The Morning Brew

Software

• New WinDBG extension for debugging .NET 4.0 applications – Ahmet Mithat Bostanci highlights the release of the Psscor4 WinDBG extension which adds additional functionality to that provided in the standard SOS debugger, providing helpers for exploring a variety of issues with your processes (high CPU, high memory, etc).
• Just Released: Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service – The Windows Azure Team highlights the availability of the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service in production Windows Azure environments, offering cache sizes ranging from 128MB to 4GB, with some Azure users getting the 128MB version for free, and everyone getting caching free until the end of July.
• Reflector – Dustin Metzgar discusses the Red Gate decision to take Reflector commercial, and highlights their recent decision to keep reflector 6.x free and to offer a perpetual license for v6.8 which will not expire. It is well worth reading the Red Gate announcement ‘‘Why we reversed some of our Reflector decision‘ from Neil Davidson (Co-CEO) discussing why they made the decisions they have done regarding Reflector.

Information

• Microsoft reorg: Scott Guthrie to head new Azure Application Platform team & Microsoft’s plan to increase its focus on developers: The full internal memo – Mary Jo Foley breaks the news of a re-organisation of the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft with a new role for Scott Guthrie (Congrats Scott) taking the lead on the Azure Platform, along with changes to the areas of responsibility and reporting lines across other areas of the developer division.
• Effective Tests: A Test-First Example – Part 5 – Derek Greer continues his Test Driven Development / Effective Tests series with a continuation of his real world example, looking in this part at the remaining QA defects found during testing working through the process of resolving the issues.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: ElementAt() and Last() – James Michael Hare shares another instalment of his C#/.NET Little Wonders this time looking at the ElementAt() and Last() LINQ extension methods
• A day in the life of a slow page at Stack Overflow – Sam Saffron shares a look at how the team at Stack Overflow investigated and resolved a performance issue with the badge detail page on Stack Overflow, discussing the various metrics they investigated and looking at the tuning to the database queries they performed to give a 100x performance boost.
• Single Package Version per Solution – Phil Haack shares the results from his recent blog survey on having multiple projects and different version references which was intended to help direct NuGet development , and shares the link to the specification of the new feature to ensure that all projects in a solution have the same dependent package version – as always feedback on the feature is welcome.
• ILSpy – Decompiler Architecture Overview – Daniel Grunwald gives an update on the ILSpy decompiler architecture which now includes 47 steps in the process (up from 14 in the initial 2 week old version).
• A Plethora Parallel Programming PDF’s – 12 Parallel Programming with the .NET Framework 4 articles for download – Greg Duncan highlights a great collection of articles, released last year and available for download which cover various aspects of parallel programming in ,NET, focusing on the .NET 4 Task Parallel Library and PLinq functionality.
• Understanding Monads With JavaScript – Ionu? G. Stan takes a look at how Monads work using JavaScript to explore the concepts and looks particularly at the maintaining of state, shareing a detailed article with plenty of code, and a 10 minute screencast.
• ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats – Rick Strahl takes a look at implementing your own ASP.NET GZip / Deflate compression, sharing a look at how you can implement it, and looks at what can go wrong when GZipping.
• Migrate to ASP.NET MVC 3 by leveraging your ASP.NET Web Forms skills – Rachel Appel discusses what existing ASP.NET development skills are translatable when making the move from ASP.NET WebForms to ASP.NET MVC
• ASP.NET MVC Compiled Views – Use Them – Malcolm Sheridan highlights a not widely known feature of ASP.NET MVC which allows you to pre-compile your ASP.NET MVC Views which will check the syntax, and is very useful for release builds. In this post Malcolm steps through enabling this feature.
• Looking at how the ASP.NET MVC Authorize interacts with ASP.NET Forms Authorization – Jon Galloway explores how the ASP.NET MVC [Authorize] attribute works and how it interacts with the ASP.NET Forms Authorisation.
• Using AntiXSS 4.1 Beta as the Default Encoder in ASP.NET &Preventing Javascript Encoding XSS attacks in ASP.NET MVC – Jon Galloway – Jon Galloway also takes a look at protecting your ASP.NET applications from Cross Site Scripting attacks using the AntiXSS 4.1 beta as the default encoder in ASP.NET. Jon also explores in more detail the nature of JavaScript encoding attacks.
• Silverlight 5 Beta Rough Notes – Composition Thread? & Debugging Data-Binding – Mike Taulty continues his series of ‘Rough Notes’ posts on the new Silverlight 5 beta release with a look at where animations run when using GPU Acceleration, and dives into the improved data binding debugging experience.

Community

• Webinar wrap-up: Julian on JavaScript – reading jQuery (part 1) – Julian Bucknall follows up on his latest JavaScript webinar which began the process of exploring the jQuery codebase, looking at how the framework works behind the scenes. Julian will be continuing this series after his next webinar in 3 weeks time.
• TechDays/DevDays Netherlands and Belgium – Scott Hanselman highlights three recordings of his sessions at TechDays Netherlands and Belgium where he delivered the keynote, a session on NuGet, from beginner to some of the advanced uses of the package, and a session on ASP.NET MVC 3 once again looking at the full range of features from beginners stuff through to the more advanced features. The recordings are available in both streaming and download formats.
• Signature Series 40% off until May 15 – Martin Fowler highlights a great offer from InformIT (only seems to apply for those in the US unfortunately) which wil get you 40% of books from the signature series from Martin, Kent Beck and Mike Cohn when you buy two books from the same series. These books are some of the best general applicability software development books and at 40% off are well worth checking out.

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