The Morning Brew

Software

• IE VPC’s Refreshed. Get your WinXP/IE6, Vista/IE7/8/9, Win7/IE8/9 VHD’s here… – Greg Duncan highlights the latest update of the Internet Explorer compatibility testing Virtual PC Images. This update brings the machine images up to date with security patches, and resets the expiry on the IE 6 XP image to 17th November.

Information

• Welcome to Building Windows 8 – Steven Sinofsky launches a new blog which the Windows 8 Team will be using for discussing some of the new features and design decisions they are making in producing the new version of Windows.
• Oh view where are thou: finding views in ASP.NET MVC3 & Optimizing ASP.NET MVC view lookup performance – Sam Saffron discusses the performance of view lookup operations in ASP.NET MVC3, in actuality finding a significant difference in behaviour when <compilation debug="true" is set in your web.config file. Marcin Doboz responds to the post with some more details about things you can do to improve performance in this area.
• Clojure and the CLR – K. Scott Allen discusses his love of LISP like languages, and highlights the clojure-clr project which brings a LISP like language to the .NET CLR.
• Dealing with singular plural phrasing – Phil Haack discusses adding polish to your application by ensuring that words are correctly pluralised, sharing a simple solution to the problem. Check out the comments for some links to other approaches, and a number of recommendations for the Castle Inflector.
• Make Your Website More like a Native App – Sara Allison shares an article from Justin Whitney on the UK MSDN Team blog which discusses some of the steps you can take to make your website more like a desktop application by exploiting the functionality provided in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 to more tightly integrate with the Windows shell.
• Introduction to HTML5 Web Storage – Lars Kappert gives an introduction to the Web Storage aspects of HTML5, outlining its purpose, use, and limitations. Comments on this one have some interesting discussions.
• LINQ query performance – Colin Angus Mackay discusses refactoring code to use the LINQ Any() method, discussing how its performance differs from the use of Count() > 0, and looking at some real performance data he has gathered looking at different sized sets and predicates.

Community

• DDD Brisbane – The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper community conference continues extending its presence with DDD Brisbane planned for later this year. The current target date is 26th November at the Queensland University of Technology.
• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Mike Murray on Compositional and Convention-based Web Development With FubuMVC on 20 September 2011 – The European Virtual Alt.NET usergroup welcome Mike Murray for a session on the FubuMVC framework, exploring its use in building compositional convention based web applications. The session is being hosted on Tuesday 20th September over Live Meeting, starting at 7:00PM GMT (So 8pm in the UK due to British Summer Time)
• Backbone.js Screencast – Introduction and Views – Joey Beninghove shares a screen cast version of the content from his recent Develop With Passion Webinar on Backbone.js, giving an introduction to the framework, exploring bootstrapping your application and looking at the view functionality.

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Software

• Windsor 3 beta 1 is released (along with other goodies) – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the first Beta release of Castle Windsor 3. The V3 release is a major one, and brings with it a number of new and improved features such as WCF Integration, introduction of scoped and bound lifestyles, improved debugger views, Lazy component support, and much more.
• Announcing Simplified Data Transfer Billing Meters and Swappable Compute Instances – The Windows Azure team blog highlights two billing related changes beginning on 1s October. Change 1 is a reduction in price of the extra small compute offering, and a standardisation on Small Compute Hours as the unit for all compute allocations, with the larger compute plans consuming more than 1 per hour, and smaller consuming less than 1.

Information

• To sign or not to sign an OSS project – Jimmy Bogard discusses the pros and cons of signing assemblies on open source projects, discussing the requirement, scenarios supported by signing, and also highlighting some of the limitations.
• Architectural Validation – Matthew Groves discusses the use of PostSharp aspects for compile time validation, exploring how aspects can return build errors out of the compilation process, and discusses how this can be used to bake in architectural validation tests.
• Building the Account at a Glance HTML5/jQuery Application – Dan Wahlin discusses the construction of a real world web application which relies heavily on jQuery and HTML5, along with using Modernizer, ASP.NET MVC3, EF 4.1 Code First, Unity, SQL Server and much more, stepping through the key implementation issues of each component.
• Getting rusty – we need new best practices for a different development world – Christian Heilmann discusses web standards and the split between presentation, structure and behaviour in our client side code in web applications, reviewing the history and ways things have been done in the past, looking at the ideal, and discussing the patterns and practices which have got us to here we are now, and where we should go from here.
• On Phone Apps and Web Apps – Paul Laberge discusses the shift from classic native phone applications to HTML5 based phone applications which allow you to target a variety of platforms, and discusses the platform changes which have begun to make this possible.
• Profiling JavaScript 101 Using IE9 Developer Tools – Gil Fink takes a look at the use of the Internet Explorer 9 developer tools for profiling JavaScript code, discussing what the profile results mean in terms of your code’s performance.
• Tip #109 Did you know- How to speed up build time by *only* building the currently selected project in a multi-project solution? : Web Developer Tips : The Official Microsoft IIS Site – Mark Berryman shares a useful tip for anyone working in a large Visual Studio solution with lots of projects, looking at how you can better control the build process to give you faster build turnaround when developing.
• Have ORMs introduced extra complexity into our codebase? – Paul Stack questions the value of Object Relational Mappers , taking a look beyond to see what other folk are doing when performance and control over SQL matters.
• Windbg: Finding a specific instance of a managed object in a windows process – Henning Krause explores the use of the Psscor Windbg extension to explore memory for instances of a particular class, and to inspect their contents.

