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.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1001

Today is the 1000th edition of the Morning Brew. Back in January 2008 when I started out with this series of posts I had no idea how long I’d keep them up for. Back then the post series started out called Morning Coffee with the first edition containing a whole 3 links – how things have grown since then!
Since then, for 1000 working UK days I’ve produced an edition, even managing to achieve posts when I was out of the country on both business and pleasure. There have been a few occasions where posts have been delayed – once due to falling asleep jetlagged in Seattle while preparing the post, but mostly things have gone out on time.
I had planned to have more a celebratory post for today, perhaps with a new look website and some giveaways, but unfortunately the last few weeks have been rather hectic, so instead I will look to the 1024th edition for those things.
I’m forever in debt to the great authors and technologists without who’s posts the Morning Brew would be nothing, and I only keep doing this because of the wonderful community we work within – if you’ve enjoyed The Morning Brew and found it useful I encourage you to let your colleagues and developer friends know about it.
Here is to the next 1000!

Silverlight 5 and Related

• Silverlight 5 Available for Download Today – The Silverlight Team announce the official release of Silverlight 5. This release brings substantial new features including hardware decoding of H.264 media, PostScipt Vector Printing, Improved 3D graphics capabilities and Trusted applications. As is to be expected with a much awaited release there are plenty of blog posts on this subject today:
  • Silverlight 5 has released! The docs are up and a .chm is available – Cheryl Simmons highlights the Silverlight 5 Release and also directs attention to the new documentation topics for some of the new features of the release.
  • Silverlight 5 Released to Web – John Papa gives a longer overview of the features included in the Silverlight 5 release
  • Announcing the Release of Silverlight 5! – Pete Brown also shares a more complete feature list, including links back to his blog posts on each of the features from the beta and preview releases.
  • Silverlight 5 is out! – David Catuhe focuses in on the security and 3D features and also provides links to other related projects releases.
  • Silverlight 5 Released – Mike Taulty highlights the release, and directs your attentions to Michael Crumps excellent series of posts ’10 laps around Silverlight 5′ for details of the features included.
  • Silverlight 5 Released with a lot of Great New Features – Dan Wahlin joins in the announcement highlighting some of the Line Of Business features he has discussed in recent blog posts
  • Silverlight 5 is released! – Laurent Bugnion highlights some of the features of the Silverlight 5 release that have got him excited, and also takes a look to the future.
  • Silverlight 5 is done. Is Silverlight also done? – Tim Anderson is joined by Mary-Jo Foley (Microsoft releases Silverlight 5), SQLDenis (Silverlight 5 available for download, will it be the last version?) and Paul Thurrott (Silverlight 5) in discussing the Silverlight 5 release, along with looking to the future for what it holds for Silverlight
• Silverlight Toolkit (December 2011) for Silverlight 5 – What’s new? – David Catuhe announces the December 2011 release of the Silverlight Toolkit for Silverlight 5, highlighting the new features of the toolkit for working with 3D in the Content Pipeline, new Silverlight project templates for 3D applications along with new sample applications which show off the new features.
• MVVM Light for Silverlight 5 is on Codeplex – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of a new MVVMLight release targeting the RTM release of Silverlight 5, currently available as source from the project’s CodePlex site.
• RIA Services SP2 RTW released – Yavor Georgiev announces the final release of WCF RIA Services V1 SP2 available in the Silverlight 5 Tools installer and also as a standalone installation. This release brings support for Silverlight 4 & 5 and requires Entity Framework 4.1 (4.2 is not yet supported).

