The Morning Brew

Software

• MassTransit v2.0.1 Available – Chris Patterson makes the public announcement of MassTransit v2.0.1, actually released without fanfare back in the end of last month. This release includes fixes for issues which didn’t make it in time for the actual v2 release.
• NOW AVAILABLE: Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Version 1.1 – The Windows Azure team announce the 1.1 version of the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games, This toolkit contains libraries to help and samples to help you write networked games which utilise the Azure platform for hosting, including leaderboards, Authentication, profiles, invites and notifications, etc.

Information

• Detecting HTML5/CSS3 Features using Modernizr – Dan Wahlin discusses the use of Modernizr to help you to detect the different HTML5/CSS3 capabilities of the browsers your web applications are running in, and use it to load custom JavaScript to provide a stand in for the functionality.
• PolyglotPersistence – Martin Fowler discusses the Database Thaw and how increasingly organisations are looking at different types of persistence and data stores, often adopting more than one to cater for the different scenarios of modern software.
• C# Mini Course – Alfred Thompson shares a mini-course on C# as a series of recordings with supporting slide decks and documentation. This course is a great introduction to programming, aimed at college students, and contains 6-8 hours of video material
• Ready, set, scaffold! Build ASP.NET MVC 3 applications quickly with MvcScaffolding – Rachel Appel discusses the use of MvcScaffolding to get your ASP.NEt MVC applications up and running quickly, walking through the process of building some scaffolded functionality.
• Partial Application – Chris Eargle discusses the concept of Partial Application of functions, illustrating the concepts with examples and highlights how you’ve probably been doing this without noticing already.
• PhoneGap on WP7 tip #1: Handling Orientation – Glen Gordon kicks off a series of posts looking at building Windows Phone 7 applications using the PhoneGap library. This first part in the series looks at the detection of device orientation and handling changes in orientation.
• Updates to the August 2011 F# 2.0 Compiler Code Drop – Don Syme highlights the availability of an update source code drop for the F# 2.0 compiler. The latest changes allow the compilation of the compiler for use in in browser based Silverlight applications, and updates the TryFSharp sample.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #16: Isolated Storage Explorer &Day #17: Using Windows Azure – Jeff Blankenburg’s 31 days of Mango series continues with two more posts from guest authors. Samidip Basu discusses the isolated storage explorer allowing you to look inside the storage of the phone and Michael Collier discusses the use of Windows Phone with Windows Azure.
• Greatest Hits: Make IntelliSense Transparent – Visual Studio Tips and Tricks – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Zain Naboulsi shares an old but very useful tip about making intellisense tooltips and select boxes partially transparent in Visual Studio using the Ctrl key.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Introduction to DDD – Ian Cooper will be visiting the Brimingham NxtGenUG for a session on Domain Driven Development and domain modelling on Tuesday 22nd November
• NxtGenUG – Event: Simple.Data + Nancy – Mark Rendle takes a trip to Hereford to visit the NxtGenUG group there on Monday 12th December, for a session looking at the use of the Nancy Framework and Simple.Data to create lightweight web based applications.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Relatively Speaking … – Dave McMahon will be presenting a session on Relativity and how its effects can be harnessed to boost the speed of computers at the Birmingham NxtGenUG on Tuesday 13th December.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Introduction to Android – The Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG welcome Will Charles for a session on building native Android applications, discussing some of the bits of Java that can confuse .NET Developers along the way on Wednesday 14th December

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Software

• November release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit – Jeff Wilcox announces the release of the November 2011 Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. This updated release focuses on resolving customer reported issues, addressing issues in controls, issues with particular combinations of controls, and other reported bugs.
• Build Explorer version 1.1 for Visual Studio Team Explorer is released – Terje Sandstrom announces the 1.1 release of Build Explorer, a TFS Visual Studio Extension which adds folders to the structure of the builds based on a naming convention, allowing you to more easily build groups of projects.

