The Morning Brew

Software

• Kinect for Windows SDK – It’s Here! – Steve Clayton makes the announcement of the availability of the Kinect for Windows SDK from Microsoft Research. This release is a ‘for non-commercial use’ release of what will be a commercial product and allows you access to the key parts of the Kinect system.
  • Kinect SDK Out! – Seth Juarez has spent a day up at Microsoft playing with the Kinect SDK and shares his initial thoughts
  • Connecting to Kinect from Sho – The Sho Team discussing linking the Kinect SDK into Sho, another of the Microsoft Research projects which aims to provide the environment for performing data analysis and scientific computing.
  • Kinect for Windows SDK is here! – Brian Peek discusses the Kinect for Windows SDK release and highlights some great samples available from the Coding4Fun site
  • Kinect SDK – Dawn of a new era – Ujjwal Kumar highlights various samples, interviews and learning resources for anyone interested in getting to work with the Kinect SDK
• ReSharper 6.0 Beta 2 is Out – The team over at JetBrains announce their second beta release of ReSharper 6.0. This release addresses crashing issues with solution wide analysis, fixes performance in large Razor .cshtml files
• Introducing System.Web.Providers – ASP.NET Universal Providers for Session, Membership, Roles and User Profile on SQL Compact and SQL Azure – Scott Hanselman highlights the alpha release of the ASP.NET Universal Providers, a library which extends Session, Membership, Roles and Profiles to support Sql Server Compact Edition and SQL Azure. The Alpha release is available over NuGet.

Information

• Atomicity, volatility and immutability are different, part three – Eric Lippert continues his series of posts exploring the theory of Atomicity, volatility and immutability with a look at volatile, discussing what it means, and how it can be used in the C# language
• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Choosing the Right Collection Class – James Michael Hare continues his C# / .NET Fundamentals series of posts with a look at picking the correct collection class for your purposes, reviewing the various options in the framework and discussing the best uses of each
• LINQ To Objects and the performance of nested "Where" calls – Jon Skeet takes a look at the Linq Where operator, examining a question from StackOverflow which asked about multiple calls to where versus combining the clauses into a single where statement. In this post Jon digs into the performance, and also takes a look at how things behave in his EduLinq implementation.
• LINQ Intersect() 2.7x faster with HashSet – Patrick Smacchia has also been looking at the performance of Linq Operators, discussing the optimisations some methods have depending on the type of collection they run against, and in particular looking at the Intersect and Union operators and your choice of IEnumerable implementation to operate on.
• MS11-039 Vulnerability Details – Jeroen Frijters discusses the recent MS11-039 security fix for the .NET Framework, looking at the change the update makes, and what the vulnerability being patched was.
• Speling misteaks make an aplikation look sily [New Delay.FxCop code analysis rule finds spelling errors in a .NET assembly’s string literals] – David Anson shares a custom FxCop Rule which will explore your assemblies and check the spelling of any string literals in your code
• Cubelicious – Silverlight 5 + Balder + Physics + SLARToolkit Augmented Reality = Triple Win! – Rene Schulte shares a new demonstration of his SLARToolkit combining it with the Balder opensource 3D engine and the open source physics engine JigLibX to create a cube based augmented reality sample.

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Software

• Announcing the Web Standards Update – HTML5 Support for the Visual Studio 2010 Editor – Scott Hanselman highlights the release of the Visusl Studio 2010 Web Standards Update which brings lots of HTML5 goodness to the Visual Studio (both Express and Professional+ SKUs). The Web Platform and Tools Blog has in depth information about the features in the post ‘Web Standards Update for Visual Studio 2010 SP1‘ and Mads Kristensen, who headed up this work, also has some details on his blog post ‘Web Standards Update – behind the scenes‘
• Portable Library Tools Release – Krzysztof Cwalina – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Krzysztof Cwalina highlights the release of the latest edition of the Portable Library Tools which help you to build libraries in C# and VB.NE which can run on a variety of .NET platforms (XBox, Phone, Client Profile, etc) without recompilation.
• Orchard 1.2 Released – ASP.NET MVC CMS – The Patterns and Practices Guidance Blog highlights the release of version 1.2 of Orchard, the Open Source ASP.NET MVC based CMS. This new release is all about improving performance with a lot of changes in that area
• Project Silk Drop 11 – Karl Shifflet highlights the 11th drop of Project Silk. This drop contains more changes from the advisory board and a review of the JavaScript and increases the number of chapters of documentation available
• Composite Services Guidance – Release Candidate – Francis K. Cheung highlights the release candidate drop of the Patterns and Practices Composite Services Guidance. Additions in this release include improvements to the Inventory Catalog Explorer (ICE) tool along with Capability Composition, Canonical Versioning, and External Routing Configuration samples
• .Net 4 Update GDR (35 fixes and 6 new features) – Greg Duncan highlights the .NET 4 Update General Distribution Release which bundles up hotfixes, along with the portable library tools and HTML5 support into one convenient package.

