The Morning Brew

Information

• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Operators are Overloaded, not Overridden – James Michael Hare continues his parallel series of posts on C# and .NET Pitfalls, looking in this post at some of the confusion that occurs around operator overloading
• Debugger Canvas released on Devlabs – Arjmand Samuel of the Microsoft Research Connections team discusses the recently release Debugger Canvas extension for Visual Studio which came out of a joint project between Microsoft Research, the Visual Studio Team, and Brown University.
• Channel 9 Visual Studio Toolbox: demoing All-In-One Code Framework – Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Jialiang Ge shares a short Channel 9 video of Mei Liang being interviewed by Robert Green about the All In One Code Framework, and looking at the sample browser and its integration with Visual Studio.
• Why the #AskObama Tweet was Garbled on Screen: Know your UTF-8, Unicode, ASCII and ANSI Decoding Mr. President – Scott Hanselman discusses the importance of having awareness of Unicode as a developer, highlighting a recent high profile Unicode ‘gaff’ and explaining how and why this type of thing occurs.
• Software Craftsmanship: The Art of the Performance – Rachel Hawley discusses software craftsmanship and the various aspects of attaining and polishing your developer shills available (code katas, code camps, etc) and draws parallels to her experiences practicing and learning recorder, piano and clarinet. Also check out the video of Corey Haines session from NDC which inspired this article (link in the comments)
• The New and Improved Silverlight.net Site – Pete Brown highlights the latest incarnation of the Silverlight.net site with the current beta site becoming the main site on 18th. Pete shares the forum post announcing the switch over and highlighting a number of the sites new features.
• Creating a global ProgressIndicator experience using the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK Beta 2 – Jeff Wilcox explores switching from his custom Progress Indicator control, created to fill a gap in Windows Phone 7, to the built in functionality provided in the WP7.1 Mango update.

Community

• Mining the Social Web with Gary Short – Scottish Developers welcome Gary Short back for a re-run of his session on Mining the Social Web, this time taking place in Edinburgh on Wednesday 3rd August, giving you another chance to see this very well received session.

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Information

• Intelligent model binding with model binder providers – Jimmy Bogard continues exploring the concepts of Model Binding in ASP.NET MVC and looks at some of the improvements to model binding introduced in ASP.NET MVC3 such as the Model Binder Provider which mean you may be able to simplify the code you wrote to extend model binding in ASP.NET MVC 1 and 2.
• HTML5 Parsing in IE10 – Tony Ross discusses the improvements the Internet Explorer team have been making to the HTML parsing engine in Internet Explorer 10, adding the HTML5 parsing algorithm which will further help developers by ensuring that all the major browsers parse HTML into the DOM in the same way.
• Using NuGet in a MSBuild-target to have the packages at the last stand – Marko Apfel explores the use of MSBuild targets to run NuGet and fetch all of the projects required package dependencies at build time, meaning that you don’t have to commit the binary packages to your source control and can still checkout and build straight away.
• Cloud Computing – Free eBooks on Cloud Computing Basics – Microsoft UK Government Blog highlights a series of eBooks looking at the use of cloud computing in (US) government, addressing collaboration, developing, virtualize and consolidation, private cloud and security topics.
• A powerful pile of PowerShell ebooks (all free too) – Greg Duncan highlights a page from Jason Hofferle on which he has collected together all the freely available eBooks which discuss PowerShell topics. With the introduction of the Package Management Console in VS2010 with NuGet PowerShell is a topic which is well worth getting to know.
• HTMLImage – Generating Dynamic Image using Plain JavaScript – CodeProject – ‘darkoman’ takes a fascinating look at the use of Data urls and construction of image data manually in JavaScript to provide a way of creating images on the fly client side in the browser in this CodeProject article.
• HTML5 / JavaScript: Reflections and Skew Effects – RobertNowik is also experimenting with visual effects, looking at how you can implement reflections and skewing using the canvas element and JavaScript.
• Improving the performance of your Coded UI tests – Deepak Mittal shares a number of tips and recommendations to help you obtain the best performance out of the Coded UI Tests to record and test web applications.
• JavaScript is Assembly Language for the Web: Sematic Markup is Dead! Clean vs. Machine-coded HTML – Scott Hanselman discusses the use of tools which generate HTML and JavaScript resulting in difficult to understand and ugly code rendered to the client, discussing the appropriateness of such techniques. Interesting discussion going on in the comments of this one.

