Update: Apologies to Mark Rendle who’s name I managed to typo and not notice in today’s edition. It’s fixed now, but hence forth you shall always be Mark ‘Merk’ Rendle in my head 🙂
Software
- Web API preview 6 is out: how to get a RESTful mind – Simone Chiaretta highlights the 6th preview release of the WCF Web API, a library for creating RESTful Web Services. This release includes URL Form Decoding, custom OData Keys, supports .NET 4.5 and addresses a number of reported bugs.
- Red Gate adds TSQL unit testing to SSMS (for free) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of SQL Test from Red Gate. This new utility is the result of a ‘Down Tools Week’ and integrates into SQL Server Management Studio to bring easy testing of your database code to the SSMS environment.
Information
- Rockford Lhotka – Windows 8 and WinRT development whitepaper – Rockford Lhotka and the team at Magenic have produced a white paper on what Windows 8 and WinRT mean to existing Microsoft Developers, looking at their effects on decisions about what and how to build Windows Applications.
- Programming Windows 8: The Sublime To The Strange – K. Scott Allen takes a look at Windows 8 Metro Application Development in HTML / CSS and discussing the platform’s support for this style of development and sharing his thoughts on the approach being taken.
- A Developers Guide to Expression Web – Sara Allison shares an article by Ian Haynes which takes an introductory look at Expression Web and discusses how you may want to add it to your toolkit for use alongside Visual Studio.
- Is JavaScript’s "Global" Scope Really Just A Closure? – Derick Bailey takes a look at the scoping of variables in JavaScript comparing them to how closures work, sharing to simple examples and helping us to understanding them much better as a result.
- jQuery Time Entry with Time Navigation Keys – Rick Strahl shares a jQuery plugin which brings easy keyboard entry of time values – a neat approach and different (and perhaps more intuitive) then the other UI techniques for controlling the input.
- Getting Setup for JavaScript Testing with Pavlov & Infuser – a Template Loader – Dan Mohl and Jim Cowart discuss more JavaScript related topics over on Fresh Brewed Code with Dan discussing the use of Pavlov to provide BDD style testing for JavaScript with QUnit, and Jim discussing his Infuser project, a templating library for JavaScript which loads templates in from external resources before binding to them.
- Macro-optimisations – Mark Rendle discusses using his own product, discussing some of the optimisations and improvements which came out of using Simple.Data on a number of his real world commercial projects.
- A Primer On Multithreaded Programming – Geoff Kratz shares a primer on multi-threaded programming. The document is intended for Android, IOS and Linux developers but many of the concepts discussed will be applicable more generally.
- Scale Windows Services with RabbitMQ – David Neal (another Fresh Brewed Code author) discusses the scaling of Windows Services using RabbitMQ and messaging approaches, sharing some sample code and links to further resources.
- 31 Days of Mango | Day #31: Promoting Your App – Jeff Blankenburg rounds out his 31 days of Mango Series with a look at marketing and promoting your Windows Phone applications, sharing numerous best practices to get the best exposure for your application.
- Anecdotes about SQL AKA post 400 – You wait ages for a 400th post celebration and then 2 come along at once! This time SQLDenis is celebrating and has ‘borrowed’ the community impressions idea this time getting peoples impressions and stories about SQL.
- Happy Birthday BBC Micro! – While we are on the subject of Birthdays / Anniversaries, Doug Stewart highlights the 30th birthday of the BBC Micro. I would imagine that many (UK based) developers of around my age will have had their first experiences of computing on the BBC Micros computers, so they will always hold a place in our hearts.
Community
- Aberdeen Developers .Net User Group – December Meeting – The Aberdeen Developers .NET User Group welcome Friend of the Brew Craig Murphy for a session on the importance of requirements in developing software including real world tales to back up the theory. The session is on Wednesday 14th December at Robert Gordon University.