Information

• HTML5 Web Socket in Essence – Wayne Ye gives a nice tour of the Web Sockets functionality provided in the HTML 5 Specification, explaining its uses, the theory behind it and looking at it in use in a nice example.
• 101 Questions to Ask When Considering a NoSQL Database – Todd Hoff shares a number of questions (not sure if there are actually 101) you should consider asking when you are considering the use of a NoSql Database in your applications.
• Use of a Private Constructor – Chris Eargle takes a look at the use of a private constructor, and discussing some of the myths about their use
• Single Responsibility Principle – discovering violations – Dzmitry Huba discusses the Single Responsibility Principle, looking at some of the common violations of the principle and looking at the solution using decomposition
• Binding A Backbone View To A Model, To Enable and Disable A Button & Solving Backbone’s "this.model.view" Problem With Underscore.js – Derick Bailey continues his exploration of Backbone, continuing with his example from the previous post, and looking at a solution to the “this.model.view” problem involving Underscore.js.

Community

• Microsoft TechDays 2011 event – videos of all the sessions are now live – Eric Nelson highlights the availability of the recordings from the UK Tech Days event held at the end of last month. With sessions ranging from web standards, cloud computing to Phone development there is plenty to see. A number of bloggers have been highlighting their favourites:
  • Don’t miss these two talks on Azure – Marin Beeby
  • UK TechDays – Whats New in Silverlight 5? – Mike Taulty
  • UK Tech Days – MVVM for Silverlight Development – Mike Taulty highlights a session from Laurent Bugnion
  • UK Tech Days – Gill Cleeren on WCF RIA Services
  • UK Tech Days – Rich Griffin on Expression Blend

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Software

• IE 9.0.1 Available via Windows Update & First IE9 Update Now Available – The Internet Explorer Team and Eric Lawrence announce the release of the First Internet Explorer 9 update, the June 2011 Cumulative Security update which takes the ‘About Box’ version number to 9.0.1
• Open Source – Snippet Designer 1.4.0 Released – Matthew Manela highlights the release of Snippet Designer 1.4.0 Visual Studio 2010 extension, available via the Extension Gallery, Visual Studio Gallery and CodePlex project site. This release adds functionality to both the Snippet Editor and Snippet Explorer
• NCrunch for Visual Studio – The NCrunch team announce the release of v1.3.2b, the latest version of their Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 add-in which runs tests and reports code coverage while you code. NCrunch is currently free to use while it is in its beta testing phase.
• xunitcontrib support for ReSharper 6.0 beta – Matt Ellis highlights an update for the xunitcontrib ReSharper test runner to bring it in line with the ReSharper 6 beta release bringing xunit 1.8 functionality to the ReSharper Test Runner

Information

• Intro To Backbone.js: How A Winforms Developer is At Home In JavaScript – Derick Bailey takes a look at backbone.js, a JavaScript UI Library which provides support for the MV* patterns he is so familiar with as a WinForms developer. In this post Derick takes a look at some examples of it in use and discusses how its features make him feel at home with JavaScript.
• Deeper into Convert.ToString – Inspired by a video on C# Interview Questions, Chris Eargle takes a in depth look at the behaviour of object.ToString() and Convert.ToString() looking at how they differ in their support for nulls.
• "Web" vs. "Native" – Tim Bray shares an interesting discussion of the ‘great’ mobile web application versus Native Phone Application, using the offerings from TripIt as a case study, and discussing his view point on the subject.
• On the Usefulness of Xml Summary Comments with Poll Results – Steve Smith shares the results of his recent Twitter Survey on XML Summary Comments in Code, and particularly the relevance of blindingly obvious XML Summary comments
• Pre-release Documentation Available – Reactive Extensions – The Reactive Extensions Team are at the RC1 stage, with them currently undergoing the final stages of preparation for a first official release. One of the items on the list is Documentation, and the team have published what they have so far with the hope of getting some feedback to better direct their remaining efforts.
• CodeRush is Never out of Milk – Martin Beeby shares a short article from Rory Becker discussing the DevExpress CodeRush IDE Productivity tool, highlighting a variety of its great features.
• CitiBank hacked – dumb developers, dumber security consultants & Has CitiBank scared you? Want to learn more about securing ASP.NET? – Barry Dorrans discusses some of the coverage of the recent CitiBank ‘Hacking’ and how the security vulnerability was one of those in the OWASP Top 10 List for a long time. Barry also highlights a nice series of posts from Troy Hunt looking at the OWASP Top 10, currently up to Part 7: Insecure Cryptographic Storage
• WP7 Mango: The new Generational GC – Abhinaba Basu continues looking at Generational Garbage Collection, exploring how the principles of this type of garbage collection are applied to the Windows Phone 7.1 platform
• LINQ to NHibernate Extensions & Adding Custom SQL Functions to NHibernate at Runtime – Ricardo Peres takes a look at adding extensions to Linq to NHibernate to provide implementations for the SQL Cast and Coalesce functions, and explores how you can add custom SQL Functions to NHibernate, allowing them to be called from your NHibernate code.
• Autoscaling a Windows Azure Hosted Service with AzureWatch – Eric Nelson takes a look at AzureWatch, a service which aims to help you make your Windows Azure solutions scale elastically with service demand
• Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Services Academy Videos – Wes Yanaga highlights a series of video tutorials which look at the use of the Windws Azure App Fabric Access Control Service which provides access control functionality based on integrations with a range of identity providers (from Active Directory to Google, Yahoo! and FaceBook.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event View: jQuery Templates – The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG welcome George Adamson for a session of JavaScript looking at jQuery Templating on the evening of Wednesday 20th July.
• Mining the Social Web with Gary Short – Scottish Developers welcome Gary Short for a session looking at using code to mine information from social networks. This session is on Thursday 23rd June in Glasgow, starting at 6:30PM.

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