The Morning Brew

Another short edition today I’m afraid.

Software

• Nocco.cs – Nocco is a port to .NET of Docco, the code documentation tool discussed in one of the articles linked to in yesterday’s Morning Brew. Not sure if this is a new project or not, saw a link to it yesterday and thought others might find it interesting.

Information

• Shadowcasting in C#, Part Two – Eric Lippert returns with the second part of his series on the casting of shadows in Rogue like games focusing this time on the API for the computation
• "Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth" 2nd edition, free Windows Phone 7.1(5) PDF now available – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the second edition of the ‘Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth’ available as a free e-book in PDF format. The 250 pages of content are joined by full source code for the examples.
• Microsoft blogging platform gains 33% performance boost after adopting RequestReduce – Matt Wrock discusses how the adoption of RequestReduce on the MSDN and TechNet blogging platforms has helped give a significant performance boost to those sites.
• Continuous Delivery Project – Setting up Continuous Integration – Eli Weinstock-Herman shares the second post of his series looking at continuous delivery by way of a sample project, This part focuses on the implementation of the Continuous integration.
• Visual Studio 11 Platform Tooling Advances – Somasegar discusses some of the enhancements to the IDE tooling which are to be included in Visual Studio 11 for DirectX and SharePoint to help boost your development productivity.
• IE to Start Automatic Upgrades across Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 – The Windows Team annpounce their plans to begin automatically updating older Internet Explorer versions to to the latest version via Windows Update.
• MSIE auto-updates: a holiday gift to web developers everywhere. & "Upgrade Your Parents Browser Weekend" Holiday To Become Obsolete? – Jeffrey Zeldman & Peter Laudati discuss the announcement.

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Short edition today due to bad traffic 🙁

Software

• IE 6/7/8 XP/Vista/Win7 VHD’s Refreshed – Greg Duncan highlights the release of updated Application Compatibility Testing Virtual Machine images fro Internet Explorer 6, 7 & 8 running on XP/Vista/Windows 7

Information

• Using-blocks and asynchronous operations – Fredrik Mörk discusses the using block and how it acts as syntactic sugar in our code to make working with IDisposable easier, and discusses the interplay between the new C#5 async/await functionality and using blocks.
• Manage Your Dependencies with Rake and NuGet – Josh Bush continues on from his last post on using Rake and Albacore to build your .NET projects, and in this post turns attention to working with dependencies in your Rake builds using NuGet 1.6
• Code signing for the independent developer – Tim Heuer discusses the process of applying and obtaining code signing certificates for signing your Silverlight Out Of Browser applications.
• Annotated Source Code As Documentation, With Docco – Derick Bailey discusses the importance of writing documentation as well as commenting your code when working on open source projects, and takes a look at using Docco to add annotation to code as a valuable part of a bigger documentation
• .NET Programming for Absolute Beginners [Free Video Series] – Suprotim Agarwal highlights two introductory video series on Channel9 which aim to teach the basics of C# and VB.NET. Valuable resources next time someone asks you what they should do to start to learn either language.
• Starting a Continuous Delivery Project – Eli Weinstock-Herman kicks off a series of posts looking at the process of working on a project running as a continuous deliver project. This first post sets the scene for the project, with 6 further posts planned.

Community

• Official RNIB Accessibility Hackathon! – The London Android Group are joining forces with the RNIB (Royal National Institute for the Blind) for an event which will focusing on accessibility hacks and APIs. The event is planned for the weekend 11th February (but may be put back to the 18th) and will be spread over the 2 days of the weekend.

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Software

• Nuget 1.6 – NuGet 1.6 has been launched, bringing with it a number of significant advances, including support for Semantic Versioning and Pre-release packages, built in capabilities for restoring packages so you don’t have to put them in version control, the ability to install packages for item templates and the ability to disable package sources.
• Install-Package Roslyn – Kirill Osenkov highlights the release of the Roslyn CTP as a NuGet package making it ever easier to include this exciting new functionality in your own projects.
• Released RequestReduce.SassLessCoffee: Now have RequestReduce compile your .less, .sass, .scss and .coffee files before minifying and bundling them – Matt Wrock highlights last Friday’s release of RequestReduce.SassLessCoffee which brings support for .less .sass and ,scss files to be compiled by RequestReduce prior to them being cached minified and bundled.
• dotPeek is Back with New Early Build – Jura Gorohovsky of JetBrains annoucnes their latest early access build of dotPeek their free .NET decompiler and assembly browser. This new version brings opening from explorer, resource decompilation, References hierarchy and much more.

Information

• Cleaning Up Your Git Repository For NuGet 1.6 – Nick Berardi discusses the NuGet 1.6 package restore functionality discussing how you should clean out the packages directory from your projects and looking at the process for Git Repositories
• Better Git with PowerShell – Phil Haack is also discussing git topics as a part of his new role at GitHub (congrats by the way), discussing how PowerShell and Git become good friends with Posh-Git, discussing the use of PSGet to install it.
• Remove full path of PDB file from C# dll or exe. (/pdbaltpath in c#) – Vaibhav Gaikwad discusses removing or changing the paths that are embedded in executable and DLLs which point to the PDB file, discussing where these are stored and sharing a simple utility which reads the format and updates the files headers.
• Subterranean IL: Explicit overrides – Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at the .NET Intermediate Language, continuing the exploration of this with a look at how override methods are implemented for virtual methods, looking at implicit and explicit overrides at the IL level.
• 31 Days of Testing – Day 12: Functional Test 101 – Jim Holmes continues his series of posts on Testing with an introduction to Functional Testing of web applications using Selenium and Web Driver
• Zero-One-Some Testing – George Mastros discusses test case heuristics, discussing the creation of tests and the Zero-one-some practice of testing looking at it applied to database testing.
• Just because you can test it doesn’t mean you should – Samson Tanrena is also discussing testing practices, talking about the importance of good appropriate tests rather than testing everything
• 7 WP7 dev tools you might not know but will want to have – ‘Timdams’ has a post which highlights 7 tools and libraries to assist with Windows Phone Development which you may not be aware of, discussing the purpose of each and linking on to further information.
• Mango Sample: Icon Design, Advertising &Accelerometer – Jerry Nixon presses on with his collection of Windows Phone Mango samples taking a look at the design of icons for use in your applications, the introduction of advertising into your apps, and exploring some code which makes use of the accelerometer built into Windows Phones.

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