November 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew #974

Posted by on 04 Nov 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development

Software

  • Project2NuGet – Greg Duncan highlights a nice Visual Studio Extension and console application whick aims to make it simple to package up your project into a NuGet Library. Drawing upon his experiences on a previous project (NuGet Package Wizard), Denis Knaack has focused his efforts on making it easy to perform repeat builds of packages. Looks well worth checking out.
  • SQL Server 2012 Edition and Licensing Revamp Round-up – Greg Duncan also highlights the announcement of details of the SQL Server 2012 Editions and Licensing, providing links to the official sources, as well as some of the community responses.
  • WhatsNew – Mercurial 2.0 (2011-11-01) – As part of their regular Monthly Release plan, the Mercurial team have released Mercurial 2.0.0. This release sees some major changes in the form of new features along with significant changes to the core and extensions. As yet there is no update to the Windows based TortoiseHG, although I suspect that will follow shortly.

Information

  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Generic Action Delegates – James Michael Hare presses on with his C# / .NET Little Wonders series of posts with a look at Delegates and specifically the Generic Action Delegates, and how contra-variance introduced in .NET 4 further extends their capabilities.
  • Concurrency Visualizer SDK: Advanced Visualization Techniques – James Rapp look at how you can extend the visualisation capabilities of the Concurrency Visualizer using the SDK, looking at adding custom markers, spans, flags and categories to give you a deeper understanding of what and when you parallel code is doing things.
  • Debugging Tools for the .NET Developer – Peter Vogel gives an overview of the various debugging tools available for .NET Developers, both inside and outside of those in Visual Studio in this Visual Studio Magazine article.
  • Overriding part registration conventions with the MEF attributes – Nick, of the BCL Team, gives an overview of the convention driven programming model being introduced in the current preview version of the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is looking at removing the repetitive use of attributes, and providing means of overriding the default behaviour.
  • Using the Roslyn Syntax API – Kevin Pilch-Bisson kicks off a series of posts looking at the various parts that make up the Roslyn API’s available in the current CTP release, giving a brief overview of that capabilities of Roslyn in this first post in the series.
  • Track Changes and Advance Scroll Mode in Visual Studio 2010 – Christian D. Yellington gives an overview of the extensions to the Visual Studio Scroll bar made available in the Productivity Power Tools Extension. These extensions allow you to see which parts of the file you have changed, and see a visual map of the code in your file, including scroll previews.
  • AJAX based CRUD tables using ASP.NET MVC 3 and jTable jQuery plug-in – Halil ibrahim Kalkan gives a detailed walkthrough building a Create-Read-Update–Delete application using the jQuery jTable plugin and ASP.NET MVC
  • 3 Ways to test your website in old versions of IE – Martin Beeby highlights the three different ways you can test your website / web application using older versions of Internet Explorer, discussing the developer tools in your current version, Expression Super Preview, and using the Application Compatibility Virtual PC Images.
  • 31 Days of Mango – Day #3: Alarms and Reminders & Day #4: Compass – Jeff Blankenburg continues his 31 days of Mango series with a look at the use of alarms and reminders, and how to utilise them in your applications, as well as exploring the use of the Windows Phone Compass, one of the sensors available inside every Windows Phone device.

Community

  • The Stack – Liverpool .Net User Group – December 2011 – The Liverpool based Stack User Group will be gathering on Monday 12th December for a Christmas Social Meeting where you will be able to mix and get to know you fellow user group attendees.
  • Palermo4.com | HTML5 Web Camp Videos – J. Michael Palermo highlights the availability of a series of videos taken at the HTML5 Web Camp with sessions on HTML5, some of the significant features (SVG, Audio, Video, Canvas) and tips on building HTML 5 solutions with JavaScript.

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The Morning Brew #973

Posted by on 03 Nov 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • EF 4.2 Released – The Entity Framework Team announce the release of Entity Framework 4.2. This version brings Entity Framework onto a more logical semantic versioning scheme, an also recifies the issue with Providers which had been causing profiler tools issues with Entity Framework.
  • Glimpse 0.86 Released – Anthony van der Hoorn announces the latest release of Glimpse, a tool to allow you to see what is going on server side in your ASP.NET web applications. This release adds a really nice looking timeline visualization of the page loading process, and the Glimpse.EF package allows you to see what Entity Framework queries are being executed.
  • EventStore v3.0 Release – Jonathan Oliver announces the release of the 3rd major version of his EventStore project. The library is available both as pre-build binary download and also as NuGet Packages. This new version is for .NET 4.0 only, and includes numerous new features, and significant fixes over the beta release.
  • jQuery 1.7 RC2 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of their second Release Candidate of jQuery 1,7. This release includes a significant fix which resolves major issues with Internet Explorer 8, along with lots of other changes and fixes.
  • Introducing to AutoF5 Nuget Package: Live Editing in ASP.NET – Hongye Sun shares a NuGet Package which adds long poll functionality to your pages and monitors changes to source files (CSS, HTML, etc) and forces the browser to refresh when changes are detected, meaning that your browser always reflects your latest changes – neat idea for styling development work

