The Morning Brew

Catching up on all the great posts from last week and the weekend with a heavy dose of //Build/ content, along with the non-build links that missed out on being included last week.

//Build/ Related

• Windows Build/Windows 8: My Impressions – Change is a good thing – John Petersen reflects back over the //Build/ Conference discussing how the latest announcements fit in with the on-going bigger picture of the evolution of our platform.
• BUILD Day #3 in Review According to MVPs – The Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – The MVP Programme Blog highlights a number of posts from MVPs discussing the events, announcements and experiences of the 3rd Day of the //Build/ conference.
• Why I’m Excited About Windows 8 – Dan Wahlin shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 Developer Preview, discussing the various aspects of the announcement, the technology, its likelihood of adoption, and what the consumer facing feature may mean for the Enterprise Developer.
• A Tale of Two Windows – Andrew Burst discusses the difficult problem that Windows 8 attempts to address, being all things to all people across user experience, Human Computer Interaction technologies and platforms.
• My thoughts about Build, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and Silverlight – Laurent Bugnion shares a nice discussion of the Windows 8 announcement, and the reaction to the proposed options for the development platform for Windows 8 Metro style applications, weighing up the various options presented in the different aspects of the //Build/ Conference.
• Windows Runtime – Dial in the right expectations before reading up – Samuel Jack urges us all to ensure we have the right expectations before you embark on looking at the new world of WinRT
• Real Native WinRT Development – Ian Griffiths drops down to the COM level and explore WinRT by looking at consuming it at this level using C++, revealing something of how WinRT actually works
• WinRT and .NET, WinRT and business apps & CSLA on WinRT (project start) – Rockford Lhotka discusses the announcement of WinRT, discusses its possible future use in Line of Business applications and outlines his plans for his CSLA application framework on Windows 8 / WinRT
• WinRT and .NET in Windows 8 – Sasha Goldshtein outlines the position of WinRT alongside the existing UI technologies like WPF and Silverlight.
• Microsoft’s New Mullet – Colin Blair looks at the now famous Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide from the //Build/ Conference discussing the UI technologies and their appropriateness for different types of application.
• A bad picture is worth a thousand long discussions – Doug Seven discusses the difficulty in creating a good marketing info graphic, exploring the Windows 8 Platform and Tools slide, sharing some details from discussions with members of the .NET Team and re-drawing the diagram to better reflect the intended reality.

Software

• Released: Project Silk Client-Side Web Development for Modern Browsers – Karl Shifflett announces the official release of Project Silk – a guidance package for the creation of rich web based experiences using modern web development technologies and techniques. This release comes on the end of a series of preview releases where we have been able to watch the team build the guidance package and the supporting sample application.
• Announcing Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta – Stathis Papaefstathiou announces the beta release of the first beta of the Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4. The major features of this release involve integration of Kinect based functionality for improved Human Robot Interaction, and a Silverlight based CCR Programming model.
• Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets 2.0 have been released! – Michael Washam announces the release of a new version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets. This version 2 release adds a number of new and updated cmdlets for improving the Deployment, diagnostics capabilities of Azure from your PowerShell command line.
• Now Available: The Service Bus September 2011 Release – Clemens Vasters announces the September 2011 release of the Azure Service Bus. The new release improves capabilities in Pub/Sub messaging, enables load balancing capabilities for Intra Application messaging, supports Asynchronous Cloud Eventing and Event Driven Service Oriented Architectures
• WebMatrix v2 Beta is out… – Greg Duncan highlights the announcement from Simon Tan of the Beta release of WebMatrix V2. This release sees a significant development in the product, and brings with it a range of great new features for development using PHP, JavaScript, and .NET, including NuGet support, and improved data management options and features. Be sure to check out the linked New features document for all the new bits.
• PlayStation Suite SDK beta coming in November, offering new games in spring 2012 – Engadget highlights the forthcoming Sony PlayStation Suite which will support the use of C# to program games for the various Sony games platforms,

