The Morning Brew

Software

• TouchDevelop v2.4: push notifications, updates, discussions,… – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Touch Develop 2.4. The new version introduces new integration of the gallery of scripts contributed by the community, including push notifications for a variety of gallery events, improved management of different versions of scripts, along with new APIs to allow access to contact information and live access to the camera enabling a whole range of augmented reality scripts to be created.
• Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx) – The Extensions for Reactive Extensions Team announce the release of version 1.2, with this version available for both the stable and experimental versions of the Reactive Extensions, across both .NET 4 , Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7. The team also provide some Labs and documentation to help you get to grips with the library.
• XNACPC – A PC & Xbox 360 Amstrad CPC emulator, written in C# and XNA – Greg Duncan highlights the release of an Amstrad CPC emulator written in C# and XNA and operable on both PC and XBOX written by Gavin Pugh. The article about its development makes for interesting reading, and the availability of source is great for those curious about what is going on under the hood.
• Released RequestReduce 1.5 Supporting Custom Minifiers and a Critical Performance Fix for v1.4 – Matt Wrock announces the release of RequestReduce 1.5, adding a significant performance improvement over 1.4 caused by a recompiling regular expression along with exception logging, tha ability to plug in custom minification routines, and the ability to exclude certain resources from processing.

Information

• Eduasync part 15: implementing COMEFROM with a horrible hack – Jon Skeet’s Eduasync series returns from a bit of a break, and resuming on a slightly different track than planned taking a detailed look at some complex code involving the COMEFROM control structure. Careful reading of this article (possibly multiple times) is certainly required to get a full understanding.
• S#arp Lite: The Basics – Billy McCafferty gives a more detailed overview of what is inside his S#arp Lite application framework for ASP.NET MVC using NHibernate, exploring a sample application built with the framework to discuss its key features.
• Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime – Rick Strahl discsses the creation of instances of generic types at runtime, showing how you can obtain a non-generic type reference to a generic type and use that to make your actual instance.
• Solving the Shakespeare Million Monkeys Problem in Real-time with Parallelism and SignalR – Scott Hanselman combines forces with Stephen Toub to try to create some computer based monkeys to write some Shakespeare using genetic algorithms and the .NET Parallel Programming features, and then works with Paul Batum to take the monkeys to the Web using SignalR.
• Legacy ETL solutions – Ayende discusses some simple tricks you can use to make periodically pulling data out of legacy systems in ETL operations easier, discussing identifying rows and detecting modifications.
• Interactive, free and just plain cool, .Net Tutorial – Greg Duncan highlights a free .NET Tutorial delivered via an innovative Computer Based Training platform, both created by Motti Shaked.
• Using MEF 2 with ASP.NET MVC 3 – Nick of the BCL Team discusses the latest preview of MEF and takes a look at using its ASP.NET MVC functionality for building compositional applications on the ASP.NET MVC Platform, giving a walk through of the features.
• String.Intern() method implements FlyWeight pattern for better Performance and reduces MemoryFootprint – Santhosh Reddy gives a short introduction to the concept of Interning of Strings in the .NET framework illustrating with three examples.
• My Code Kata – A Solution Kata – Glav discusses his own Code Kata exercise, a somewhat larger and more complex exercise than the traditional Kata which he is terming a Solution Kata, sharing the problem statement and his solution to it.

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Software

• ReSharper 6.1 EAP for Visual Studio 11 – Hadi Hariri highlights an updated installer for the ReSharper 6.1 EAP which brings with it the ability to integrate the EAP release with Visual Studio 11.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Generic Func Delegates – James Michael Hare continues with this long running series of posts looking at various less well known features of the .NET Framework and C# Language. This post concerns the use of the Func<> Delegates, discussing their use in code, how Co/Contra-variance effects them, and examining some of their uses.
• PLINQ Queries That Run in Parallel in .NET 4.5 – Igor Ostrovsky discusses how and why certain PLINQ queries actually run sequentially, and how the .NET Framework 4.5 improves on the detection and ability to run queries in parallel.
• New in .NET 4.5: ThreadLocal.Value – Igor Ostrovsky also discusses the use of ThreadLocal<T> value container, available in .NET 4, and highlights a new addition to this type in 4.5 which allows access to all values ever stored in a ThreadLocal.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #10: Network Information – Jeff Blankenburg continues his 31 days of Mango series with a look at the NetworkInformation namespace which reveal information abou the network connectivity available and its state on the device.
• Mango Sample: Local Database Part 1 & Local Database Part 2 – Jerry Nixon also continues his series of Windows Phone Mango samples with a look at storing data in local database on the device, looking at using EF Code First and also at using the visual designer to create your data store.
• Jasmine-BDD: A Screencast On The Standalone Test Runner – Derick Bailey shares his second screencast on WatchMeCode.net, with this one looking at the use of the Jasmine JavaScript BDD Testing framework, running through the getting started aspects of using Jasmine in this 17 minute screencast.
• Windows Phone 7.5 Developer Event Simulcast Links – ‘alicerp’ highlights the availability of recordings of 7 sessions from the Windows Phone Camps events, covering development of Silverlight applications and XNA games for the device as well as looking at key concepts like push notifications, tombstoning and multitasking.
• Is Implementing Continuous Delivery the key to success? – Paul Stack discusses Continuous Delivery as a way of making sure your projects succeed, discussing the benefits, and potential dangers of early and Continuous Delivery. Good discussion in the comments of this one so be sure to read down.

