The Morning Brew

Software

• Beta release of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Windows Phone – Lee Stott highlights the release of the Amazon Web Services SDK for Windows Phone allowing you to consume the range of Amazon Services (S3, SimpleDB, SQS Cloud Services) from the comfort of a sensible Windows Phone compatible API. Lee highlights a good set of resources for getting up and running with the library including video content from Channel 9.

Information

• Anonymous Types Unify Within An Assembly, Part Two – Eric Lippert continues his discussion of anonymous types within assemblies, and the unification of types which contain the same definition.
• Currying vs partial function application – Jon Skeet discusses the differences between the functional programming concepts of currying and partial application, looking at doing both in C# when programming in a more functional programming style.
• Hazards of Converting Binary Data To A String – Phil Haack picks up on an interesting group of questions on StackOverflow discussing how you can represent binary data as a string, and looking at the implications of the encoding used as to what it does to the data being encoded, and how it can result in changes to the actual bytes being written.
• About Orchard Governance and Microsoft – Bertrand Le Roy discusses the recent change to the Orchard project, and how the project which was initiated by Microsoft has now been formally handed over to the community in a more complete way than many company created open source projects have been in the past.
• The new OpenEverything organization – While on the topic of Open Source project involvement, Sebastien Lambla discusses some of the organisation changes for the OpenEverything (OpenWrap, OpenRasta, OpenFileSystem,…) projects and how he is now focusing his involvement.
• From Concept to Code in 6 hours: Shipping my first Windows Phone App – Scott Hanselman walks through the creation of his very first Windows Phone 7 Application, from concept to application in 6 hours, sharing the key bits along the way.
• 31 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design – #5 Choosing between Panoramas, Pivots and/or Pages. – Arturo Toledo is into week 5 of his 31 post series looking at all aspects of Windows Phone Metro design. This post takes a look at the three key UI concepts beginning with ‘P’ – Panorama, Pivots and Pages, looking at their use and how they are similar to other more familiar design concepts.
• The Big Dummies Guide for Windows Phone Developer Resources – Bil Simser shares a great collection of Windows Phone development resources, ranging from articles, frameworks, design concepts, training, to marketing and monitzation of applications.
• Winning on the Marketplace: The differentiation game – Paul Laberge discusses how you can make your applications stand out in the Windows Phone Marketplace, including how some application feature will make users love your application all the more.
• Introducing Apache Hadoop Services for Windows Azure – Roger Jennings discusses the use of Apache Hadoop Services on Windows Azure, looking at and highlighting some posts on the concepts and product, before walkig through two tutorials, and highlighting plenty of further resources.
• Find the jQuery Bug #3: Give Me Truth – Elijah Manor is running a series of posts looking at common bugs found in jQuery consuming code, and discussing what the problem is, and how you can resolve the issue.
• Testing a jQuery Plugin with ExpectThat and Mocha – Dan Mohl continues discussion of his ExpectThat library for CoffeeScript / JavaScript assertions, looking in this post at the application of the library in testing a jQuery Plugin
• Using SpecFlow to drive Selenium WebDriver Tests – Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses the use of SpecFlow combined with the Selenium WebDriver to provide a way fo executing tests derived from human readable requirements, running through the process from scenario to working test

Community

• SQL Bits X – The Biggest SQL Event in Europe – Sara Allison highlights the SQL Bits X SQL Server event and the associated training days. SQL Bits is a great conference, with SQL experts from all over the world, and this event is particularly special as it also doubles as the UK launch event for SQL Server 2012. Spaces are limited (although it is a large limit) and registrations for both the ‘pay for’ conference / training days and the Free Community Day are currently open.
• NxtGenUG – Event – Straighten Spaghetti with C# 5 – Jon Skeet takes a trip to Microsoft Research in Cambridge on Thursday 16th February for the NxtGenUG where he will be delivering a session on how C#5 and the new async functionality can help straighten out complex spaghetti code. Be sure to register early for what is bound to be a very popular event.

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Software

• jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 Released – The jQuery Mobile team announce the release of jQuery Mobile 1.0.1, their first maintenance release which brings support for the Samsung bada platform and UCBrowsers on the Android platform, along with a number of other bugfixes and enhancements.
• IcedCoffeeScript – IcedCoffeeScript is a fork of the main CoffeeScript which adds a number of additional features, most notably await and defer keywords which extend the power of the language with respect to asynchronous control flow, implementing continuation passing style, much like C#5.
• Umbraco CMS – Download: Umbraco CMS 5.0 RC 3 – The 3rd Release candidate of Umbraco CMS V5.0 is now available on CodePlex. This release candidate is likely to be the final one before a production release later this week, so is a great opportunity to get your hands on the new stuff first.
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Version 1.2.2 Released – Nathan Totten announces the release of 1.2.2 of his Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. There are no new features over the 1.2.0 beta, but this release is considered to be a stable one, and includes some perforamcne tweaks and improved use of AutoFac for dependency injection.