Information

• Time Warp – Jesse Taber discusses the complexities and difficulties of handling dates and times, especially when globalisation and daylight savings time are involved, and takes a brief look at the NodaTime library, a .NET Port of Joda Time a well-known Java library.
• Using the C# Interactive Window that comes with Roslyn – Filip Ekberg takes a look at the interactive REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) environments provided in Visual Studio for F#, and now C# when you have the Roslyn CTP installed.
• What’s new in .NET Framework 4.5? [poster] – Jouni Heikniemi highlights a poster illustrating the new features and improvements included in the .NET Framework version 4.5.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview: Preview Tab – Zain Naboulsi discusses another new feature of Visual Studio 11, available now in the developer preview. Preview Tab gives you a way of seeing the contents of your source files, without having to open them in your own tab, also providing a way of moving a preview to a open document.
• 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10) – Michael Crump is a little over half way through his series of posts looking at the features of Silverlight 5. This 6th part is the first of two looking at operating system integration with P/Invoke, multiple windows and file system access being explored in this post.
• Implementing 5 important principles of REST using WCF Services – Shivprasad koirala discusses 5 of the key concepts of REST, and looks at how you can implement a REST based service which complies to these concepts using WCF Services.

Community

• Tonight at F#unctional Londoners: Byron Cook: Proving program termination with F# – Don Syme highlights tonight’s (16th Nov) F#unctional Londoners session being held at Skills Matter, where Microsoft Research’s Byton Cook will be discussing formal analysis of software to prove that software does what it should
• WPUG Dec 2011 – Windows Phone 7 – The London Windows Phone User Group are meeting on Wednesday 7th December for their last meeting of the year. Details of the content of the meeting are not finalised yet, but the usual format is a talk (or two) along with time for you to demo and discuss the applications you are working on with fellow developers.

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Software

• Now Available! Updated Windows Azure SDK & Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK – The Windows Azure Team announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK 1.6 / November 2011, along with the Windows Azure HPC Scheduler SDK and the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit. The updated Azure SDK brings improved build and publish features, extensions to queuing and performance improvements to the emulators.
• Announcing YUI Compressor 2.4.7 – The Yahoo! User Interface Team announce an updated version of their YUI Compressor, a minification tool for CSS and JavaScript. This release brings with it a number of improvements to CSS Compression, including support for large data URLs, and improvements to HEX Colour identification.
• Reactive Extensions (Rx) v1.1.11111 (Experimental Release) – The Reactive Extensions Team have a new experimental build. Version 1.1.11111 is mostly focused on performance improvements, including improvements to query operators, query operator chains, an also addresses some known bugs. Full release notes can be found in the Release Notes for Reactive Extensions 1.1.11111 (Experimental Release)

Information

• Now Available – Windows Azure SDK 1.6 – Shaun Xu takes a look at what is included in the Windows Azure SDK 1.6, discussing side by side install with 1.5 and also running through some of the key changes.
• Compiling F# to JavaScript with Pit – Phil Trelford takes a look at compiling F# code into JavaScript using the F# feature ‘Code Quotations’ and looks at a new F# compiler community project called pit which performs the conversion / compilation.
• 15 Pragmatic JavaScript Tips for ASP.NET Developers – Jon Galloway shares the slides and notes from his DevConnections session on 15 Pragmatic JavaScript Tips for ASP.NET Developers, including discussion of the Ajax Toolkit, jQuery, the use of NuGet, IDE Features, and SignalR.
• Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture – ‘TheBeebs’ shares an article discussing and sharing what he learnt from Nicholas Zakas at Full Frontal 2011 on building application architecture for JavaScript based Applications, discussing a variety of concepts to help build a robust structure for your application.
• Fun with 3D transforms and rollovers – kittens in space – Christian Heilmann shows some neat tricks you can achieve with pure CSS 3 using 3D Transformations to implement pure CSS rollovers
• Laying out HTML with CSS Grids – Mike Taulty takes a look at laying out pages using the CSS Grids support in Internet Explorer 10, showing how easily you can achieve grid based layouts using simple CSS Rules.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #14: Using OData & Day #15: The Progress Bar – Jeff Blankenburg continues his series of 31 posts about Windows Mango with two guest posts, the first from Chris Woodruff on consuming OData in your applications, and the sceond on the use of the progress bar from Doug Mair.

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