The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Microsoft Codename "Data Explorer" – Microsoft Announce a new product – "Data Explorer" provides means to explore data sets and gain new insights from the data by combining your data is other related data sets, including the ability to collaborate on and publish your results
• Big day for Big Data… Hadoop coming to Windows Azure, Windows Server and SQL Server – Greg Duncan highlights the announcements and reactions to support of Apache Hadoop coming for Windows Azure, Windows Server and SQL Server made at the PASS summit in Seattle
• FSharpChart new release available (version 0.55) – Carl Nolan highlights a new release of FSharpChart. This release benefits from the documentation effort the team have been making and fixes a number of known issues, along with adding enhancements such as tooltip support for data points, defaults for fonts and other chart properties and styles support.

Information

• Official release of "The Developer’s Guide to AppFabric" – Alan Smith announces the release of the official version of his ‘Developers Guide To AppFabric’ eBook. This October 2011 release contains no additional content over the CTP but does include a number of corrections. Alan is planning a November release too which will add further content to the book.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Search Everywhere – RadhikaTadinada discusses the Search Everywhere feature of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview which aims to make it easier for you to find what you are looking in the variety of places in the IDE which present lists of data.
• WinRT BackgroundWorker type – Rockford Lhotka discusses the lack o a BackgroundWorker type in WinRT, and since his CSLA framework requires such a type shares an implementation of the Background worker which will operate on WinRT.
• Full-height app layouts: Animated transitions within panes – Steve Sanderson continues his series on full-height web application layouts, taking a look at changing content in the various panels of your application, and exploring how you can animate the transitions
• EFMVC 1.0 Preview Released – Shiju Varghese announces the second release of an Entity Framework / ASP.NET MVC 3 sample application which illustrates the use of these two technologies together. This updated release makes some changes to the application architecture and introduces some CQRS principles.
• HTML5 Video Captioning – Frank Olivier of the Internet Explorer Team discusses HTML 5 Video and the ability to add captions to the video, and discussing the support for this in Internet Explorer 10
• ScreenShots.cs: How to capture screenshots of your app on your device – Jeff Wilcox shares a simple solution to taking screen shots of your Windows Phone Application in use on the device by including some code in your development builds which will caputure frames at particular times or intervals configured in code with the screenshots being placed in isolated storage.
• Preview ASP.NET MVC 4 – Christian D. Yellington takes a look at the steps required to manually upgrade an ASP.NET MVC 3 project to ASP.NET MVC4, highlighting the references, configuration and project file changes required.

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Software

• Web Essentials – Mads Kristensen updates his Web Essentials Visual Studio Extension which brings a number of useful features for Web Developers to the IDE across CSS, JavaScript and HTML, including adding Smart tag to help with cross browser support.

Information

• Problems with NuGet Today? – Phil Haack highlights an expired certificate on go.microsoft.com which may cause you problems when using NuGet with the standard feed address, and shares the direct package feed link you can use in its place to work around the issue.
• Modernizr.js : Feature Detection – K. Scott Allen continues his series looking at what the Modernizr library actually does, looking in this part at how the library provides a way for you to check the capabilities of the clients browser with regard to the HTML5 features allowing you access to them both from CSS and JavaScript.
• Backbone.js: Getting The Model For A Clicked Element – Derick Bailey continues his series exploring the Backbone.js library for constructing rich browser based applications, discussing the use of data-ID attributes to allow you to work out which element th user is actually manipulating.
• KnockoutJS Custom Binding for Invoking an Action with Enter Key – Steve Michelotti discusses the use of KnockoutJS for creating rich browser based applications, taking a look at how the framework was designed for extension and putting some of the extension points to work to provide a means of firing actions with the enter key.
• "Introducing Microsoft SQL Server Code Name ‘Denali’" Free (draft two chapter preview) eBook – Greg Duncan highlights a preview of two chapters from a forthcoming book on the next release of SQL Server.
• WinRT Transitions- Creating Fast and Fluid Metro UIs – Colin Eberhardt takes a look at building User Interface Transitions in WinRT making a good user experience for your Metro Style applications without the use of story boards.
• Event Sourcing as a strategic advantage – Jimmy Bogard discusses the strategic aspect of adopting Event Sourcing and Domain Driven Development and the importance of thinking carefuly about how your domain structure is created.
• Your Browser Matters – Terry Zink highlights the launch of Microsoft’s new ‘Your Browser Matters’ site which attempts to inform browser users about the relative security level offered by their browser of choice.

Community

• Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group – November Meeting – The Aberdeen Developers .NET User Group welcome Gill Cleeren for a session on the evening of Thursday 24th November where Gill will be looking at WinRT and Metro style application development for Windows 8 and using Silverlight 5 for Line of Business Applications
• Windows Azure and Phone ‘Mango’ Live MSDN Chats for 10/12 through 11/30/2011 – Roger Jennings highlights a series of online events being held throughout October and November looking at a variety of developer topics around Azure and Windows Phone. The events are on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, starting today, at 8am PST.

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Software

• New Coding4Fun Toolkit v1.4.8 officially released – WindowsPhoneGeek highlights the release of an updated edition of the Coding4Fun Toolkit. Version 1.4.8 includes a number of fixes from the previous 1.4.6 release, along with updating the included Silverlight toolkit to the August release.

Information

• RFC: New Beta.ASP.net website – Scott Hanselman announces the public beta of the new ASP.NET website, a redesigned, re-information-architectured, improved social integration rendition. The team behind this work are keen to hear your feedback on the beta site, and are collecting it via UserVoice (link in Scott’s post)
• ASP.NET website redesign beta: What’s changed, why, and how you can make it better – Jon Galloway also makes the announcement of the new ASP.NET beta site, along with talking about some of the improvements in more detail, as well as comparing pages from the old (current) site with their equivalent in the new.
• Loading jQuery Consistently in a .NET Web App – Rick Strahl discusses the loading of jQuery and associated libraries in the best possible way in your web applications, including discussing the correct use of Content Delivery Networks, protocol, version.
• Preventing CSRF With Ajax – Phil Haack discusses the protection of requests from Cross Site Request Forgery using the standard functionality in ASP.NET , and how AJAX requests using JSON don’t work with this method, and shares a solution both as source on GitHub and as a NuGet Package.
• Nugit.org – NuGit.org is a neat looking service which will take a project from GitHub and produce NuGet packages based on the live source and meta data associated with the project, publishing the resulting package in their NuGit NuGet feed.
• Using Site Pinning and Overlay Icons for Enhanced User Notifications and Engagement – Rey Bango looks at how you can make use of the Internet Explorer Pinned site to keep your users up to date by providing an overlay icon which can be used to send status messages to your users, illustrating with an example
• Modularity via Bottles – Continued – Josh Arnold continues his discussion of the Bottles concept used in FubuMVC, TopShelf, etc as a way packaging components which can be composed by a supporting application.
• OpenWrap 2.0 – Package locking – Sebastien Lambla discusses a new feature recently added to his OpenWrap (v2) package manager – the ability to lock packages to specific versions, and discusses its use along with a discussion of the structure of version numbers.
• ParallelLoopState and Parallel.ForEach – K. Scott Allen shows another illustration of the power available in the Task Parallel Library, showing how you can easily exit out of parallelized loops early using the ParallelLoopState Stop method.

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