August 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #910

Posted by on 05 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • And we are back: Mono 2.10.3 – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono 2.10.3, the first official release of the Mono Project since Xamarin took control. Significant changes are those to add support for Mac OS X Lion, improvements to the WCF Stack and improvements to the garbage collector
  • dotCover 1.1.1 and dotTrace Performance 4.5.1 Released – Hadi Hariri highlights the release of the latest versions of dotCover and dotTrace from JetBrains. These releases improve the integration with ReSharper 6, along with some significant new features in dotCover, and all the usual bugfixes and minor improvements.
  • The Time is Now to Try JustTrace – Chris Eargle highlights the Telerik tracing offering, freshly updated as a part of the Telerik Q2 2011 release cycle and now commercially available. There is currently a 50% introductory discount available and a 60 day trial so you can get a taste before parting with your cash.
  • Coded UI Test Enhanced Framework now available – The Visual Studio Team Test Blog highlights the Coded UI Test Enhanced Framework (CUITe), a layer built on top of the Coded UI tests in Visual Studio by Suresh Balasubramanian which aims to reduce the code needed in your tests and improve readability and maintainability of your tests.
  • Using GMap.NET – Great Maps for Windows Forms & Presentation – Saif Khan highlights a nice looking Mapping control for use in rich client applications, offering support for Bing, Yahoo, OpenStreetMap and ArcGIS mapping imagery

Information

  • Dive into the summer with MSDN: HTML5 – Katrien DG highlights the 3rd MSDN ‘Dive Into’ topic for the summer – HTML5 and Internet Explorer 9 & 10. The site contains a collection of resources organised by the time you may have available to learn, breaking them down into 30minutes, half day and full day learning opportunities.
  • HTML5 Part 4: Using HTML5 while retaining support for older browsers – Jennifer Marsman continues with her week’s blogging on HTML5 with a look at maintaining backwards compatibility whilst using HTML5 in your sites, using polyfills to add in API features from HTML5 back into older browsers via JavaScript implementations.
  • Visual Studio 2010 Addin: Setting a class breakpoint – Software development from Uruguay, South America – Alfonso Cora shares a Visual Studio Extension which adds breakpoints to all methods in your current class, discussing how the Add-in was built, and sharing the code and binary version.
  • Collapse All Add-in for all Visual Studio Projects – Sreekesh NK has also been looking at Add-in development in this CodeProject article, sharing an addin which collapses project structure in the IDE, discussing the development and install experience for the addin and providing full source and binaries
  • Mango RTMs! Now what? – Paul Laberge discusses what the RTM of Windows Phone 7 Mango actually means, reviewing the new features, and highlighting a great selection of resources from Larry Lieberman which give developers all the information they need to make the most of Mango.
  • Fancy Building Your Own Tower Defence Game? – Mike Ormond highlights a great XNA learning opportunity from the Coding4Fun team, a fully features tower defence game implementation written for Windows Phone in XNA which you can explore and customise at both a configuration and code level.
  • Minimalist Coding Guidelines – ‘gggustafson’ shares what he considers to be a minimal set of coding standards guidelines, presenting both the rule, and the rationale behind the rule.
  • SemanticConflict – Martin Fowler discusses what he and his colleagues at ThoughtWorks consider to be the difficulties for branch per feature version control strategies, discussing some of the difficulties and fail cases in merging which can result in problems.
  • Feature switching: a better way to collaborate – Paul Stack is also considering Branch Per Feature and its impact on Continuous Integration when changes may live on branches not build considered by CI, looking Feature Switching as an alternative to allow developments to be performed on the main code based but in a disabled state while being developed.

Community

  • NxtGenUG – Event: Scalable websites – The NxtGenUG in Essex are holding a session on building scalable web sites and applications using ASP.NET and Windows, exploring how architectures similar to those used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook can be implemented on the .NET platform. The event will be held on Wednesday 31st August in Brentwood.
  • FREE One Day Windows Azure Discovery Workshops for product authors – first is September 12th – Eric Nelson highlights a series of monthly workshops on the Windows Azure Platform for partner organisations who are interested in finding out more about Azure. Spaces are limited to 12 per workshop, with one space available per partner organisation

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The Morning Brew #909

Posted by on 04 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Announcing the August 2011 Release of the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – The Windows Azure Team announce the release of their August 2011 build of the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2010. This release contains new profiling tooling allowing you to profile applications running on Azure, support for ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Roles, improved package validation and support for multiple service configurations in one project.
  • NOW AVAILABLE: August 2011 Update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit – As is usual, the Windows Azure Team have updated their Platform Training Kit to reflect the changes in the August 2011 (1.4) release of the SDK Tooling.
  • Announcing Windows Azure Storage Analytics – The Windows Azure Team complete their trio of announcements with new abilities to monitor, track, analyse and debug the use of Windows Azure Storage, Blobs, Tables and Queues
  • Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms – Graham Mendick releases version 1.2 of his Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms project on CodePlex. This project provides a server side solution to building multi stage state based page flows, and is accompanied by a comprehensive sample application based on Nerd Dinner, and detailed documentation

