The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing The End of The Free Promotional Period for Windows Azure AppFabric Caching – The Windows Azure Team give a reminder of the end of the promotional period for the AppFabric Caching Service, and announce the official pricing for service use for billing periods starting from 1st August. Prices range from $45 a month for a 128MB Cache, through to $325 for a 4BG cache, with a number of Azure Platform offers including the 128MB cache in the package.
• NLog 2.0 has been released! – The NLog team announced the release of Version 2.0 of their logging library last month (and somehow I missed the announcement at the time). The version 2.0 release focused on adding support for new platforms including Silverlight, and Windows Phone, along with various improvements to the underlying architecture and te Developer experience.

Information

• Introduction to Unity Application Block 2.1 – Niko Schuessler gives a nice introduction to the Unity Application Block which provides dependency injection functionality as a part of the Patterns and Practices Application blocks. In this article Niko gives some background and walks through some of the introductory use cases and the code required to make them work.
• Techniques, Strategies and Patterns for Structuring JavaScript Code – The Prototype Pattern – Dan Wahlin continues his series of posts looking at JavaScript programming, taking a look at how the prototype pattern which is baked into the language can be used to improve your code, building on his example from last time.
• Javascript code quality, as part of your build – Romain Prieto highlights JsHint, a JsLint clone which addresses a number of user issues which can make working with JsLint difficult. In this post Romain takes a look at configuring and including the tool as a part of your build process.
• HTML5 Part 1: Semantic Markup and Page Layout – Jennifer Marsman kicks off a new series of posts this week looking at the various aspects of HTML5. In this first part Jennifer explores the notion of semantic markup and how HTML5 provides markup elements to better express your page in semantic markup.
• Creating an HTML 5 Game – Part 2 – Moving Stuff Around – The South Africa Developer and Platform Group Blog is featuring a series of posts looking at creating a game in HTML 5 and JavaScript. This second part takes a look at capturing keypresses and moving elements on screen in response.
• Explore the Browser User-Agent in Windows Phone Mango – ‘jhealy’ takes a peek at the construction of the Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) web browser user agent string
• Windows Phone 7 : Using Local Database for Application – Wriju takes a look at using Windows Phone 7’s Isolated storage and Linq to Sql to provide database functionality for your Windows Phone applications
• Unix Fight! – Sed, Grep, Awk, Cut and Pulling Groups out of a PowerShell Regular Expression Capture – Scott Hanselman takes a look at using PowerShell to parse and read values from files from the command line, exploring how easy it is to read values from good well-formed XML, and taking a look at other techniques you can use when your files are less well formed (or not even XML).
• LaxCraft – Sample MVC3 Site – James Coleman discusses the creation of a real world ASP.NET MVC3 application for managing and tracking a youth lacrosse team, making use of Dependency injection, Razor Views, Open ID and the ASP.NET MVC 3 platform. Full code is available over on CodePlex.
• ViewData or ViewBag – Avoid Dependency Pollution in ASP.NET MVC Controller – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at the ViewBag / ViewData and its use in carrying values from controller to view, exploring the use of child actions to populate the values we require in the ViewData to avoid having bloat in our main primary controller, allowing it to focus on only what its main purpose is.
• Creating a Silverlight 5 Helper for ASP.NET MVC3 Razor – Pete Brown takes a look at creating a ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor helper to make it easy to include Silverlight applications within your ASP.NET MVC application, walking through the process step by step.

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Update: Fixed the double posting – thanks to Oded for letting me know

Software

• Caliburn.Micro v1.2 RTW and Nuget Feature Packages! – Rob Eisenberg announces the 1.2 release of his Caliburn.Micro framework. Along with the usual improvements and fixes this release includes the introduction of NuGet based feature packages allowing you to get just the bits of the framework you require allowing you to make smaller applications
• SpecFlow 1.7.0 released – Jonas Bandi announces the release of SpecFlow 1.7.0, the latest update to this .NET BDD Framework. This release includes the use of the standard gherkin parser, support for code generation from the lib folder copy of the library, along with numerous other improvements and bugfixes.
• NHibernate 3.2.0GA – Fabio Maulo announces the General Availability release of NHibernate 3.2. This release includes a vast array of improvements, bug fixes and new features including a SQL Azure dialect, paging in HQL, code based mapping and much much more. Be sure to read the release notes for full details and also for details of the few potentially breaking changes.
• WinForm HTML Editor Control – Adding HTML editing to your WinForm app is drag and drop away… – Greg Duncan highlights a very useful looking HTML Editor Control for WinForms applications providing you with a useable alternative to the built in RTF editor for rich text editing with the content being maintained as HTML. Available from the MSDN Code Gallery, the control comes with a sample application and 30+ pages of documentation.

Information

• Node.cs – Ayende takes a look at implementing some of the Node.js functionality in C# showing how using the Task Parallel Library you can quite easily obtain something similar in not very much code.
• Knockout Style Data-Bind Attributes For Backbone – Derick Bailey continues his exploration of Backbone sharing code for Knockout style data binding attributes for Backbone, plugging in to his existing Model Binding plugin for Backbone.
• Magic Free Code First Migrations – Rowan Miller responds to some of the feedback about the Entity Framework Migrations CTP, discussing some of the design decisions, and outlining some of the use cases for the tool, urging people to give good constructive feed back through the official channels to help the focus future CTP efforts.
• Using Reflection and Attributes for better Tracing and Logging data rendering – Carl Nolan discusses the use of Reflection to explore object structure and extract information from the structure and instances of objects, showing how that can be applied to tracing and logging code.
• Reflection, Lambda, and Expression Magic – Jeremy Likness discusses the use of Reflection along with Lambdas and expressions to create a helper class which provides non-intrusive validation onto code generated entities
• Internals of Dependency Property in WPF – Abhishek Sur continues his ‘Internals of…’ series with a look at how Dependency Properties in WPF are implemented under the hood
• Techniques, Strategies and Patterns for Structuring JavaScript Code – Dan Wahlin kicks off a series of posts looking at the different ways of structuring your JavaScript code, exploring techniques and patterns which help make your JavaScript code better. In this post Dan sets the scene for the examples, and takes a look at closures in JavaScript.
• OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 8: Failure to Restrict URL Access – Troy Hunt continues his excellent series of posts focusing on the OWASP projects top 10 security vulnerabilities.

Community

• What’s new in Denali (The next version of SQL Server) – Scottish Develpoers welcome Andrew Fryer for a session in Glasgow on Tuesday 16th August where Andrew will be giving a taste of the new features of SQL Server Denali, the next release of the SQL Server Product Line.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Node.js – Gary Short takes a trip down to Manchester / Warrington for the NxtGenUG to deliver a session on using Node.js to create event driven server side JavaScript code, giving an introduction to node.js, and exploring a network appliance’s code written in Node.Js. The session will be delivered on Wednesday 21st September at AppSense in Daresbury.
• Dev4Good July 2011 – Howard van Rooijen shares a nice write up of a great Dev Event. The July Dev4Good event set out to help 3 charities with some technology to help support their charitable goals, and i sounds like the Dev4Good team got on well with the project and had a great time to boot.

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