Information

• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs of Software Development – Scott Hanselman turns psychologist and discusses the hierarchy of needs looking at applying them to the practices of software development
• Don’t Rely Solely On jQuery’s "keyup" Event – Derick Bailey discusses how relying on the keyup event for change detection in browser input boxes can get your in to trouble when the browser’s auto complete kicks in.
• Perils Of Lambda Capture – Artur Laksberg discusses some of the confusion which arises from the capture of local variables in lambda expressions, especially when the lambdas are used for async code.
• Creating Files through BlobBuilder – Sharon Newman of the Internet Explorer Team discusses the implementation and use of the File API in Internet Explorer 10 which allows developers to read and write files on the client.
• MSDN Magazine February Issue Preview – Michael Desmond gives a teasing taste of what is coming in next month’s MSDN Magazine, due out online shortly.
• Found: Windows Azure Document Treasure Trove! – Peter Laudati highlights a collection of real world Windows Azure Guidance which covers a wide range of Azure topics, from Authentication to storage, via use of PowerShell, Dynamic scaling, and much more.
• Action, Func, void and unit – ‘Flatlander’ discusses the different types of Standard Delegate types which are included in the .NET Framework, looking at the lack of interchange-ability between the types, and looking at how F# provides a contrast to this.
• Engineering Management: Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? – A fascinating post on Quora discussing via analogy why it is that estimation in software development (and travel by foot over long distances) can be so inaccurate.

Community

• Manchester Meetup. V5 presentation by @mattbrailsford from @Umbraco. – Manchester Umbraco Meetup – The Manchester Umbraco Meetup welcome Matt Brailsford of Umbraco to their February event, taking place on the evening of Wednesday 29th February, which will explore the new features of V5 of Umbraco.

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Update: Some broken HTML merged Derick Bailey and Davy Brion’s links in todays edition – thanks to Oded for letting me know.

Software

• Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Refresh – The Windows Azure Team announce the release of a refresh to the preview of the SQL Azure Data Sync. SQL Azure Data Sync provides a means for you to synchronise data between your on premise databases and those in the cloud, and this refresh addresses a number of issues customer raised, including making it available in all Azure datacentres
• Rockford Lhotka – CSLA 4 version 4.3.0 alpha available – Rockford Lhotka announces the alpha release of his CSLA 4 v4.3.0 application framework. The major feature for this release, in addition to the usual bugfixes, is some significant performance improvements to the MobileFormatter which supports serialisation on Silverlight and Windows Phone platforms.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: Anna – Jason Jarrett continues his series of posts looking at interesting projects hosted on the NuGet Feed. This post gives a short introduction to Anna, a HTTP Server library based around the Reactive Extensions,

Information

• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Implicit Zero To Enum Conversion – James Michael Hare continues his ‘Little Pitfalls’ series with a look at how a constant zero value can be converted to result in the use of an overload of a function you might not expect
• Modularity And Security In Composite JavaScript Apps – Derick Bailey discusses securing client side applications and preventing users from accessing functionality they are not allowed on the client by making clever use of the module pattern to control the functionality delivered to the client.
• (Ab)Using Conventions To Enforce Good Practices – Davy Brion shares a neat trick using Fluent NHibernate conventions which will help force developers to specify the lengths of strings in the mapping ensuring optimal database performance.
• 3. Pattern Matching – Be Explicit – Dorian Corompt continues this series looking at the various aspects of Functional Programming, in this post exploring the use of Pattern Matching, illustrating its use in F# and discussing some best practices for its use.
• SqlBulkCopy for Generic List<T> (useful for Entity Framework & NHibernate) – Jarod Ferguson discusses the use of SQL Bulk Copy to provide a quick and efficient way of getting large volumes of data into SQL Server data tables
• MVVM on MVC: HTML is not XAML – Jeremy Likness discusses the MVVM pattern, some of its benefits and explores how well it fits with HTML development using libraries like Knockout.js
• Understanding SQL Azure Throttling and Implementing Retry Logic – Scott Klein discusses the throttling behaviour of SQL Azure and looks at how you should handle throttling and the retry capabilities you need to bake into your data access to account for it.
• One reason why HTML5 gaming is limping along – Christian Heilmann discusses the disservice that the conversion of games from other platforms to HTML5 based implementations, discussing the disadvantages of this conversion approach rather than writing on the platform from the start, illustrating with discussions of the plight of Commodore 64 games in their later years.
• Happy birthday Commodore 64 – Marcin Dembowski highlights the 30th birthday of the Commodore 64, the computer which started it all for me, and for many others I suspect.
• The HTML5 History API and ASP.NET MVC – Dan Maharry shares an extract from the Manning book HTML5 for .NET Developers which discusses the use of the HTML5 History API.

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