The Morning Brew

Software

• Version 4.2 RTM Today!! 🙂 – .NET Micro Framework – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Colin Miller of the .NER Micro Framework team announces the RTM release of the .NET Micro Framework version 4.2, available only via the CodePlex site. This new version supports development in VB.NET, includes StringBuilder, Regex, SNTP and FTP support, adds remote firmware update support, and adds support for Cortex M3 devices.
• So what’s new in Orchard 1.3? – Bertrand Le Roy announces the release of Orchard 1.3 and discusses some of the new features of this release including Draft Previews, support for MarkDown, rules, new Admin UI Form Creation API and lots more.
• CSLA 4 version 4.2 beta 1 release – Rockford Lhotka announces the first beta release of version 4.2 of his CSLA 4 framework. This release supports .NET 4, Silverlight 4, Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) and Mono (including Mono for iOS and Android)
• TFSSCExplorerExtension for VS10 and 11 – Think "TFS Source Control Explorer Window Features++" or "zomg drag and drop in TFS Source Control Explorer Window!" – Greg Duncah highlights a useful Visual Studio Extension for Visual Studio 2010 and 11 Developer Preview from Holan Jan. This freshly updated (October 2011) version brings Drag and Drop, Move and Branch functionality to the IDE Source Control Explorer, along with a host of other useful features.

Information

• Prevent Forms Authentication Login Page Redirect When You Don’t Want It – Phil Haack takes a look at requesting content which requires authentication using JavaScript, and discusses the problems with the default unauthenticated behaviour issuing a redirect to the login page. In this post Phil explores some solutions to the problem, sharing his own solution too.
• The Asynchronous Programming Models – Mark Zhou discusses the various Asynchronous Programming Models (APM) availabe in the .NET Framework, looking in detail at Thread Pool, Standard APM using BeginXXXX EndXXXX methods, Event Based APM, Task based and the new addition, Task based Async / Await
• Choices I hate to make: Constructor exceptions vs. Initialize patterns – Pete Brown discusses the different ways of creating instances when you may want to throw exceptions if certain conditions are not met, such as requiring elevated permissions to work with the accelerometer – good discussion in the comments on this one.
• RavenOverflow – building a StackOverflow clone with RavenDB – Ayende shares a screencast which looks at using RavenDB to create a StackOverflow website clone. The video is 1 hour, and explores Map / Reduce Indexes, Root aggregates, Performance tuning and the use of the RavenDB Profiler.
• OData Compression in Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) – Evan Czaplicki & Shayne Burgess of the OData Team discuss two new events which make working with compressed OData data on Windows Phone Mango much easier allowing you to plug into the request both in and outbound.
• Visual Studio 11 says goodbye and so long to IDE macros – Greg Duncan highlights an InfoQ article from Jonathan Allen which discusses the removal of the little used macro support from Visual Studio in the Version 11 Developer Preview
• Sharing session state over multiple ASP.NET applications with ASP.NET state server – Li Chen’s Blog – Li Chen discusses the often forgotten State Server service which allows you to move your ASP.NET State out of process and looks at how you can use it in your applications to allow state to exist outside your single web application.
• Code Inspection for SDETs, part I – Liam Price discusses the practice of Code Inspection, one of the important practices of the Software Design Engineer in Test role at Microsoft, discussing how it supports quality in software.
• 3 Tips to Improve Your Connection Strings – Steve Smith discusses three things you can easily do to improve your use of database connection strings, along with why you should consider doing them.

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Software

• Nancy v0.8.0 – Best Laid Plans.. – Steven Robbins announces the release of Nancy v0.8.0, a .NET framework similar to Sinatra. This new release brings a significant number of new features along side bugfixes and tweaks. This release has taken the team longer than planned, mainly due to the strong community uptake
• MVVM Light Toolkit for Windows 8 (preview) #mvvmlight #win8 – Laurent Bugnion announces the first preview of his MVVM Toolkit running against Windows 8, available as an MSI installer from CodePlex and can be installed alongside MVVM Light V3 or V4 beta. As this is an early preview, there are a few things which may not be working correctly, or are missing from this release – check the blog post for full details.

