The Morning Brew #919

Software

• The Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit is now available for "Mango" application development & Exploring the August 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit for ‘Mango’ – Jeff Wilcox announces the release of the August 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit which now targets the Mango edition of the phone OS. This release includes significant updates to a number of controls, adding new features and improving performance.
• New Ajax Grid Scaffolding NuGet Package for MVC 3 – Phil Haack hosts his first Guest Blogger, Stephen Halter, an intern on the ASP.NET Team who discusses the AjaxGridScaffolder package he has been working on which brings Ajax paging and sorting to grids of data easily in ASP.NET MVC 3.
• StyleCop 4.6 released – Tatworth highlights the release of the first alpha of StyleCop 4.6, an update to 4.5 bringing support for ReSharper 6
• Firefox 6 is here – Browser version numbers are shooting upwards, and the FireFox team are not to be left behind, releasing version 6 of Firefox yesterday. This version includes support for the <progress> element, along with touch events, server sent events and web sockets, along with a variety of smaller changes to HTML, CSS, DOM, networking, etc.

Information

• The easy way to set up NuGet to restore packages – David Ebbo highlights the work David Fowler has done in the creation of the NuGetPowerTools package which makes it much easier to set up NuGet use without committing packages to source control, providing a useful improvement on David’s earlier process.
• The Year in Review: W3C Web Performance Working Group – Jatinder Mann takes a look back at the work of the W3C Web Performance Working Group in its first year, giving an update on the specifications the group are working on.
• HTML5 Rocks – How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers – Tali Garsiel takes a fascinating and in-depth look at what goes on inside the modern web browser, discussing in detail the inner working os the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines
• Html 5 Controls for ASP.Net MVC – Saleth Prakash shares a collection of HTML5 ‘controls’ implemented as a comprehensive collection of extension methods for use in ASP.NET MVC views giving you an easy way of rendering these new markup elements.
• AppFabric Duplicate Message Detection – Alan Smith highlights a series of webcasts over on cloudcast.net on Azure AppFabric Queues, Duplicate Message Detection, and Messaging Message Expiration, and shares an article version which digs into the code for the duplicate message detection
• Underscore.js – K. Scott Allen highlights Underscore.js, a library which adds functional programming support to JavaScript without extending any built-in JavaScript objects, allowing you to write more functional style code.
• Making the most out of IIS compression – Part 1: configuring IIS 7 compression – Matt Perdeck starts a 2 part series looking at compression in Internet Information Services (IIS), beginning with part 1 looking at compression in IIS7, looking at the installation and configuration of the compression features.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: A Look at Powershell – Jimmy Skowronski joins the Coventry NxtGenUG on Monday 26th September 2011 for a session looking at the use of PowerShell from the ground up, exploring its use for developers and sysadmins alike, and looking at the extensibility provided by PowerShell.