Community

• Test Driven Development (TDD) in Visual Studio 2010- Microsoft Mondays – Hosam Kamel highlights this Microsoft Mondays event where he will be delivering a session on Test Driven Development in Visual Studio. The session is on Monday 14th November, between 10am-11am GMT+3, and is being broadcast via Lync.

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Software

• WP7: Northern Lights WP7 Toolkit v0.0.1 – Bjorn Kuiper shares a library of helper and code examples for Windows Phone development in his Northern Lights Windows Phone 7 Toolkit. The library is available as both NuGet Package and as a direct download. Source is hosted on CodePlex.
• Announcing JesCov – JavaScript code coverage – Ola Bini announce the first version of JesCov, a code coverage tool for JavaScript. The tool integrates with Jasmine currently, but can be used from any testing framework. The tool is implemented in Java and uses Rhino under the hood.

Information

• Goodby jQuery Templates, Hello JsRender – Steve Wellens explores JsRender, the new templating option for jQuery. With the jQuery Templates library being discontinued and not being taken beyond beta this active project seems like a pretty good bet for your templating requirements in JavaScript code.
• Building a Slimmer jQuery – dmethvin discusses the growth of jQuery over the past 5 years, both in terms of features and file size, and discusses the areas of functionality which will be deprecated in coming versions, and the criteria by which the team decide functionality’s fate.
• Here’s why you should be happy that Microsoft is embracing Node.js – Matthew Baxter-Reynolds discusses the support of Node.js on Windows and IIS, the facilities that it provides for developers and application owners, and looks to the future for Node.js on Windows.
• Mango Sample: Isolated Storage, Input Scope, Consume Odata, MVVM & Chart Data – Jerry Nixon shares a series of posts which look at a number of different areas of the Windows Phone Mango release from a developer point of view, illustrating each with code samples, and links to relevant documentation.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #9: Calendar API – Jeff Blankenburg presses on with his series of posts on Windows Phone Mango functionality with a look at the use of the Calendar API in your applicaitons, allowing you to access and display the phone user’s calendar from within your applications.
• Windows Phone, Podcast App Starter Kit. Don’t leave your Podcast without it… – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Windows Phone Podcast Application Starter Kit, a sample application which you can cusomise to create applications for podcasts, or to learn from by reading the MS-PL licensed code.
• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 3: NDbUnit – Thomas Weller continues his series exploring the testing of an Entity Framework backed applications. This 3rd part takes a look at techniques which you can use to fake data in the database for testing, especially useful with legacy applications.
• Your users don’t care if you use Web Sockets – Scott Hanselman discusses how choosing to use technologies like web sockets can, without implementing a backup mechanism, significantly impact the adoption of your applications, and highlights the concept of polyfills to fill gaps in browser implementations.
• Rewriting WCF OData Services base URL with load balancing & reverse proxy – Maarten Balliauw discusses the hosting of WCF OData services behind proxies or load balancers, and how the URLs contained in the feed won’t match the names expected, sharing a technique to re-write the URLs to the correct host names.
• Adding Output Caching and Expire Header in IIS7 to improve performance – Renso Hollhumer gives an overview of the caching settings available in IIS7 to allow you to control the cache-ability of the files and content that make up your web site, giving you a way to significantly improve the performance of your web apps.
• Exception Handling in TPL Dataflow Networks – Cristina Manu discusses the handling of exceptions in Task Parallel Library Dataflows, exploring a number of different scenarios and sharing some best practice guidelines.
• Putting back functionality left out of VB Core – ( If you can’t live without Mid when writing WP7 apps 😉 ) – The Visual Basic Team discuss some of the missing bits of functionality which are not in the VBCore used by Windows Phone 7 Applications, and how you can (at your own risk) use the availability of the framework and VB source to add the functionality back.

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