December 2011

Monthly Archive

The Morning Brew – 2011 In Review

Posted by on 31 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Today brings us once again to the close of another year, and as has become the tradition of The Morning Brew it’s time to take a look back at some statistics for the year.

This year was a particularly significant year in The Morning Brew’s history, with the marking of the 1000th edition in early December. Due to work commitments (and me not pulling my finger out) the anniversary edition was not quite the glorious celebration I’d hoped for. I’ll try and do a bit better in a little over 2 weeks time when I hit 1024 (or 10000000000 in binary) – a number I’m sure the programmers in us all will feel is a more fitting one to celebrate.

Website and Feed traffic

Once again the year has seen steady growth in visitor numbers, both to the website and as subscribers to the RSS feed as can be seen from these two graphs.

2011 Visitors

2011 Subscribers

Visitor number jumped a few times during the year, generally in response influential members of the community tweeting about The Morning Brew (I’d link to the tweets but it seems that Twitter is ‘Down For Maintenance’ at the moment!) The other significant jump was in response to the 1000th edition where the post attracted a record 33 (very much appreciated) comments.

The Content

This year The Morning Brew has featured 3700+ links from almost 1000 different blogs, with the links spread over the three standard categories, Information, Software and Community. In addition, a couple of times this year Special additional categories have been drafted in for things like the January release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix, the Developer Developer Developer 9 Conference in the UK, The Silverlight 5 beta release in April, Windows Phone 7.1 Mango in May, Windows 8 and Kinect SDK announcements in June, the //Build conference and all its announcements in September.

2011 Links by Section

This year’s top domains were:

  1. blogs.msdn.com – 942 links
  2. weblogs.asp.net – 236 links
  3. geekswithblogs.net – 170 links
  4. lostechies.com – 132 links
  5. coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com – 114 links
  6. www.codeproject.com – 99 links
  7. www.hanselman.com – 69 links
  8. www.nxtgenug.net – 62 links
  9. haacked.com – 62 links
  10. devlicio.us – 54 links

This year’s individual blog chart looks like:

  1. Greg Duncan – 114 Links
  2. Scott Hanselman – 69 Links
  3. Phil Haack – 62 Links
  4. Eric Lippert – 58 Links
  5. Mike Taulty – 48 Links
  6. Ayende – 41 Links
  7. Derick Bailey – 35 Links
  8. James Micheal Hare – 34 Links
  9. K. Scott Allen – 31 Links
  10. Jeff Blankenburg – 28 Links
  11. Scott Guthrie – 27 Links
  12. Pete Brown – 27 Links
  13. Mike Hadlow – 25 Links
  14. Dan Wahlin – 24 Links
  15. Jon Galloway – 23 Links
  16. Derek Greer – 21 Links
  17. Mike Ormond – 20 Links
  18. Ricardo Peres – 20 Links
  19. Laurent Bugnion – 19 Links
  20. Jimmy Bogard – 19 Links

In Conclusion

I’ve kept this year’s wrap up short, as I’m aware that with the 100th edition, the planned 1024th edition celebrations, and this post there will have been quite a bit of ‘retrospective’ this in a short space of time. I’d like to finish the year off by thanking all of the bloggers who’s content has been featured in The Morning Brew this year – without you guys writing great stuff I’d have very little to link to, it is much appreciated. I’d also like to thank the loyal readers – your passion for learning and interest in the content keeps me going.

My very best wishes for 2012 to you all

Chris

The Morning Brew #1012

Posted by on 30 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Today is the last edition of The Morning Brew in 2011 – I will be doing a short ‘2011 Review’ post tomorrow (Saturday) and, once again, due to New Year’s Day falling on a weekend I will be observing Morning Brew tradition in skipping the post on Monday 2nd January as it is a Public Holiday here in the UK. The Morning Brew will return on Tuesday 3rd January.