Information

• ASP.NET MVC 4: New template for web applications, ASP.NET MVC 4: New mobile web application template &ASP.NET MVC 4: Display modes – Gunnar Peipman explore the new ASP.NET MVC 4 application template, giving a preview of the layout, and discussing how it makes better use of CSS and HTML(5), and provides a mobile friendly version before moving on to look at the new Display Modes feature allowing you to conditionally render different views to mobile devices, discussing how you can simulate and test this behaviour using your desktop browser and looking at creating custom display mode rules.
• Demystifying the Windows 8 Grid Application – Bil Simser takes the wraps off the Metro Grid Application Template included in the Visual Studio 11 Preview release, exploring the structure of the template and how and what each part does.
• Windows 8 : Metro’s Grid Application – what, how and when ? – Jonathan Antonie also explores the new Windows 8 Metro Grid application template included in Visual Studio 11, looking at the UI Experience and exploring the creation of a sample application using the template.
• Metro .NET Framework Profile (Windows Tailored) – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the parts of the .NET API which are exposed to the new Metro Style applications, discussing what is in and out, some of the possible work around available to getting at other bits of the framework, and their effects of App Marketplace compliance.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Fetch and Lazy, SELECT N + 1 & Merge – Ricardo Peres continues his series focusing on some of the possible problems you as developer can run into using the NHibernate ORM with a look at the condusion around Fetch and he problem of Select N+1 when retrieving complex object graphs, and discusses merging entities back into the session and the backing data store from outside the current Session.
• Windows 8 – An OS of two halves – Colin Eberhardt shares his thoughts on the Windows 8 dual UI experience, from both a developer and end user perspective, discussing the confusion the two UIs may cause, and how we have to be careful to select the right UI for our applications.
• Using System.Reflection.Emit in a Windows 8 Metro style Application – Jason Bock discusses the use of Reflection.Emit in Metro applciation by way of including a .NET Class Library to do the reflection emit work, hard coding the reference to the class library assembly, and discussing the probable impact of this technique on your ability to get the Metro application into the market place.
• Creating Data-driven web apps using ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms – Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the new model binding functionality available in ASP.NET WebForms 4.5 Preview, looking based upon Damian Edwards session at //Build/
• Extending configuration in OpenRasta 2.1 – Sebastien Lambla discusses some changes to OpenRasta 2.1 which make extending OpenRasta’s configuration API easier and also support writing extensions for 2.1 which will continue to function in OpenRasta 3.0
• Effective Xml Part 1: Choose the right API – Pawel Kadluczka starts a series of posts looking at the different APIs provided for working with XML data and documents and looking at whcih approach is best suited to which scenario.
• The .NET Dictionary – Simon Cooper takes a look at the implementation of the humble .NET Dictionary class, looking at the internal structure used by the dictionary to keep track of items.
• Creating simple and complex animations with JQuery in ASP.Net applications – Nikolaos Kantzelis discusses animations using jQuery, sharing some samples which illustrate varying levels of complexity of animation
• What is the cost of try/catch – Ayende discusses one of the misunderstandings people commonly have with try/catch exception handling – that there is actually no performance penalty in using Try / Catch in your code unless exceptions are thrown.

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I’m planning an Afternoon Tea post this afternoon / evening to attempt to record all the great articles and announcements I have open in the (must be aproaching 100+) browser tabs which are currently causing my laptop to go very slow.

Software

• Visual Studio 11 ALM Developer Preview: Virtual Machine with Hands-on-Labs + Demo Scripts now available – Esther Fan highlights the availability of a Virtual Machine Environment for the Visual Studio 11 ALM Preview release, including demos and hands on labs, and the correct versions of all the bits and pieces all preconfigured.

Information

• Improvements in the CLR Core in .NET Framework 4.5 – Sasha Goldshtein highlights some of the many improvements made in the preview release of the new version of the .NET Framework, discussing Garbage Collection, JIT, NGen and other optimisations.
• What’s New For Parallelism in .NET 4.5 – Stephen Toub discusses the enhancements made to the .NET Framework which improve the support for parallel programming, disucssing the Task Parallel Library, PLINQ, improved support for controlling your workload via partitioning, reductions, timeouts, the introduction of Async support, and the improved tooling in Visual Studio.
• New Tools and New Content – ASP.NET, Visual Studio 11 Web and .NET 4.5 Developer Preview (with commentary) – Scott Hanselman discusses the new releases from the ‘Angle Brackets Team’ announced at //Build/, including their part in Visual Studio 11, the NuGet 1.5 update for VS 11, ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC 4 Preview, Web Pages 2 Preview, RIA for JS/HTML5, and the WCF 4.5 Developer preview. Lots of great stuff to play with.
• New CSS editor features in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – Web Development Tools @ Microsoft – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Van Kichline and Peter Spada of the VWD Dev Team share a look at the new CSS editor functionality available in the Visual Studio 11 product line, discussing the improvements, and showing how you can give feedback on the new features.
• Knockout.js – using MVVM in HTML & JavaScript applications – Dan Jones discusses the Knockout.js Javacript MVVM implementation from Steve Sanderson, highlighing some good resources for those interested in getting started with Knockout (which I’m sure I saw somewhere was included in the MVC4 Preview release).
• Running Windows 8 Developer Preview in a virtual environment – Steven Sinofsky shares a post from Sue Bohn, David Hicks, Cornel Lupu discussing the use of the Windows 8 Developer Preview in different Virtualisation Technologies, highlighting those know to work OK and those which have issues.
• Functional Fun: What’s new in C# 5.0 and VB.Net? – Samuel Jack discusses some of the significant new features of the C#5 and VB.NET releases included in the .NET 4.5 / VS 11 Developer Preview announced in Anders Hejlberg’s session at //Build/ including Windows Runtime, The Roslyn Project and Asynchronous Methods.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #940

