The Morning Brew

Software

• CoffeeScript 1.1.3 – The CoffeeScript team announce the latest version of CoffeeScript. Version 1.1.3 brings improvements to the formatting of the generated JavaScript, support for binary numbers, along with a number of other new features and bugfixes / improvements

Information

• Clean up after Visual Studio – Paul Sheriff discusses the many places which Visual Studio and .NET leave files as a part of your development, and talks about removing them to clean up your machine, free disk space and improve the performance of your machine.
• The Developer’s Guide to App Fabric November 2011 – Alan Smith highlights the November 2011 update to his ‘Developers Guide to App Fabric’. This update expands on the content regarding the Service Bus brokerd messaging features. The guide is available in both PDF and CHM formats
• Channel 9 Moves to the Cloud with Windows Azure – The Windows Azure team blog highlights the migration of Microsoft’s Channel 9 website onto the Windows Azure Platform and the discussion of the move in an article by Duncan Mackenzie where he discusses the process of the move and shares some of the lessons they learnt in the process.
• Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight – Part 2 CouchDB, Cloudant and Hammock – Erno de Weerd continues this series of posts looking at building an application to host in the cloud using AppHarbor, ASP,NET, Silverlight, etc. This part looks at storing data in the cloud using hosted CouchDB
• Rethink Your Data – Karl Seguin discusses the different way of thinking about your data that you need to have in order to make NoSql data stores work efficiently for you.
• Building a jQuery Mobile Application, Part 1 – Jorge Ramon kicks off a new series of posts looking at building mobile applications using the jQuery Mobile toolkit, looking at performing the build in a behaviour driven development approach using Jasmine.
• HTML5 App versus HTML5 Page – What’s the Difference ? – Joe Stagner discusses what he percieves as the difference between an HTML5 Application and an HTML5 page, and how thinking of them as Applications brings a more significant mind shift to what the future of web applications may look like.
• Working with Prism 4 Part 1: Getting Started – Brian Noyes kicks off a series of posts exploring the use of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism Toolkit for building composite applications in Silverlight, discussing some of the background to composite applications, and bootstrapping a simple application in a step by step work through.
• Secure Strings – AbhishekGoenka gives a short introduction to the .NET Framework’s SecureString class which stores strings in memory in an encrypted form so that the data contained in the strings in memory cannot easily be ready from outside the application.
• ConcurrentDictionary Performance Improvements in .NET 4.5 – Igor Ostrovsky discusses some of the performance improvements made to the concurrent dictionary which will be included in the .NET 4.5 release. The two optimisations brings anywhere between a 30% to 300% improvement in performance.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – Project Backward Compatibility (Round-Tripping) – Zain Naboulsi discusses one of the most requested features for Visual Studio, which is included in Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – the ability to round trip projects between the new and older version of the IDE.
• Typing with Speed and Accuracy in IE10 – Travis Leithead discusses the introduction of spell checking and autocorrect in Internet Explorer 10, using some of the OS features of Windows 8 (which includes spell checking across all applications), and how they will also be including these features for IE10 running on Earlier versions of Windows too.
• Charles shares his Windows 8 stream story (or How he learned to deal without most of file stuff in System.IO…) – Greg Ducnan highlights an article from Charles Petzold discussing his experiences in developing on Windows 8 and how he is now understanding why the System.IO namespace is so empty on Windows 8 WinRT applications.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #8: Contacts API – Jeff Blankenburg continues this 31 days of Mango series with a look at the Contact API which allows your applications to search and use the contact information already stored in your phone’s address book.

Community

• Progressive F# Tutorials 2011 – Phil Trelford gives an overview of the happenings at last week’s Progressive F# Tutorials event held at Skills Matter, discussing the sessions presented, where you can get the recordings, and talking about some of the code on show.

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Information

• Breaking changes and named arguments – Eric Lippert thanks the community for it feedback on the Roslyn CTP, and discusses the nature of breaking changes caused by renaming parameters, both when using named parameters in C#, and how parameter name changes have always been a potential breaking change in VB.NET.
• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 2: Typemock – Thomas Weller continues his series of posts looking at testing Entity Framework applications with a look at using TypeMock to mock the data layer, looking at using it to swap in fake instances for the actual implementations.
• The life story of the SwitchToThisWindow function – Raymond Chen digs back into the dim distant past to discuss the task switching via ALT+TAB in Windows 3.1, and how hosting full screen DOS applications inside Windows presented certain challenges.
• Useful Visual Studio Extension – Web Essentials from Mads Kristensen – Scott Hanselman highlights the Web Essentials Visual Studio Extension from Mads Kristensen, Mads’ own playground of potential Visual Studio features to make web development in Visual Studio better.
• First Stable Build of NodeJs on Windows Released – Claudio Caldato highlights the significance of the 0.6 release of Node.js for developers on Windows as this is the first stable version which supports operation on Windows and within IIS using IISNode.
• Debug node.js applications on Windows with iisnode integrated debugging – Tomasz Janczuk discusses the debugging capabilities of Node.js running under IISNode on Windows
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #7: Raw Camera Data – Jeff Blankenburg continues his month of posts looking at the Windows Phone Mango developer experience, continuing today with a look at using a live feed of data from the camera included in all Windows Phone devices
• Semantic Versioning (semver.org) – Greg Duncan highlights the ‘official’ site for Semantic Versioning which outlines the goals and aims of using this versioning scheme which is rapidly being adopted by a number of projects.
• Track memory usage of your Windows Phone 7.1 app in real time – Jeremy Alles shares some code to help you track the memory usage of your Windows Phone applications while testing / developing them, helping you to conform to the platform certification requirements for the market place.
• That Accelerometer simulator thingie, where is it? – Surf4Fun shares a useful tip about the location of the simulator for the Accelerometer in the Windows Phone Emulator environment, allowing you to experiment with the accelerometer in your development environment.
• An F# Web Server From Sockets and Up – Anton Tayanovskyy takes a look at F# Async and combines it with sockets to create a simple web server implementation which offers pretty impressive performance for such little code.

