The Morning Brew

Many many thanks for all of the congratulations and kind comments on yesterday’s 1000th edition post – much appreciated.

Software

• Improved Developer Experience, Interoperability, and Scalability on Windows Azure – The Windows Azure Team announce multiple updates for the Windows Azure Platform, including price reductions, larger SQL Azure Databases, improved subscriptions management via the newly updated site, SQL Azure Federation, Windows Azure support for Node.js in the Windows Azure SDK for Node.js, preview of Hadoop for Windows Azure, along with a variety of features to improve Azure support for Open Source Development platforms (Eclipse/Java, MongoDB, Solr/Lucene and Memcached). Other announcement posts include:
  • Openness Update for Windows Azure – Gianugo Rabellino
  • Windows Azure December Update – What’s Important for OSS Developers – Larry Franks
  • New Windows Azure Site and Features Available Today – Bart Vande Ghinste
• New Windows Azure Guidance Topics Published – Glenn Gailey & (Windows Azure Prescriptive Guidance Released) Rick Saling announce the release of new guidance topics for Windows Azure and SQL Azure, discussing topics including OData, Windows Phone integration, Managing SQL Azure connections, working with Entity Framework and Federations, and much more
• Now Available: SQL Azure Q4 2011 Service Release – The Windows Azure Team also announce the Q4 2011 service release of SQL Azure, discussing the pricing changes, database size increases and new features of this update.
• SQL Database Federations: Enhancing SQL to enable Data Sharding for Scalability in the Cloud – Ram Jeyaraman also discusses the new Federation support in the latest update to SQL Azure, giving an overview of the functionality and showing the TSQL use of federations.
• SpecsFor.com Launched, SpecsFor 2.2 Released! – Matt Honeycutt announces the launch of both an updated version of his SpecsFor project and also a new project website. The 2.2 release of SpecsFor improves the process for creating multiple mocks of the same type for use in IEnumerable parameters with the introduction of the GetMockForEnumerableOf method.
• YUI 3.5.0 PR1 Is Now Available – The YUI Team announce their first developer preview release of the YUI 3.5.0 JavaScript library. This release gives the first taste of some of the new features that are coming, and is the first opportunity for you to feed back on the ideas and features. There will be a number of further preview releases as the team continue to implement the new features for the 3.5.0 release.
• Bumblebee 0.1 is on CodePlex – Mathias Brandewinder announces the alpha release of Bumblebee 0.1. Bumblebee is a implementation of the Artifical Bee Colony algorithm which creates a simulation of the behaviour of a bee colony. What’s interesting about this is the implementation which makes use of the Task Parallel Library to parallelize the implementation over multiple cores, implements a good API design for ease of consumption in C# and F#.

Information

• Shadowcasting in C#, Part One – Eric Lippert takes a fascinating look at the Text Based game Rogue, discussing how it implemented a partial view of a world based on what your character can see, and discusses algorithm implementations of this world view along with including a Silverlight based illustration.
• OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers part 10: Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards – Troy Hunt completes his series on the top 10 web application vulnerabilites as identified by OWASP, discussing their impact and avoidance in ASP.NET Applications. This final part looks at the use of redirect scripts which perform redirections to other sites without validation, and how they introduce security risks.
• Brand New ACS Walkthrough on the New Windows Azure Developer Center – Vittorio Bertocci highlights a new Access Control walkthrough guide included in the Windows Azure Developer Center
• Video Tutorial – How to install and run Node.js on Windows – Bruno Terkaly shares a walkthrough video looking at getting up and running with Node.js on te Windows Platform, to be followed by some discussion of getting up it going on the Windows Azure Platform.
• ASP.NET MVC ViewModel usage and pick your best pattern – Kazi Manzur Rashid – Kazi Manzur Rashid walks through the refactoring of an ASP.NET MVC ‘page’ introducing better OOP principles and encapsulation bring the page towards a cleaner ViewModel implementation
• Espresso Tip: IHttpHandler and IsReusable – David Neal shares a short tip (nicely named as an ‘Expressso Tip’ about IHttpHandlers and how the IsReusable option can improve performance.
• Composite JS Apps: Regions And Region Managers – Derick Bailey continues his series looking at composite JavaScript applications with a look at breaking down the page into regions and draws on ideas from Prism to build a Region Manager implementation
• Acronyms and Ubiquitous Language – Derek Greer discusses the Domain Driven Design concept of the Ubiquitous Language, focusing on the dangers of using acroynms in your Ubiquitous Language
• SQL Advent 2011 Day 12: Table Value Constructor – SQLDenis is mid way through his series of SQL posts covering the Advent, todays post discusses the use of table value constructors – this series is a great way of getting up to speed with some useful SQL tips.

Community

• Vote desired sessions at #SQLBits 10 – Marco Russo highlights the opening of community voting for the SQLBits 10 event to be held in london in March next year. Registrations for the event are already open.
• Get started with Windows Azure – and Scott Guthrie – Sara Allison highlights the Windows Azure event being held at Redmond today (13th December) and being streamed live. The event is headlined by Scott Guthrie with Dave Campbell, Steve Marx, Wade Wegner , Jay Schmelzer and Mark Russinovich. The event kicks off at 9am PST.
• Developing Applications Using SQL Azure Data and SQL Azure Reporting- December 15, 2011 – The Microsoft Public Sector Developer Blog highlights a web cast session from Dr. Zhiming Xue looking at developing applications using SQL Azure and constructing reporting solutions using SQL Azure Reporting on Thursday 15th December at 2pm EST.
• Win Free Copies of NHibernate 3 Beginner’s Guide – Gabriel Schenker has teamed up with Packt Publishing to create a draw for three readers to win a copy of his NHibernate 3 book in either physical or ebook format.

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