Information

  • 5 Tips and Techniques for Avoiding Automatic GC Collections – Michael McLaughlin discusses a number of tricks you can use to help your application avoid some of the pain of large automatic garbage collections, discussing the use of Reference vs Value types, Structs instead of classes, object pooling, setting inital capacities for collections, common operations which can cause garbage collection, and also manually forcing garbage collection when it suits you.
  • 31 Days of Mango | Day #2: DeviceStatus – Jeff Blankenburg has kicked off a series of daily posts throughout November which are looking at various aspects of development on the Windows Phone 7.1 Mango platform. This second day post looks at the DeviceStatus class and what it can tell you about the device your application is running on.
  • November PragPub Magazine – The Pragmatic Bookshelf announce the availability of the November edition of their PragPub online magazine. This month features articles on Test Driven Development, Scope Creep, Root Cause Analysis, iOS 5, and much more.
  • A few tips to get up and running with the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service – Sandrino Di Mattia shares some tips to help you getting up and running with the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control functionality
  • Updating live tiles without draining your battery – Steven Sinofsky posts on the implementation of the Notification Platform within Windows 8 discussing some of the design goals to allow vast numbers of notifications and Live Tiles without drastic effect on performance or battery life.
  • Windows Phone 7 Coding Dojo video… A 66 minute journey to a LOB WP7 app – Greg Duncan highlights a series of videos showing the creation of a real world Windows Phone Line of Business application, usingMVVM Light, calling web services based on Object Client for SharePoint. The first video looks at the creation of the project and getting started.
  • Yahoo! Announces Cocktails – Shaken, Not Stirred, How YQL powers Cocktails, the technology behind Livestand & YUI for Cocktails – The Yahoo Developer Network blog announces their new technology platform based on HTML5, Node.JS, CSS3 and JavaScript. The JavaScript framework component (‘Mojito’) will be made open source early next year, and follows an MVC approach.

Community

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The Morning Brew #972

Posted by on 02 Nov 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • Updated Async CTP – Stephen Toub gives the details of the Async CTP Refresh release. This is a V3 CTP Release, and brings support the various changes in the framework and platform releases on Windows Phone and Silverlight
  • Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework November Sample Updates – Jialiang Ge highlights the November 1st release of the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework. This release includes 11 new samples covering Silverlight, ASP.NET, WDK, and Dynamics NAV.
  • WriteableBitmapEx 0.9.8.5 Now Available – Rene Schulte announces the latest version of his WriteableBitmapEx Open Source library. This release brings fixes to a number of minor issues, along with a few new features and is available as both binaries and NuGet packages for Silverlight and Windows Phone. Full Source can be found on the projects CodePlex site.

Information

  • MSDN Magazine: November 2011 – The November 2011 edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online. This month sees articles on Windows Phone 7.1, HTML5, LightSwitch, NuGet, 3D in Silverlight, RavenDB, along with all the usual regular columns.
  • Web Forms Model Binding Part 3: Updating and Validation (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of ASP.NET 4.5, discussing the updating and validating aspects of the new Model Binding capabilities of WebForms.
  • Opportunistic Refactoring – Martin Fowler discusses the practice of Opportunistic Refactoring, discussing the benefits of refactoring as an when needed rather than giving over part of the schedule to refactoring. Maring also discusses the importance of having a good safety net in the form of regression test.
  • Debugging Fun with the Async CTP – Mike Taulty discusses how Async / Await makes the order of code execution, and likewise the order of break points being hit more non-intuitive, illustrating with some example code.
  • Using Windows Azure Service Bus Messaging – Roman Kiss takes a detailed look at the use of the Windows Azure Service Bus Brokered Messaging using Windows Communication Foundation and Workflow Foundation
  • Windows Azure Service Bus – Push based programming approach – Forward Thinking – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – ‘Piyush’ discusses the process of queuing and retrieving messages from the Azure Service Bus, highlighting a NuGet Package available now which contains an implementation of a QueueClient and SubscriptionClient for dealing with the WCF communications to the Queue.
  • Basic Design Principles for Windows Phone using Expression Blend with SketchFlow – Mohamed Yamama highlights a Windows Phone Lab which looks at the use of Expression Blend with SketchFlow to assist in learning about and building good Windows Phone UI. The 50+ page document walks through the use of Sketch flow in a number of scenarios.
  • p&p roadmap for the next few months – Eugenio Pace outlines the plans of the Patterns and Practices team for the next few months, discussing the areas and technologies the team will be focusing on, and highlighting some of the projects they will be undertaking.
  • Javascript memory leaks – Jeff Krebsbach discusses memory leaks in JavaScript code, highlighting two cases he has recently encountered, and reminding us that its not just server side code that we should consider looking for memory leaks in.
  • A relaxed attitude towards the pragmatic delivery of ‘okay’ software – Rob Ashton discusses a change in approach he has taken on his latest project, and how he has focused on delivering something rather than producing the most perfect and technical debt free code possible.

Community

  • Announcing DDD South West 4 – Guy Smith-Ferrier announces the plans for the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West event. DDD SW 4 will take place on Saturday 26th May 2012 at the University of West England, near Bristol, and will bring all the usual DDD event goodness.
  • FREE WPF and Silverlight Online Prism Training from PluralSight on Nov 12-Nov 14. – Blaine Wastell highlights 3 hours of free training materials from PluralSight for Prism available between 12th and 14th November. The training will look at Prism 4’s use in WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications

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