Community

• Europe Virtual ALT.NET: Andreas Håkansson and Steven Robbins on Nancy on 22 November 2011 – The European Virtual Alt.Net Usergroup welcome Andreas Håkanssonand Steve Robbins for a virtual session on the Nancy lightweight framework for building HTTP based applications. The talk, on the 22nd November at 8pm GMT is broadcast via live meeting.

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Software

• jQuery 1.7 Released – The jQuery team announce the release of jQuery 1.7, the latest major version of this JavaScript framework. By now, the library will be available on the Microsoft and Google Content Delivery Networks, and you can also download it directly from the site. The new release brings a new event API, improved performance, better HTML 5 support in older Internet Explorer Version, and mich more.
• Kinect SDK Beta 2 Release – Lee Stott highlights the release of the Kinect SDK Beta 2, along with the new website and branding for Kinect For Windows.
• Introducing S#arp Lite …S#arp Architecture’s pompous little sister – Billy McCafferty announces the launch of his new application architecture framework. S#arp Lite is a significantly cut down version of his original S#arp Architecture project, a framework for application development in ASP.NET MVC using NHibernate (and much more). S#arp Lite still achieves this, but with a lot less included in the box.
• SourceMonitor V3.2.0.208 – Tatworth highlights an updated version of SourceMonitor, a tool for examining source code and gathering metrics for a vast array of languages (including C#, VB.NET, C++, C, Delphi, HTML, and much more)
• ReSharper 6.1 EAP Opens: Much More than a Bugfix Release – JetBrains announce he opening of the Early Access Program for ReSharper 6.1. This program provides free (time limited) access to early builds of ReSharper 6.1, allowing the team to gather feedback on the changes they are making. The new version already has a number of great looking features to experiment with.
• Develop with Python in Visual Studio, connect with Kinect and Excel – Dan Highlights the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 Alpha release, which brings improved Python support to Visual Studio, supporting CPython and IronPython, including code navigation, REPL window and much more

Information

• Full-height app layouts: Navigation and History – Steve Sanderson continues his series of posts on building full height web based applications, bringing tablet / mobile User Experiences to the desktop web application. This post discusses the tracking of content in panes, and providing the navigation between content
• jQuery 1.7 Released – Event handling in a better, simplified and consolidated way – John Petersen highlights the release of jQuery 1.7 and discusses its new API for working with events, discussing the API and how it is an improvement over the previous way of attaching and detaching events.
• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 1 – Thomas Weller kicks off a three part series looking at the testing of applications which use Entity Framework as their Data Access strategy. This first post discusses the background to testing Entity Framework based code, and introduces the sample application which will be used for the remaining parts of the series
• Using AppHarbor, Bitbucket and Mercurial with ASP.NET and Silverlight – Part 1 – Erno de Weerd is running a series of posts (already up to part 3) which examine building a web based application using ASP.NET and Silverlight, along with using Mercurial, BitBucket and AppHarbor hosting, walking step by step through the process of creating the application.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Querying a Collection Count – Ricardo Peres continues his series of posts on some of the potential pitfalls when using NHibernate for your data access, discussing the danger of using LINQ to Objects methods on Lazy Loaded collections.
• Introducing AutoBox – Mehfuz introduce AutoBox, a convention based on the fly dependency injection and caching container which integrates with Memcached and CouchBase’s Membase server to provide repository caching
• New SQL Server 2012 Labs and Presentations Available – Roger Doherty highlights a wealth of new content for SQL Server 2012 as a part of the SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit, available now via the Web Installer Preview. The labs and presentations included cover all aspects of SQL Server, including Programmability, Business intelligence and much more.
• SQL Server Roadmap to Denali Webcast Series – Susan Ibach highlights a series of webcast events running throughout November and into December looking at various aspects of SQL Server 2012 (Denali). The webcasts are scheduled for 1-2pm EST on Wednesdays.
• Playing with SQL Server 2012 the easy way, via a Microsoft and Amazon partnership for SQL Server 2012 on AWS/EC2 (Think "5 Minutes to Denali") – Greg Duncan highlights a partnership between Microsoft and Amazon which provides the simplest way of getting your hands on a working instance of SQL Server 2012, via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #5: Gyroscope & Day #6: Motion – Jeff Blankenburg continues his series of 31 days of posts on Windows Phone Mango development, with parts 5 and 6 looking at the gyroscope and detecting different kinds of motion.

Community

• Effective Strategies for Distributed Testing – ThoughtWorks Testing Portal is running a 1 hour webinar on strategies for distributed testing between 1:15 and 2:15pm EDT on Wednesday 9th November, when Anand Bagmar and Manish Kumar will be discussing the best practices for distributed testing and putting them to work

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