucian Wischik has details of the install process, and getting up and running with Async on the Phone in his post Async CTP Refresh – Installation
• RouteDebugger 2.0 – Phil Haack highlights a really useful looking tool for helping diagnose Routing issues available as a part of the Glimpse Web Debugger project.
• xUnit.net 1.8 – The xUnit.NET team have released the RTM version of xUnit.NET 1.8 – from what I gather this release is actually the same as the release Candidate, just with a label change on the download – great news as the RC process must have had no significant issues – well done guys
• Announcing datajs version 0.0.3 – Asad Khan of the WCF Data Services Team announces the release of data.js 0.0.3, a library for JavaScript which aims to make data heavy application development easier. This new release makes use of some of the HTML5 local data storage features to improve the caching of data, and adds pre-fetch capabilities

Information

• The seven deadly sins for the developer (* some restrictions apply) – Ayende kicks off a discussion of Development Anti-patterns, sharing three of the worst practices, and calls for his readers to add their own ‘favourite’ crimes against code in the comments.
• Me on NHibernate 3.2 – James Gregory discusses the new Fluent ‘loquacious’ API for configuring NHibernate in NHibernate 3.2, and how this relates to the FluentNHibernate project

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Recording of Robert Greyling on Spark View Engine @ E-VAN 12 April 2011 – Jan Van Ryswyck shares the recording of this week’s European Virtual Alt.Net Usergoup meeting, allowing you a chance to see Robert Greyling presenting his session on The Spark View engine, touching on JavaScript Spark Views, SparkSense, and using Spark with other web frameworks

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