Still struggling to keep up (or catch up) – there may have to be an ‘Afternoon Tea’ post this weekend to get back up to date.

//Build

• The Windows Runtime & Using WinRT from C# //build Demo – Harry Pierson discusses his involvement with the WinRT as a Program Manager on the Runtime Experience Team, highlighting some of the key features, pointing to //Build sessions about those features, and sharing some example code from his session on Using Windows Runtime from C# and Visual Basic.
• Learning about the Team Foundation Service Preview – Martin Woodward shares the key information about the Team Foundation Service hosted service running on the Windows Azure Platform, discussing the key features, where you can find more information, and how you can help give feedback.
• TFS Azure – Technical Access Preview Experience! – Tarun Arora discusses the TFS as a Service, sharing some key questions and answers, as well as giving a walk through the product by way of a series of screenshots with narrative.
• PowerShell v3 and JSON – Doug Finke highlights the release of PowerShell 3 as a part of the Windows Developer Preview, making note of two new commands which give PowerShell native JSON support
• Web API Preview 5 Is Now Available – Howard Dierking highlights the announcement of the 5th Preview release of the Web API at the //Build Conference. This new preview is a significant step forwards with a large number of new features along with some breaking changes. The release is also available via NuGet.
• New JavaScript editing features for Web development in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – The Web Development Tools blog highlights some of the new features for JavaScript in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview, comparing the new implementation to what was available in Visual Studio 2010.
• WinRT demystified – Miguel de Icaza gives a nice discussion of the WinRT, looking at its origins, the problems it looks to fix, and discusses its use in building components
• Lots and lots of interesting //Build related posts being written still….here are a few:
  • Microsoft dev stack vNext from Build – Simone Chiaretta
  • OK, so I think HTML/JS for Metro apps is a good idea – Mark Rendle
  • BUILD: WinRT, Silverlight, WPF, XAML – Jeremy Alles
  • Build day 2: WinRT and managed languages – Bill Wagner
  • BUILD Day #2 in Review According to MVPs – MVP Award Program
  • SELA Blogs and Tweets @ BUILD – Sasha Goldshtein highlights //Build content from some of his colleagues.
• Download all the Build Videos with RSS – Michael Crump highlights the availability of RSS feeds including the links to the video recordings of //Build Sessions. Greg Duncan also has a useful tip for building a custom feed in his post Channel 9 Events / BUILD2011 RSS Feed Tip, Building your perfect, custom, filtered BUILD RSS feed –

Information

• WebMatrix and node.js: The easiest way to get started with node on Windows – Scott Hanselman highlights some great work by Tomasz Janczuk and Steve Sanderson which brings a use of WebMatrix as an IDE for Node.Js Development on the Windows Platform by way of some project templates and the IISNode for IIS Express project.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The String Remove() and Replace() Methods – James Michael Hare continues his series of less well known about parts of the .NET Framework and C# language continuing exploring some of the methods of the String class, looking today at Remove and Replace.
• Back to Basics: Big O notation issues with older .NET code and improving for loops with LINQ deferred execution – Scott Hanselman is also continuing his Back to Basics series with a look at the Big O notation for analysing the performance characteristics of code, digging through an example of a method in the .NET Framework, and discussing its performance, along with comparing how a LINQ based version would behave.
• A Step-by-step guid to creating your first Hello World Metro style app using Live Connect – Shelly Guo shares a walkthrough of building a Windows 8 Metro application which makes use of the Live Connect SDK (another new release at //Build) developed in HTML and JavaScript.
• My Pluralsight C++ Fundamentals course is live! (and free for a little while) – Kate Gregory highlights the release of her C++ Fundamentals course with the folks at Pluralsight, which is available to access during //Build for free.
• Zombies! RUN! (Managing Page Transitions In Backbone Apps) – Derick Bailey continues his series of posts looking at the Backbone.js platform and discusses some of the common problem developer can run into with event binding.

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