Software

Information

  • Shadowcasting in C#, Part Six – Eric Lippert wraps up his series on the casting of shadows using algorithms with a look at solving the problem for a viewer in any position, and also shares the project for the Silverlight Sample control to illustrate as a working example.
  • The Myth Of "Infinite Scalability" – Udi Dahan discusses some of the principles of scalability of software applications, discussing how scalability is a function of cost, an also discussing the different metrics to measure when discussing scalability, before calling time on the expression "infinite scalability"
  • Event Centric: finding key business value by leveraging domain events and reactive extensions – Daniel Cazzulino discusses one of the less talked about uses of the Reactive Extensions (Rx) for .NET, looking at how they can be used to work with domain events passed along an event stream.
  • Deploying independent web applications to Windows Azure using single web role – Gunnar Peipman builds on an article from Andy Cross working through a way of hosting multiple web applications on a single Windows Azure Web Role
  • MapReduce Tester: A Quick Word – Carl Nolan continues his exploration of the Hadoop Streaming F# MapReduce code, discussing how to create a simple tester for the Map and Reduce functions supporting the passing of data into the process.
  • F# – A Monadic Pratt Parser – Matthew Manela discusses the concepts behind a Pratt Parser as highlighted in Beautiful Code by Douglas Crockford, and goes on to look at implementing one in F# as a monad using computation expressions to give a clean and concise implementation.
  • Addition to the Coding4Fun Toolkit – MetroFlow – Den Delimarsky highlights the new MetroFlow control added to the latest release of the Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 Toolkit, looking at the visual structure and how to use it from your XAML pages.
  • RavenDB videos on YouTube – Ayende highlights 5 video sessions which focus on different aspects of RavenDB use, all available for free on YouTube, giving you 4.5+ hours of learning.

The Morning Brew #1011

Posted by on 29 Dec 2011 | Tagged as: .NET, Development, Morning Brew

Software

  • ASP.NET Security Update Shipping Thursday, Dec 29th – Scott Guthrie announces the planned release of an out of band security update for ASP.NET addressing security issues surrounding a new method to exploit hashtable data structures published at a security conference yesterday. The patch will be released at approximately 10am PST today (29th December) and there will be a webcast at 1pm PST (29th December) about the issue.
  • Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.0 Now Available… – Greg Duncan highlights an updated release of the Coding4Fun Windows Phone Toolkit. This updated release targets Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) and brings with it some new appearances for controls, the MetroFlow control, along with addressing a number of bugs and issues,
  • VSColorOutput – Visual Studio Output Coloring Extension (Think "Adding color to the Build/Debug Output window text") – Greg Duncan also highlights the VSColorOutput Visual Studio Extension which adds the ability to colour the output of your applications in the output window making it easier to see the ‘wood for the trees’ in this oft busy text window.
  • StyleCop 4.7.0.0. is out – Tatworth highlights the latest update to StyleCop which gives it support for running in ReSharper 6.1. There are no additional changes in this release.

Information

  • Working with the JavaScript "this" Keyword – Dan Wahlin takes a look at the this keyword in JavaScript discussing what ‘this’ will be in a number of scenarios when using object and jQuery, along with sharing some extracts from his Pluralsight Structuring JavaScript code course.
  • On single page apps – Christian Heilmann discusses the rise (once again) of the single page web application, discussing its origins, benefits and disadvantages, along with some of the recent innovations in browsers which can make them better.
  • Extending Unity – Robert May takes a look at extending the Unity Container with a custom strategy for resolving types which does not require the types to be mapped but relies instead on naming conventions.
  • Method name conventions in bddify – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking in detail at his bddify framework. This part explores the naming and structure of your tests, and the two different ways (reflective and fluent) of reading scenarios.
  • The Big Bang Transcripts Viewer – Marcelo Ricardo de Oliveira works through the building of a Windows Phone application to read the transcripts of the comedy series ‘The Big Bang Theory’ looking at parsing the data and giving a good mobile like presentation of the scripts, making use of a number of the Windows Phone features along the way.
  • Windows Azure Trial Account Spending Limit – Jim O’Neil highlights the new and improved subscription process for Windows Azure, discussing the new Spending Limit features which allow you to better control the costs of your Windows Azure Trial and MSDN accounts.
  • An introduction to Agile development with Team Foundation Server: TFS Support for Agile practices – Giles Davies kicks off a series of posts looking at how Team Foundation Server supports agile development practices. This part provides an introduction to some of the key features and how they address agile concerns.
  • Publication of the PerfView performance analysis tool! – Vance Morrison highlights the new Performance Analysis tool from Microsoft – PrefView. Released recently this tool aims to fill in many of the gaps in the existing lineup of tools, and in this post Vance gives an overview of getting the tool, and highlights some of the key features.
  • Expanding your horizons: Actions – Ayende continues his discussions of learning, discussing theoretical learning and the benefits of rolling up your sleeves and experiencing some of the pain of actually implementing and working with technologies and learning other techniques along the way.
  • Silverlight slideshow with remote control and windows taskbar support – Giorgi Dalakishvili takes a look at using the Native Extensions for Silverlight constructing and sharing a simple slideshow application in Silverlight using the Native Extensions to add more Windows features to the application.

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