The Morning Brew

Software

• Lucene.net 2.9.4 is out, now with NuGet – Simone Chiaretta highlights the release of Lucene.NET 2.9.4. This release addresses some know issues with concurrency, compilation on Mono and memory leaks, and continues the work of cleaning up the code base, along with a couple of new features. The distribution is also available as a NuGet package making it easier to include in your projects.
• Announcing the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure with Autoscaling, Transient Fault Handling and more – Grigori Melnik announces the release of the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure which brings the Auto Scaling Application Block, Transient Fault Handling Application Block, along with a suite of other utilities, tools, scripts and guidance.

Information

• New CSS Editor Improvements in Visual Studio (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5, this time exploring the new features of the editor for dealing with CSS Files.
• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Safely and Efficiently Raising Events – James Michael Hare resumes his C# / .NET Fundamentals series with a look at the raising of events, exploring some of the issues you may encounter in event based code and looking at solutions for them to ensure that your events are raised safely.
• 31 Days of Mango | Now In eBook Format! – Jeff Blankenburg’s series of posts on Windows Phone Mango has now come to an end, however he is making the series available in e-book format available from the Amazon and Nook e-book stores. Proceeds support the authors who wrote the posts, so if you enjoyed the series and want the content in a good electronic format go get a copy.
• 31 Days of OData – Day 1 Background of OData & 31 Days of Testing: The Kickoff – 31 Days of… series seem to be all the rage with two new series kicking off this month. First up is Chris Woodruff exploring OData in his ’31 days of OData Series’, and Jim Holmes is taking a look at all aspects of testing in his series ’31 Days of Testing’
• Simple Producer Consumer With Tasks And .NET 4 – Alois Kraus takes a look at how the Task Parallel Library makes writing parallel code easy, exploring a producer consumer which makes use of tasks.
• Coalescing CancellationTokens from Timeouts – Stephen Toub discusses the new feature of the CancellationToken which provides for Timeout functionality for your parallel tasks, exploring cancelation of multiple tasks with the one token.
• Roslyn Syntax Visualizer Tools
  – Chris Sells highlights some of the tools provided as a part of the Roslyn CTP which allow you to gain a better understanding of the details of the syntax tree, discussing the use of the Syntax Visualizer Extension and Syntax Debugger Visualizer.
• Achieving Block Scope With Immediate Functions In JavaScript – Derick Bailey discusses how you can use Immediate Functions to create scope in a similar way to block scope in other languages illustrating with some examples
• Knockout.js 1.3 External Templates – Jim Cowart shares his external templates functionality as a plugin for Knockout.js allowing you to separate your templates into separate files allowing you to keep your page size down and code more ordered. Jim illustrates its use with an example.
• 10 Reasons why the build works locally but fails on the build server – Tim Stall discusses 10 of the most common reasons for ‘Works on My PC’ syndrome where builds work OK on the developers machine but not in the Continuous Integration / Build Server.
• A look back at the ASP.NET site through the years – Jon Galloway takes a trip down memory lane looking back at the different incarnations of the ASP.NET Website.

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Bit of a short edition today (due to time constraints) might make up for it with a special weekend edition if I get the time.

Software

• Code First Migrations: Beta 1 Released – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announce the beta release of Code First Migrations, a database migrations framework intended for use with Entity Framework powered applications. The work done since the beta has been cleaning the API and improving quality along with renaming some types, creation if foreign key indexes and improvements to model change detection.
• SSMS Tools Pack 2.1.0 is out. Added support for SQL Server 2012 RC0. – Mladen Prajdi? announces an update to his SQL Server Management Studio Tools Pack. This release adds support for SQL Server 2012 RC0, removing regions and debug sections from the tool as they are now included in the core SQL Server Management Studio.
• TeamCitySharp v0.2 – Paul Stack announces a new release of TeamCitySharp, a C# wrapper round the REST API provided by TeamCity. This release brings a new Build Locator making it easier to obtain build information, and adds a sample Build Monitor project using ASP.NET MVC 3 and Knockout.js.

Information

• New ASP.NET website launched &ASP.NET website redesign: Now with less Beta, more Live – Scott Hanselman & Jon Galloway announce the launch of the new ASP.NET Website highlighting the new content and improved information architecture and navigation structures.
• Scott Hanselman’s 2011 Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows – Scott Hanselman also released the 2011 update to his Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows. This in depth list of software highlights all the best tools, software and utilities for achieving all those day to day tasks. I’m also thrilled to see that The Morning Brew is featured again in this year’s list – Thanks Scott.
• MSDN Magazine – December 11 – The December 2011 edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with feature articles on the MVPVM design pattern, building HTML5 applications, Responsive Web Design with HTML5, Video encoding and a look at the ProcDump utility, along with all the usual columns.
• Setting up TeamCity as a native NuGet Server – Hadi Hariri discusses the built in NuGet server feature of the current Early Access Program edition of TeamCity 7 allowing your builds to be easily exposed as packages for consumption.
• Yes, Simple.Data protects against SQL Injection & Eager-loading RFC – Mark Rendle (not to be confused with his evil twin Merk Rendle) discusses the origins of Simple.Data, and the SQL injection protection it provides, along with asking for feedback on a possible implementation for Eager loading in Simple.Data.

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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.

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