The Morning Brew

Software

• jQuery 1.7 RC1 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.7 Release Candidate 1, available now via the jQuery CDN. The team would like you to make use of the release candidate and report any issues encountered back to them.
• Web Essentials – Mads Kristensen releases the next version of the Web Essentials Visual Studio Extension. Version 1.6 brings new features in the form of the Live Web Preview tool window, support for TODO comments in CSS and JavaScript and improves the performance of the extension.
• Visual Studio 2010 SP1 – now available on Microsoft Update – The Visual Studio Team highlight the inclusion of Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Update, which will now be pushing out this update to developers who have not yet updated.

Information

• SemVer, NuGet, and Nightly Builds – Phil Haack discusses some improvements to NuGet to help support its use in internal and Continuous Integration Scenarios, and the introduction of support for SemVer versioning numbers, discussing how to version pre-release and continuous integration builds.
• When at last you await – Stephen Toub discusses a minor performance optimisation you can make with compositional code using the async / await keywords, showing two equivalent methods which have subtle differences in how they are actually implemented by the compiler.
• Assault by GC – Marc Gravell discusses some useful optimisations you can make to improve the performance of applications which are experiencing stalls caused by long running garbage collection processes within the framework which helped improve the performance of StackOverflow.
• Empty Charsets in IE 9 Causing JSON Parsing Errors – Rob Conery follows up from his previous post on issues with JSON parsing in Internet Explorer 9 when the charset was not set in the response, discussing the specification and Internet Explorer’s implementation.
• Updated Win 8 Dev Platform diagram – Rockford Lhotka also follows up his previous post with and update to one of the diagrams, now updated to include the Chakra JavaScript Engine.
• Entity Framework, The Five Years Plan, And Building Software on Future Features – Ayende looks back at the original aims for Entity Framework and how its ideas of Entity Data Model where intended to appear in the whole range of products across Microsoft’s development stack.
• Models for a view (some objects are more equal than others) – Peter van Ooijen discusses the model component of MVC applications looking at the flow of Domain Objects from the domain model to the view, and the dangers in the flow being the other way round.
• Rebuilding My Backbone.js Plugins With Modules, SRP and More – Derick Bailey discusses how he has been rebuilding many of his Backbone.js plugins using better JavaScript programming and development principles
• Beginner Guide to Page and Script Debugging with Chrome – Dave Auld gives a tour round the debugging capabilities provided for Web Developers in the Chrome browser, discussing in detail the use of all the different features.
• State of .NET Image Resizing: how does imageresizer do? – Bertrand Le Roy takes an updated look at the problem space of resizing images in web applications, discussing how the pure .NET ImageResizer.NET library compares to using GDI and WPF, and allows use in medium trust.

Community

• LIDNUG: Scott Guthrie Unplugged, session 9 – Tonight (Wednesday 26th October) is the 9th Linked In .NET UserGroup open Question and Answer session with Scott Guthrie. The event kicks off at 9AM Pacific time and is hosted via LiveMeeting
• Re-Build: A Developer’s View of Windows 8 with Robert Hogg – The .NET Developer Network welcome Robert Hogg for a session on Tuesday 8th November at the University of West England, Bristol where Robert will take a look at Windows 8 from a developers point of view.
• "Web development with technologies that are still in the oven" with Steve Sanderson – The .NET Developer Network also announce their plans for their December event, to be held on Monday 5th December, where Steve Sanderson will discuss new and upcoming web development technologies, with a secret agenda until the actual event.

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Software

• .Net Framework 4.0.2 Release Information Rollup – Greg Duncan highlights a (rather confusing) set of updates to the .NET Framework 4.0 whcih add a few new features and address a few issues. The framework update is accompanied by updates to tooling to make them work with the updated version.
• WiX v3.6 Beta released – Rob Mensching announces the beta release of WiX 3.6. The team would like you to try out this latest release and feedback on the changes, including Burn a new bootstrapper, improved elevation support, patch slipstreaming,
• Released: RequestReduce 1.3 Now Runs on .net 3.5 and a Preview of Support for Third Party Javascripts in your Minification and Merge Process – Matt Wrock announces an updated release of RequestReduce. Version 1.3 includes some minor re-architecting with the SQL Server synchronisation code being moved to its own assembly, along with the ability to run RequestReduce on .NET 3.5, opening it up to a wider range of developers.
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone (V1.3.1) is released – Avkash Chauhan highlights the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone v1.3.1. This updated release updates the Windows Azure Tools version to the 1.5 September 2011 release in the Azure Samples, updates to Windows Phone Developer tools RTW, makes use of the ASP.NET Universal Providers, improves the Blobs API and introduces two new samples.
• Enterprise Library community extensions ported to v5, released via NuGet – Grigori Melnik highlights the work of the EntLibContrib Project Team in porting the EntLibContrib project to Enterprise Library v5, and the release of the parts which have been ported as a NuGet Package.
• xunitcontrib-resharper 0.4.4 – dotCover support – Matt Ellis announces a new version of his xunitcontrib-resharper plugin which brings xUnit.NET to the Test Runner, and as of this new release also supports integration of the JetBrains dotCover code coverage tool.