Community

• SpecFlow & S.O.L.I.D – DevEvening – The DevEvening UserGroup running out of Woking Surrey welcome Paul Stack and Nathan Gloyn on Wednesday 27th July for sessions on SpecFlow testing with WatiN, and SOLID Code respectively. I’ve seen both sessions at recent conferences, and they both come highly recommended
• July ’11 – One year on – Windows Phone UG – The Windows Phone UG in London will be celebrating their 1 year anniversary on Wednesday 20th July. To celebrate they will be having sessions on the WP7Contrib library and the use of SketchFlow Templates for Windows Phone Development.

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Software

• Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011 is Launching July 26th! – The Visual Studio LightSwitch Team announce that their official release will be on Tuesday 26th July, and highlights some resources for you to get up to speed with LightSwitch 2011
• EntitySpaces/Punchout – EntitySpaces LLC shares a new library of controls which build upon the Knockout JavaScript MVVM implementation, initially providing a grid implementation. These controls will be available as generic controls and also specialised to work with EntitySpaces specific functionality

Information

• July’s MSDN magazine is out now – Rachel Collier highlights the availability of the July edition of MSDN Magazine, this month focusing on the Web Platform. Articles this month include Workflow in SharePoint Online, WPF in PowerShell , ASP.NET MVC Web Grid, performance counters using ASP.NET MVC Filters and much more.
• datajs samples – Marcelo Lopez Ruiz highlights the availability of some samples for the recently released datajs library. The samples cover consuming OData, using the Storage and Caching APIs, and aim to illustrate best practices use of the library.
• Managing data in web applications with HTML5 Web Storage – Rachel Appel explores the concepts and level of support for the HTML 5 web storage APIs, discussing their use, limitations and some of the things to be aware about when using them.
• Yahoo YUI compressor and .Less with Visual Studio – Simon Harriyott shares some excellent advice and tips on working with CSS using the .less library to make the development experience better and the YUI Compressor as a part of your build to minifiy your CSS output.
• Code rant: The First Rule of Threading: You Don’t Need Threads! – Mike Hadlow discusses the (mis)use of threads, and how in many cases you really shouldn’t be using your own threads and should be using the Async functionality already provided in .NET (not just the fancy new stuff in C#5) when you are waiting on slow IO.
• Rethink your Data Model – Karl Seguin discusses some of the benefits of NoSql data stores which many people overlook, focusing on just the performance at huge scale benefit. Karl also discusses the differences in how you should model your data model in NoSql databases like MongoDB orver their relational (distant) cousins.
• Using PC Hardware more efficiently in HTML5: New Web Performance APIs, Part 1 – Jatinder Mann kicks off a series of posts looking at the Implementation of the Web Performance APIs in the latest Internet Explorer 10 preview release, These emergent APIs are the work of the W3C Web Performance Group and aim to provide a way to harness the raw hardware of the computer for best performance.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Table Per Concrete Type and Native Id Generators – Ricardo Peres shares another NHibernate Gotcha, this time looking at how to structure your keys in table per concrete type inheritance structures.
• Building Nice Display Names From Pascal-Case View Model Names in ASP.NET MVC 3 – Matt Honeycutt explores how you can manipulate the names returned as metadata used by the MVC framework when rendering labels using your own implementation of a IModelMetadataFilter.

Community

• NxtGenUG Event: Power(shell) to the Developer! – Ziemowit Skowronski joins the NxtGenUF in Oxford for an introductory session on Powershell Development on Tuesday 2nd August at RM in Abingdon.
• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Simon Brown: Effective Sketches – SkillsMatter continue their ‘In the brain of…’ series of events on Thursday 1st September with Simon Brown exploring the concepts of sketching your architecture, types of diagrams and how they can aid understanding.

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