Information

Community

  • SQLBits 9 conference schedule posted – Matt Masson highlights the provisional Agenda for the Friday (pay for) and Saturday (free community day) at SQLBits 9, hosted in Liverpool on the 30 September / 1st October. Once again it looks like there is going to be a great range of sessions available, and another conference well worth checking out if you haven’t already.
  • 10K Apart: The Responsive Edition Contest open for participation – Katrien DG highlights the 10k Apart contest, a joint effort between Microsoft’s MIX Online team and An Event Apart, looking for a fully featured web application for modern browsers all written inside 10K of code (compressed)
  • Upcoming FubuMVC Webinar Series & FubuMVC Webinar: F101 – Behaviors, Configuration, and Runtime – Josh Arnold is taking his FubuMVC series to the next level with three planned Webinar events looking at Behaviors, Configuration, and Runtime, View Engines and Html Conventions, and Custom Behaviors. The first of which will run twice, once on Friday 5th August and again on Friday 19th August

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The Morning Brew #908

Posted by on 03 Aug 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Kinect for Windows SDK Beta Refresh Available – The Microsoft Research team behind the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit announce an updated beta refresh which brings improved stability to the Kinect framework, along with improvements to the APIs and time sampling, and further improved documentation.
  • Web Farm Framework 2.1 – Servicing Release available for download : The Official Microsoft IIS Site – ‘ruslany’ announces the release of an update to the Web Farm Framework, taking its version to 2.1. This update addresses user reported issues against the 2.0 release, including support for non-standard HTTP ports, automatic re-adding of now healthy servers, and many others
  • Announcing TouchDevelop v2.0 beta: script sharing in the cloud – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop v2.0 beta, an update (with a new name) to the project know previously as TouchStudio which allows you to write and share scripts for your Windows Phone 7 mobile device. This new version includes cloud based sharing of scripts, and improved editor, and a new supporting website.

Information

  • MSDN Magazine: August 2011 – The August edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles this month exploring FTS, Visual Studio LightSwitch, HTML5, Multi-platform development using the Portable Class Libraries functionality, artificial intelligence, and parallel programming in .NET. Combine this with all the usual columns and that is one element of your holiday reading sorted
  • Text templating using Razor the easy way – Phil Haack shows how easily you can use the Razor engine with the RazorGenerator Visual Studio Extension to generated templated output for use in places other than web applications, illustrating with a simple console application.
  • Temperature Monitoring using VB.Net, Micro-framework and a Netduino – Spotty Bowles takes a look at the use of the .NET Micro-Framework with VB.NET and the Netduino hardware walking through the creation of a simple application to monitor temperature
  • Techniques, Strategies and Patterns for Structuring JavaScript Code – Revealing Module Pattern – Dan Wahlin presses on with his series looking at code structure patterns in JavaScript with a look at the Revealing Module pattern, once again illustrating how the pattern can tame an unruly sample JavaScript application.
  • Exploring CoffeeScript Part 5 – Ranges, Loops and Comprehensions – Jan Van Ryswyck continues his series of posts looking at the CoffeeScript language, exploring the use of loops, ranges, while and comprehensions in this post.
  • Thoughts on MicroOrms – Chris Brandsma takes a look at the MicroORM landscape, discussing why you might want to consider MicroORMs for use in your projects, and looking at three of the main players, Simple.Data, Dapper and Massive.
  • HTML5 Part 2: Canvas – Jennifer Marsman presses on with this week’s post series looking at HTML5 features, taking a look in this post at the HTML5 Canvas, showing a simple drawing example using the canvas, and looking at canvas compared to SVG.
  • Version Control Model Enhancements in TFS 11 – Brian Harry discusses some of the background to version control in TFS, its aims, design goals and some history, and introduces the new concepts of Local Workspaces in TFS11 and shares a video of them in use.
  • When would I use a Branch for Developer Scenario? – Bill Heys explores two scenarios looking at how branching strategies can be used to make the processes behind the approaches work better.
  • Web Dev .NET: 7 Chrome Tips Developers & Designers May Not Know – Elijah Manor shares 7 tips for working with Chrome as a Web developer or designer, looking at modifying JavaScript and CSS in browser, unminify JavaScript source, Break points triggered by DOM changes, inspecting CSS pseudo-class selectors, keyboard shortcuts, and customising the browser developer experience.

Community

  • Windows Phone Usergroup – Aug ’11 – Designing better apps – Windows Phone 7 – The Windows Phone Usergroup in London are meeting on Wednesday 17th August when Dave Crawford, a Microsoft UX Designer in Windows Phone Developer Support will be discussing common design mistakes app developers make. Additionally there will be general Q&A along with an opportunity to show off the applications you are workin on.

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