Information

• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Syntax Rewriting with Symbol Information – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series exploring the Roslyn CTP release picking up where he left off last time with a look at using the SemanticModel class to rewrite calls to particular methods of a class.
• Scripting and Code Analysis using Roslyn – And a first look at Roslyn CTP – Anoop Madhusudanan looks at how you can embed scripting into your own applications using Roslyn, illustrating this very powerful concept with a simple example.
• Task.Run vs Task.Factory.StartNew – Stephen Toub discusses the introduction of Task.Run and its overloads in .NET 4.5 as a shortcut to the more complicated Task.Factory.StartNew method.
• JavaScript in the small – Ola Bini highlights a number of key concepts in usnig JavaScript well in your web applications, showing how even when you only need a little bit of JavaScript it is well worth using these techniques.
• A Fun Little JSON Murder Mystery With IE9 – Rob Conery discusses some interesting issues he ran into with JSON decoding in Internet Explorer 9 caused by some badly formed Server response headers. (As a warning, this article contains some strong language)
• SignalRChat – Using RxJS to add live notifications – Peter Moberg discusses a little use of the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript to control the sending of status notifications from client to server when adding typing notifications to the SignalRChat application.
• Windows Phone Mango: Under the hood of Fast Application Switch – Abhinaba Basu takes a look at how fast application switching is implemented from a CLR point of view on the Windows Phone 7 operating system, discussing what happens and when which events fire, and how your application should respond to them.
• Windows 8 Development Platform Clarified – Rockford Lhotka shares a suite of diagrams produced by the folk at Magenic which aim to give a picture of the Windows 8 Development Platform, discussing the various different stacks which make up the overall picture.
• Using MongoDB with the Official C# Driver – Ercan Anlama takes a look at hooking an ASP.NET MVC Application up to the MongoDB NoSql database using the C’ Driver in this CodeProject article.
• Getting Started with the .NET Gadgeteer – Part 1: Background, Setup, and Hello World – Pete Brown kicks off a series looking at the .NET Gadgeteer project, an Open Source and Creative Commons licensed hardware and software platform based on the .NET Micro Framework which provides an easy way of prototyping hardware devices.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and EventStore on 25 October 2011 – This Evening (Tuesday) sees the Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup host a session from Jonathan Oliver on Event Sourcing and his EventStore open source project. The LiveMeeting event kicks off at 7:00PM GMT (8PM BST)

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Software

• WP7 Skydrive API 1.0 Released – Mitchell Pronschinske highlights the release of the SkyDrive API 1.0 for Windows Phone 7, allowing developers to make applications which store data in the cloud using SkyDrive.
• Dropkick – Deploy Fluently & RoundhousE – Intelligent Database Migrations And Versioning – Rob Reynolds gives an overview of two of his projects – RoundhousE provides an easy way for developer to migrate and version their databases, and DropkicK provides a way to easily deploy your software using scripts written fluently in C#.

Information

• Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Introduction & Syntax Rewriting – Sasha Goldshtein kicks off a series of posts looking at last week’s CTP release of Roslyn, setting the background to the types of problem that Roslyn solves in the introduction, and starting digging into using Roslyn to rewrite syntax.
• Build Online C# Syntax Checker with Roslyn – Nandip Makwana takes a look at using Roslyn to create an online syntax checker for C# code, looking at using the Syntax Tree to parse the code, and obtaining the error information to return back to the user.
• Coded UI Tests for jqueryui – Mathew Aniyan discusses the use of Coded UI Tests with web user interfaces which make use of the jQuery UI library, discussing the types of test which work, and how you can work round some issues in testing some of the more complicated controls.
• Javascript minification patterns: Structuring for maximum compression – Anthony van der Hoorn discusses the process of JavaScript Minification, and highlights how the scoping of variables, and therefore the structure of your code can make a significant difference to how minified the code will end up.
• Implementing Programming Languages using C# – Christopher Diggins discusses the use of his Jigsaw library to help in the creation of your own programming language discussing the constituent parts of the library which are used to build your own language implementation, programmed in C#.
• Dynamic resolution rules joy – Ayende highlights a particular aspect of Dynamic Objects in .NET whereby they will always use actual property implementations over their Dynamic option (provided by TryGetMember).
• New Line of Business Features in Silverlight 5 – Using pInvoke – Dan Wahlin continues his series of posts looking at the features of Silverlight 5 which provide for the needs of the Line of Business application developer, discussing the use of PInvoke in Elevated Trust applications.
• ObjectStorageHelper<T> – A WinRT utility for Windows 8 – Jamie T shares a helper class which abstracts the saving of object data into the three different sandboxed folders available through Win RT.
• Moving to Azure: Worker Roles for Nothing and Tasks for Free – Michael C. Neel shares a useful tip for those moving to Windows Azure who need some limited provision of scheduled tasks where a full blown worker role can’t be justified (especially for cost), making use of the underlying OS features of a Web Role.
• High Availability On The Azure Platform – Jack Greenfield discusses some of the high availability features of Windows Azure within a single data center, discussing resource management, load balancing and partitioning of services.

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