The Morning Brew

Software

• ReSharper 6.1, dotCover 1.2 and dotTrace 4.5.2 Performance Released – The Team over at JetBrains share an early Christmas present with us all in the form of three new releases. ReSharper 6.1, dotCover 1.2 and dotTrace 4.5.2 have all emerged from their EAP status into fully fledged releases, each bringing some new features and enhancements to the table.
• TouchDevelop v2.5: new tutorial, artwork, forum, and more – Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop v2.5 which fixes a number of reported issues along with adding some new APIs, a new tutorial and a number of other new features.
• TFS + NuGet =’;s? TFS NuGetter of course! – Greg Duncan highlights TFS NuGetter, a project which extends the Team Foundation Server 2010 build process to easily make NuGet Packages of your build artefacts and publish them in an automated and repeatable way.

Information

• 31 Days of Testing-Day 16: Testing Web Services – Jim Holmes testing series continues with a guest post from Dan Hounshell looking at the testing process for web services
• Using CORS to access ASP.NET services across domains – Dave Ward discusses the use of CORS a new feature making its way into modern web browsers (including IE10) which provides a new way of making cross domain AJAX requests which avoids the XmlHttpRequest security limitations.
• Let It Snow… Faster! – The Internet Explorer Team Blog celebrates the festive season with a HTML5 demo which makes the most of the new features of Internet Explorer including GPU acceleration, HTML5 Canvas, SVG, CSS and even MultiTouch.
• Espresso Tip: Changing those nasty constraint names in Code First – Jonathan Creamer shares a short tip on controlling the naming of the database structures created by Entity Framework Code First, sharing how you can rename the auto generated constraint names.
• Continuous Delivery Project – Incorporating the Unit Tests & Deploy and Smoke Test – Eli Weinstock-Herman continues his series looking at creating a project using the methods of continuous delivery, exploring the inclusion of unit test in the build process and looking at the deploy and smoke test of the applications

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Software

• PhoneGap 1.3 Released – The PhoneGap team announce the release of PhoneGap 1.3, a significant update which brings improved BlackBerry and Windows Phone support to this toolkit for building Phone applications using HTML5 and JavaScript.
• Full Support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone is Now Complete! – Abu Obeida over on the Interoperability @ Microsoft blog discusses the PhoneGap release, highlighting feature level of the WP7 integration, discussing the integration with Visual Studio and looking forward to PhoneGap 1.4

Information

• Shadowcasting in C#, Part Three – Eric Lippert continues his look at the algorithms surrounding a simple problem from the game Rogue, and in this post digs down into a division operation, going into detail on the operation to determine the top cell.
• Sharing with CompositionScopeDefinition in MEF 2 & What’s new in MEF 2 Preview 5? – Nick Alok discusses the a new type in the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) called CompositionScopeDefinition which controls the sharing of items produced by the export factory. Nick also discusses some of the changes in MEF2 Preview release 5, which has just been released.
• SOLID JavaScript: The Open/Closed Principle – Derek Greer presses on with his series looking at the application of the SOLID principles to programming in in this post discussing the Open/Closed Principle, illustrating its application wih an example.
• Using the JavaScript Prototype Property to Structure and Extend Code – Dan Wahlin discusses the use of the Prototype property that all JavaScript object have and looks at using it to extend the behaviour of code, discussing the Prototype and Revealing Prototype patterns
• The rise and rise of JavaScript – Dan North discusses the recent rise in popularity of the JavaScript language, discussing many of the places where it is cropping up these days, discussing the improvement in techniques and ways of working with the language and looking to the future of JavaScript.
• Memory Management In .Net – Story Board – Paul Stack highlights a nice storyboard introduction to how memory management works in .NET from the folks over at Redgate.
• Performance Guidelines for Properties – Rico Mariani shares his guide to te performance of properties in .NET discussing principles you should observe when creating your properties implementations, and discussing the performance considerations.
• Free eBook: OWASP Top 10 for .NET developers – Troy Hunt announces the release of his free eBook on the top 10 security vulnerabilities for we applications as described by OWASP focusing on them from a .NET point of view. This was a great blog article series, and if you haven’t already read it this is essential Christmas holiday reading.
• Mango Sample: Resources Part 1: Themes,Part 2: Colors,Part 3: Sizes & Part 4: Styles – Jerry Nixon continues his Mango Samples seriese with a 4 part look at the use of resources in your Windows Phone Applications discussing the use of Themes, Colours, sizes and styles.

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Software

• Castle Windsor 3.0 is released – Krzysztof Kozmic announces the official release of Castle Windsor 3.0. This release features no major changes over the previous Release Candidate release, with only bugfixes and a few improvements being included. The release is available both as a NuGet Package and also as standalone .ZIP download.
• Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit – Lee Stott highlights the release of an update of the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview Training Kit containing updates to labs made at the //Build conference. The kit is available as a web installer or full offline package, and the contents of the training kit can also be viewed online on MSDN.
• December 2011 TFS Power Tools Release – Brian Harry announces the release of an update to the TFS Power Tools. This December 2011 release focuses attention on those interacting with TFS from other environments, including updates to the Eclipse integration, 64 bit MSSCCI provider support as well as a few improvements for those working in Visual Studio.
• Windows Azure Service Bus EAI and EDI – first public CTP availability – Avkash Chauhan highlights the first public CTP Release of the Windows Azure Service Bus Enterprise Application Integration and Electronic Data Interchange, providing improve B2B integration and allowing connectivity between private cloud and public cloud service bus instances.

Information

• Node.js For Dummies – Davy Brion gives a nice introduction to some of the key concepts behind the ever increasingly popular Node.js, highlighting where Node.js is different from many other technology stacks.
• Composite JavaScript Applications With Backbone And Backbone.Marionette – Derick Bailey continues his series of posts on BackboneJS with this post announcing his Marionette BackboneJS library. Marionette enables a number of composite application structures for your Backbone applications.
• A Case For Using CoffeeScript – Justin Etheredge discusses some of the points raised in ‘A case against using CoffeeScript’ (article linked in the post) discussing some of tbe bad parts of the language, along with looking at debugging and the comprehension of CoffeeScript code.
• Hadoop Streaming and F# MapReduce – Carl Nolan discusses the use of MapReduce in F# and the new support for Hadoop Streaming , exploring the implementation of a simple example and the testing of it
• Continuous Delivery Project – Making MVCMusicStore Testable – Eli Weinstock-Herman continues his series on Continuous Delivery, takjing a look at adding tests to the MVCMusicStore application, covering a variety of techniques for testing. These tests will be included into the CI build in the next post
• A Simple Multi-Page Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap Example – Colin Eberhardt gives a nice tutorial on using PhoneGap to create multi-page applications for Windows Phone, including discussion of enabling the back button, disabling pan and zoom and implementing a splash screen.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event – Web Caching 101 – Seb Lambla visits the Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG on Wednesday 18th January for a session exploring web caching and how it can make your websites quicker and more scalable.

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