The Morning Brew

Software

• Silverlight 5 RC has released! – Cheryl Simmons announces the release of the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate. The release brings with it a number of significant new features and improvements. Pete Brown highlights many of them in his post ‘Silverlight 5 RC now Available‘ where he recaps a number of the features via posts from his blog and other beta based resources.
• Now Available: Workflow Foundation Activity Pack for Windows Azure CTP 1 – The AppFabric team highlight the release of the first CTP release of the Workflow Foundation Activity Pack for Windows Azure, available from CodePlex or via NuGet. The activity pack builds on the August Azure SDK and includes activities for interacting with blob and table storage as well as the AppFabric Cache.
• Update for LightSwitch Released – Visual Studio LightSwitch Team announces a GDR release of LightSwitch which resolved some issues users have encountered when publishing to SQL Azure

Information

• Strongly Typed Data Controls (ASP.NET vNext Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series discussing the functionality which is coming in the next version of ASP.NET and Visual Studio. In this post Scott begins exploring the changes to WebForms with a look at Strongly Typed Data Controls
• Visual Studio vNext IDE Enhancements – Zain Naboulsi is also looking forwards to what will be in the box in Visual Studio vNext, discussing a number of features and improvements being made to the core project, many inspired by Visual Studio Extensions currently available.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: An Oft Overlooked String Constructor – James Michael Hare continues his series on less well known parts of the .NET framework and C# language. In this post James takes a look at the construction of strings of varying lengths of the same character.
• The Importance (and Ease) of Minifying your CSS and JavaScript and Optimizing PNGs for your Blog or Website – Scott Hanselman discusses the importance of making sure your websites images, CSS and JavaScript files are as small as possible, looking at how you can easily test, identify, and resolve these types of issue.
• Getting Started with the Silverlight 5 RC – Michael Crump gives his usual walk through of the download and setup experience for the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate, sharing a collection of resources to take you further once you are setup and running.
• Silverlight 5 RC – What’s new in the 3D world? – David Catuhe takes a look at some of the 3D features and enhancements included in the Silverlight 5 Release Candidate, sharing some code for each to illustrate.
• Tasks are in Silverlight – David Catuhe highlights a significant features of the Silverlight 5 release candidate, the inclusion of Task Parallel Library Tasks.
• JavaScript Jargon – Jonathan Cardy takes a look at a number of terms which crop up in programming JavaScript, giving definitions, explanations and examples of Closure, Anonymous functions, currying, hoisting, prototype, and many more.
• "Intro to NoSQL" or "Noodling NoSQL" or "No NoSQL? Now know NoSQL…") – Greg Duncan highlights a nice article on the concepts and ideas behind NoSql from Francesco Rizzi Design
• How to Navigate the HTML5 Video Maze – Nigel Parker discusses HTML 5’s Video support, discussing the various options for Video, the complexities and sharing some experiences from real world projects.

Community

• The Stack – Liverpool .NET User Group – October 2011 – The Stack Usergroup, here in Liverpool, welcomes Dave McMahon for two sessions on Monday 10th October. Dave will be discussing the development of a Silverlight based Business Intelligence Dashboard making use of Prism. SharePoint, Bing Maps, and much more. In his second session of the night, Dave will give and introduction to Quantum Computing.
• Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group – October Meeting – Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group welcome Mark Rendle for two sessions on Thursday 13th October as a part of his Scottish tour. Mark will be delivering a session on Functional Programming in C#, and his session on Managing your Manager.

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