The Morning Brew

Software

• PhoneThemeManager: allow your app to have the Light, Dark, or Inverted theme with 1 line of code – Jeff Wilcox shares a library for Window Phone 7 Mango which allows you to have your application use the light theme even if the device is set to dark theme, allowing you to give you applications a contrasting look, much like the built in Mail application does. The library is available on NuGet in both source and binary format, and code is also available on GitHub.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: NFeature – Jason Jarrett continues his series of posts looking at some of the interesting recent additions to the NuGet package feed, highlighting NFeature, a library which provides support for Feature Toggles.

Information

• Event Centric: storing and consuming events – Daniel Cazzulino continues his series of posts discussing the various aspects of event sourcing, taking a look in more detail at the storage of the domain events in an event store and how you can go about consuming them.
• Structure your code by feature – Urs Enzler discusses an alternative approach to structuring your code, looking at structuring it based on feature / requirement, building more structure on top of the standard layered approach and easing maintainability in the long term.
• Implementing resource oriented controllers in ASP.NET MVC – Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the tendency for ASP.NET MVC controllers to be used as a grouping of actions to share URL structures, and looks at an alternative which allows your controller to be simpler and better observe the SOLID principles.
• Solving Real-world Theming Challenges with MVC4 and Sass – Harvey Kandola discusses the lack of theming support in native ASP.NET MVC, and shares his solution to this building upon Sass and utilising some useful IDE extensions to make working with Sass and CSS better.
• Windows Communication Foundation 4.0 – Simplified Configuration Feature – Melissa Amanna highlights one of the key improvements made to WCF in .NET 4, an improvement to the amount of configuration required for your services.
• MicroFinance App, Creating the Front End – Sara Allison shares a piece from Matt Robinson discussing a proof of concept application using HTML5 Canvas, Modernizr and Knockout.js which he was involved in the creation of.
• Debugging IndexedDB Applications – Israel Hilerio discusses and shares the IDBExplorer tool that the Internet Explorer team use to help debug client side code which makes use of the IndexedDB data storage features.
• Software Release Management – Why You Can’t And Shouldn’t Force People to Use the Latest Version – Rob Reynolds discusses the variety of factors which you need to consider when dealing with versioned software releases, looking at the many reasons why people may choose not to use your latest and greatest version.
• Rant: That’;s Not Rest – Derick Bailey wades into the world of REST, a topic which has more than its fair share of confusion about what it actually is and how it should be correctly implemented. Derick shares a collection of resource (and has updated the post with addition ones people suggested).
• Building a large text file editor – Part I – Costin Boldisor kicks off a two part series looking at some of the concepts behind the creation of a text editor which can handle large files, discussion the concept of a revision stream in this first post.
• Deploying "Cloud Numerics" Sample Applications to Windows Azure HPC Clusters – Roger Jennings walks through the process of deploying a sample application of the new Microsoft ‘Cloud Numerics’ platform onto Windows Azure in this step by step post.
• Now, more than ever, you need a designer – Pete Brown discusses the value that a good UX designer can bring to your project, looking back at the history of UX design in software development and highlighting the importance of getting designers involved early in a project.

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Software

• Json.NET – Download: Json.NET 4.0 Release 6 – The JSON.NET Team announce their latest release – 4.0 Release 6. This version adds line numbers to deserialization errors, additional BinaryReader/BinsaryWriter constructor overloads on BSON Readers / Writers, along with fixse for a number of issues.
• Introducing Dragonfly – another .NET HTTP server – Louis DeJardin introduces a new .NET HTTP Server implementation which provides the OWIN functionality to allow it to act as an application host. The intention of this projects is to provide another reference implementation to validate OWIN and the Gate implementation.
• dotTrace 5.0 Performance Early Access Program – Hadi Harari announces the openign of the Early Access Program for dotTrace version 5.0. This is an opportunity for you to get your hands on the latest pre-release version of dotTrace, and for you to help feedback on the product and assist the development team.