Information

• New articles on async/await in MSDN Magazine – Stephen Toub highlights the October 2011 MSDN Magazine, now available online. This Month the magazine features a significant focus on the new Async / Await features of C# and Visual Basic, along with LightSwtich, F#, Silverlight, Sharepoint, data modelling and HTML5, and the usual collection of columns from recognisable names.
• Squish your CSS and JS files in your ASP.NET web apps – Hajan Selmani takes a look at the use of the SquishIt library to minify CSS and JavaScript resources used in your applications in both ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC.
• Large Object Heap Improvements in .NET 4.5 – Brandon Bray discusses the improvements in Garbage collection and the Large Object Heap in the preview release of the .NET Framework 4.5
• CTP Version of The Developers Guide to AppFabric – Alan Smith share a CTP release of his Developer Guide to AppFabric, a 117 page eBook, available in PDF and Windows Help (CHM) formats along with a web browsable version. Alan would love to hear your feedback on the EBook.
• Book Free PDF – Practical .NET2 and C#2 – Patrick Smacchia shares the 850+ page Practical .NET2 and C#2 2nd edition as a PDF. Patrick worked on this book back in 2006 and now is able to release it to the community for free – a great addition to your virtual bookshelf.
• Silverlight 5 in Action Book Excerpt: Using the Accelerometer from Silverlight 5 via Native Extensions – Pete Brown shares another extract from his forthcoming book on Silverlight 5. This partial chapter excerpt looks at the use of Native Extensions to interface with an Accelerometer
• Tell us what you think of Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – Michael Alberts highlights a survey for developers who have experimented wth the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview to provide some feedback to the team at Microsoft.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Sample Browser v4 Released – A New Way to Enjoy 700 Microsoft Code Samples – Jialiang highlights the new Sample Browser (V4) for the All In One Code Framework which makes use of a Metro like UI.
• TPL Dataflow- An overview – nmarun takes a look at the Task Parallel Library DataFlow introduced in .NET 4.5, looking at a couple of simple samples which illustrate how it differs from working in previous versions, sharing recordings of the applications to demonstrate the behaviour.
• Developing multiple packages in one go – Sebastien Lambla continues his series of posts looking at OpenWrap 2.0, sharing the details of the ability to build wraps from the command line

Community

• SQL Dark Arts & Asynchronous C# – DevEvening welcome Dave Morrison and Lian Westley for session on SQL Server performance tuning and Aysnc in C# on Wednesday 26th October in Woking Surrey
• RavenDB Webinar #2 – Modeling – Ayende announces the next RavenDb Weninar, to be held on Thursday 6th October, looking at modelling with Raven DB, registration is required, and there are 100 spaces available, with those who get in decided during the webinar.

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Software

• Windows Azure SDK 1.5 update released (Previous 1.5.20830.1814 , Latest 1.5.20928.1904) – Avkash Chauhan highlights an update release of the Azure SDK 1.5 which addresses the issue with partial blob downloads when connections get closes not throwing IOExceptions.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 for VS 11 Developer Preview – Microsoft have released an installer for ASP.NET MVC 3 whcih installs on top of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview release allowing you to create ASP.NET MVC 3 applications using the developer preview IDE.
• Json.NET 4.0 Release 3 – LINQ to JSON performance – James Newton-King announces release 3 of his Json.NET 4 library, bringing a significant improvement to the performance of the LINQ to JSON implementation along with the usual bugfixes and enhancements.
• dotCover Roadmap, Subscription Renewals, and 1.2 EAP – JetBrains announce the Early Access Program for dotCover 1.2, along with outlining their plans for this and future releases and discuss their licensing options.
• ORM Profiler v1.0 has been released! – Frans Bouma announces the first release of his new ORM Profiler tool. This tool hooks in between your ORM of choice and your database allowing you to inspect the behaviour of your application. Initial pricing is €99, and customers of the LLBLGen Pro product pay €69

Information

• Visual Studio 11 Programming Language Advances – Somasegar discusses some of the major new features of the various programming languages produced by Microsoft for the .NET Platform as the starting point of a new series of posts discussing the technologies released as previews at //Build/
• The Sweet Spot of Multiple Monitor Productivity: That Magical Third Monitor – Scott Hanselman discusses the benefits of multiple monitors, talking about his decision on 3 monitors as the ‘sweet spot’ for multiple monitors, discussing how he uses monitors in different scenarios. Now might be a good time to buy shares in Monitor manufacturers as ever developer will now be asking for 3 😉
• Don’t Forget To Complete Your Task &Keeping Async Methods Alive – Stephen Toub discusses why it is important to ensure that all your tasks are correctly completed, illustrating with discussion of an issue which was caused by not completing, and also explores a scenario where objects may be getting disposed before tasks complete.
• JavaScript Has Built-In Mix-ins With "apply" Or "call" – Derick Bailey discusses one of the suprising things you can do in JavaScript which illustrates how JavaScript supports mixins out natively.
• Mailbag: Do I need still need older versions of the .NET Framework on my system after installing the .NET Framework 4? – Aaron Stebner discusses the requirement for previous versions of the .NET Framework to be installed along with .NET 4 in answer to a reader question.
• Visual Studio 11 Preview and .NET 4 Platform Update 1 Side by Side Bug – Ron Jacobs highlights a bug when the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is installed side by side with .NET 4 Platform Update 1, sharing a work around for the issue.
• NHibernate for Entity Framework Developers: Part 1 – Writing and Mapping Classes – Morteza Manavi kicks off a series looking at NHibernate from the point of view of someone familiar with Entity Framework, discussing the NHibernate platform, looking at creating the domain model, and mapping them to the database.
• Developing Windows Phone 7 HTML5 apps with PhoneGap – Colin Eberhardt takes a look at building Mobile applications for Windows Phone 7 using the PhoneGap platform running through the process of creating a simple application, sharing a video of the final product.

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