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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Update: Fixed some broken HTML which was causing Brian Lagunas’ Prism / Bing article and Brian Harry’s TFS Merging article links to be combined – thanks to Mark Heath for letting me know

Software

• Knockout 1.3.0 Beta Available – Steve Sanderson announces the beta release of Knockout 1.3.0. This new version focuses on developer happiness, bringing with it a number of new features which reduce the amount of code needed to work with Knockout, including a number of new binding features, improved event handler support, and throttling features.
• Nuget 1.5 – Phil Haack has just announced that NuGet 1.5 is ‘up for real’ now after problems yesterday with release procedures and is now well and truely ready for download and use, so get it while its hot 🙂
• Quick news: Windows Azure Toolkits for devices – Devon Musgrave highlights a raft of releases of Windows Azure Toolkits for mobile devices, with update to the Windows Phone, iOS editions, along with a new Android platform version.
• NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for Android – The Windows Azure team highlight the new Android Windows Azure Toolkit in a little more detail, sharing a video from Wade Wegner on the new release, and pointing to further information in blog post form.
• Windows Phone 7.1 Isolated Storage Explorer Visual Studio Extension – Greg Duncan highlights the release of a Visual Studio 2010 Extension from Rudy Huyn which allows you to explore the data stored in a Windows Phone from the IDE rather than the command line

Information

• HTML Editor Smart Tasks and Event Handler Generation (ASP.NET vNext Series) – Scott Guthrie returns from his blogging hiatus kicking off a new series of posts looking at the features that are coming in ASP.NET vNext and IDE features relating to it. This first post looks at some of the improvements to the HTML editor and the improvements in event handler generation.
• MSDN Magazine: September 2011 – The September edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles looking at Application Lifecycle Management, the June CTP of Entity Framework, Open Data Protocol, Database Development with the ‘Juneau’ Database Project in SQL Server Development tools, and much much more.
• the other thing about ‘using’ blocks – David Cameron discusses the use of using (){} blocks in code, highlighting their more widely known feature of ensuring dispose is called on IDisposable objects, and also looking at the other useful feature, the creation of a scope for the variable avoiding misuse once its disposed.
• Prism-fy the Bing Maps WPF Control (Beta) – Brian Lagunas continues his experimentation with the beta Bing Maps WPF Control, taking a look at combining it with Prism to enable loose coupling of a map with map layers at runtime.
• Merge enhancements in TFS 11 – Brian Harry continues his series of posts looking at the improvements coming in TFS 11, discussing some of the improvements for the diff / merge experience being provided by a new merge tool, and improved automatic conflict resolution.
• MemoryImage – Martin Fowler discusses the storage of data in enterprise systems, and how these days it’s not just a simple case of connecting to a database with some real alternatives. Martin then goes on to discuss the use of event sourcing with an in memory image of your data to provide a high throughput way of working and persisting data.
• Strategy to Make CI Builds Self Testing – Paul Stack continues his series looking at implementing Continuous Integration of your project(s), discussing the use of Continous Integration to run all the required and available tests to ensure your builds are good.
• Silverlight 5: Remote control and MediaCommand Support – Pete Brown shares a modified exerpt from his Silverlight 5 in Action book looking at the use of MediaCommands in Silverlight, allowing your Silverlight applications to respond to the specialist media keys on keyboards and remote controls.
• Optimize Images With HTML5 Canvas – Sergey Chikuyonok takes a fascinating look at image generation and manipulation on the client side using the HTML5 canvas in this Smashing Magazine article. The article explores a number of techniques which can allows you to reduce the size of images being sent to the clients browser.

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