Information

• The New MSDN Subscriber Portal is Live! – The MSDN Subscription Team have launched the new MSDN Subscriber Portal, both a visual refresh as well as a significant behind the scenes rewrite.
• Using QUnit with Razor Layouts – Phil Haack discusses the role of JavaScript in modern web applications and how important it is to test your JavaScript code well, setting out to show how he uses QUnit to test JavaScript in his Razor views, drawing on Jonathan Creamer’s recent post as inspiration.
• SOLID JavaScript: Single Responsibility Principle – Derek Greer kicks off a series of posts over on Fresh Brewed Code looking at applying the SOLID Principle to JavaScript Code, starting off with a look at the Single Responsibility Principle.
• BackboneJS modular app using RequireJS – Jonathan Creamer discusses the using RequireJS to create modular JavaScript applications which avoid the problems of scale that many large and complex JavaScript applications suffer from.
• "A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control, Second Edition" in 441 pages of a free PDF – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the second edition of the Patterns and Practices ‘A Guide to Claims-Based Identity and Access Control’ available as a PDF download. The book addresses all aspects of claims based identity including Windows Identity Foundation an Active Directory Federation Services.
• ASP.NET MVC Routing Extensibility – Simone Chiaretta discusses how you can hook into the ASP.NET MVC pipeline via Routing extensibility allowing you to jump into your own pipeline before the controller instance is created for the request.
• Easy URL rewriting in ASP.NET 4.0 web forms – Jalpesh P. Vadgama discusses the use of Routing in your ASP.NET Web Forms applications, showing a simple worked example of the configuration and use.
• Take Control of Your .NET Builds with Rake and Albacore – Josh Bush highlights the Albacore project from Derick Bailey which makes building .NET Applications with Rake allowing you to create build scripts in Ruby.
• FrazzledDad: 31 Days of Testing – Day 8: Pay Attention to Your Tests’ Setup! – Jim Holmes continues his 31 Days of Testing series of posts with discussion of the test setup and how you should observe good programing practices (like DRY) when writing your tests.
• User testing is common sense – ‘armear’ highlights the practice of User Testing, discussing the value of performing User Testing to improve the quality of your products and User Interfaces
• Zooming & Panning with CSS in IE 10 – Mike Taulty explores how some of the CSS 3 features of the Internet Explorer 10 Developer Preview can help you create a familiar experience for those used to touch based interfaces, discussing the practices and implementation of panning and zooming.

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Today marks the last triple digit edition of The Morning Brew!

Software

• Introducing CSSCop – FxCop for stylesheets – Mads Kristensen announces his latest Visual Studio Extension – CSSCop. CSSCop is to CSS Style Sheets what FxCop is to .NET Code allowing you to find mistakes, invalid values for properties and much more. The rules applied are configurable and is manually invoked on your files.
• OakLeaf Systems: The SQL Azure Team Unveils a New Server Management UI – Roger Jennings gives a tour of the new Sql Azure Management Interface for controlling and working with your SQL Azure server instances

Information

• So many interfaces, part two – Eric Lippert revisits a topic from earlier in the year taking a look at interface re-implementation where your class explicitly states that it implements an interface that is already implemented in the inheritance hierarchy, showing how inheritance can be a much more complex topic that we may initially think.
• C# Fundamentals: Returning Zero or One Item As IEnumerable<T> – James Michael Hare continues his C# Fundamentals series with a look at returning empty results collections or single results wrapped as IEnumerable<T>, exploring the use og List<T>, arrays and iterators, comparing their implementation in code and performance.
• NuGet: little known features – Peter Kuhn discusses some of the less well know features of NuGet, discussing and highlighting documentation on creating your own NuGet feeds, making use of Package Restore as a part of your build process, and creating your own packages.
• Use Projections and a Repository to Fake a Filtered Eager Load – Julie Lerman discusses one of the most requested features which is not currently in Entity Framework – sorting and filtering of eager loaded data – discussing the problem pace and showing how you can work around the current limitation in certain circumstances.
• Hosted Execution of smaller code snippets with Roslyn – Filip Ekberg discusses the creation of a Roslyn based environment which allows you to run arbitrary C# code in a more isolated way than many of the existing REPL demonstrations support.
• Test first != TDD – Kailuo Wang discusses the difference between writing your tests first and actually doing real Test Driven Development
• 31 Days of Testing – Day 7: Automated Test Basics – Jim Holmes is pressing on with his Testing Series continuing with exploration of Automated Testing looking at the basics of NUnit testing.
• Testing Web.config Transformations, Part 1 – Mads Troest takes a look at performing web.config transformations programmatically allowing you to create automated tests for your web.config transformations, looking at the use of IBuildEngine outside the MSBuild Process.

Community

• The SQL Server Conference – SQLBits 10 – 29 – 31 Mar 2012 – London – Registrations for SQL Bits X which runs between 29th and 31st March 2012 in London. The format of the event is the usual 2 days of paid for conference followed by the Saturday Community Day which is free for all (Registration required). SqlBits X is also doubling up as the SQL Server 2012 UK Launch event, so expect it to be bigger than ever.
• Free OpenWrap workshop Saturday 10th December in Lier, Belgium – Sebastien Lambla is out in Belgium and will be running a 4 hour session on package management, Open Wrap, and composite systems this Saturday (10th December). The event is free, and includes a complimentary lunch.

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