Community

• Gary Short on Applied F# – Tonight (Tuesday 16th August) Gary Short joins the F#unctional Londoners for a session on applied F#, in which he will show how he has been using F# for calculating the metrics
• NxtGenUG – Event: NHibernate from the trenches – Richard Wilde visits the Oxford NxtGenUG for a session on NHibernate and its use in real world applications, looking at and giving tips on building excellent data access applications using NHibernate, exploring sessions, transactions, queries, unit of work, and testing, on Tuesday 13th September. The NxtGenUG in Oxford are being joined by Kendall Miller for their October event ‘The Kendall Miller Tour ‘ on Tuesday 25th October where Kendall will be discussing API design, outlining some of the key principles of commercial API design and looking at some real world examples.

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Information

• Using Windows Phone As Windows 7 Accelerometer Sensor – Arik Poznanski explores hooking the Accelerometer in a Windows Phone 7 device as a Windows 7 sensor allowing you to control applications on your Windows 7 desktop or laptop using the WP7 device.
• The Backbone.js Todo List Refactored – Part 2: Being Reactionary – Rob Conery continues his exploration of Backbone.js with the second part of his series looking at refactoring the code in the Backbone,js Todo sample application, exploring the reactive nature of views and looking at refactoring the views in the application.
• Enabling And Disabling A Button With Backbone.ModelBinding – Derick Bailey follows up on ihs recent post on enabling and disabling buttons in Backbone,js Modelbinding, looking at an alternative implementation based on feedback from the backbone mailinglist.
• Making Switch Refactorings Better – Defaultable Dictionary – John Sonmez shares an implementation of a dictionary class which provides for returning a default value when no match is found, making it ideally suited to refactoring switch statements into a map / dictionary approach and handling the default case of the switch in an elegant way.
• Understanding"Prototypes" in JavaScript – Yehuda Katz shares a nice introduction to the prototype approach to objects in JavaScript, exploring creating objects using prototypes, adding properties, and exploring object orientation
• Small Revamp to strangelights.com and Free Chapter of Beginning F# – Rob Pickering has given a spring clean to his website, and also made available the full chapter 3 from his ‘Beginning F#’ book. This chapter explores the way functional programming works in F# and is a great resource for getting up to speed with this aspect of F#.
• New Async Programming Video’s – The Visual Basic Team highlights a collection of new videos about the Async features of the Async CTP for Visual Studio 2010 showing them in both Visual Basic and C#.
• Internet Explorer 9.0.2 Update – Eric Lawrence highlights some of the recent security changes to Internet Explorer 9 released over Windows Update, including restrictions on the use of the File:// protocol in pages served over HTTP(S) and the storage of cookies
• The Top 5 WPF and Silverlight Gotchas – Chris Farrell explores 5 of they key gotchas for memory management in WPF and Silverlight applications, looking at how the issue comes about and sharing possible solutions to resolve the problems.
• Multiple face detection and recognition in real time – Sergio Andrés Gutiérrez Rojas explores the use of Emgu CV a .NET wrapper over the Intel OpenCV image processing library to perform facial recognition on images

Community

• F102 – F ubuMVC In Action & FubuMVC Webinar: F101 – Behaviors, Configuration, and Runtime – Josh Arnold shares the recording of his second FubuMVC webcast event, and reminds us that he is re-running the first part this Friday (19th August) at 10am CST.
• Webcast: "Mango"Jump Start! Aug. 23-24! Pass it on… – Kim Spilker highlights a 2 day vrtual class for learning all aspects of Windows Phone Developement beign hosted by Rob Miles and Andy Wigley. The two all day classes are running on 23&24th August between 8am and 4pm PST
• NxtGenUG – Event: Go Asynchronous With C# 5.0 – The Birmingham chapter of the NxtGenUG welcome Liam Westley for a session on the Async CTP and C#5, looking at how you can let the compiler do the hard work of aysnc programming for you on Tuesday 13th September

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