Information

• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentQueue – Simon Cooper continues his series of posts looking at the internal implementations of the various Concurrent Collections introduced in .NET 4.0. This post explores the Concurrent Queue, looking first at the non-concurrent queue, and seeing how the concurrent one differs, before deriving some key concurrency principles from the implementation.
• Advanced APM Consumption in Async Methods – Stephen Toub discusses how you are able to consume an existing Asynchronous Programming Model implementation without first wrapping it in a task, an advanced approach which reduces some of the overheads of the task wrapping approach.
• NuGet Project Uncovered: PineCone & NuGet Project Uncovered: xizzle – Jason Jarrett highlights two NuGet packages as a part of his NuGet Project Uncovered series which aims to look at interesting and less well known projects which have recently been released as NuGet Packages.
• Picking a domain for CQRS Journey RI – Grigori Melnik feeds back some of the initial findings and thinking following the Patterns and Practices CQRS questionnaire, discussing one of the key questions – what domain should the reference implementation cover.
• Windows Azure and Cloud9 IDE at Node Summit – Glen Block highlights the work undertaken in getting Node.js running as a platform on Windows Azure and summarises the goings on at the NodeSummit, giving particular attention to the use of the Cloud9 web based IDE which can be used to develop and deploy Node.js based applications straight to Windows Azure, as demonstrated by Scott Guthrie.
• Some Thoughts On Functional JavaScript – Derick Bailey shares some of his experiments writing Functional Style code in JavaScript, looking at how some of the key fundamental principles of Functional Programming can be implemented using JavaScript.
• Resources for getting started with Backbone.js – Jarod Ferguson shares a great collection of resources about Bakbone.js which will help you go from zero to hero with this client side framework.
• Get involved in Open Source today – How to contribute a patch to a GitHub hosted Open Source project like Code 52 – Scott Hanselman highlights the Code52 project which is aiming to develop a new application each week of the year, and with 3 interesting projects under their belt already is certainly one to watch. Scott discusses how you can get involved with open source projects like this by running through the process of submitting a patch to a project hosted on GitHub.
• Add HTML5 Geolocation plus Bing Maps into ASP.NET MVC views – Rachel Appel discusses the use of the Bing Maps API in your ASP.NET MVC views, walking through the getting started and consuming some of the basic features of the API
• "A Lap Around Windows Phone 7.5" webcast now available on-demand – Paul Laberge highlights the availability of the video recording of his ‘A Lap Around Windows Phone 7.5’ webcast from last week. This is 3 hours of content looking at how to build applications on the Windows Phone 7.5 platform, from idea to marketplace.
• If I can build a phone app anyone can: Changing the keyboard and IsNumeric – Susan Ibach continues her Windows Phone Development series which is exploring some of the common questions which arise in Windows Phone development. This post looks at adding validation to inputs and controlling which mode the onscreen keyboard appears in.

Community

• SQL Server 2012 launches March 7th… with a free virtual launch event – Greg Duncan highlights the SQL Server 2012 Virtual Launch Event which is taking place on Wednesday 7th March, offering range of learning opportunities with SQL server team members and partners, along with the change to engage with the community and win some prizes.

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Information

• Anonymous types unify within an assembly, Part One – Eric Lippert fulfills an old promise to show an example of anonymous type unifying within an assembly in this new series of posts, showing how the C# specification allows for use of the same anonymous types in differnent locations are combined into a single type within an assembly.
• Modifying Code with Project Roslyn – Jason Bock takes a look at using Project Roslyn to modify source code, looking at the removal of region elements from a code file, and integrating this with Visual Studio.
• Using Async for File Access – Alan Berman takes a look at the use of the new Async / await functionality in C#5 to perform file access in a non-blocking way to help maintain responsiveness and improve the performance of your applications.
• SOLID JavaScript: The Dependency Inversion Principle – Derek Greer completes his series of posts looking at applying the SOLID principles to JavaScript code, taking a look at Dependency Inversion in this post, looking at the theory behind dependency inversion and how it can be implemented in JavaScript.
• Javascript and CSS Minifying/Bundling with the Microsoft.Web.Optimization Nuget package – Frédéric Harper takes a look at implementing compression and minification of JavaScript and CSS Resources using the Microsoft.Web.Optimization NuGet package
• NuGet Project Uncovered: An Introduction to the Series – Jason Jarrett kicks off a new series of posts looking at some of the interesting packages which are being published via NuGet. This first post introduces the criteria used to select the packages which will feature in the series.
• HTML5 And Internet Explorer: Modernizr To The Rescue! – Derick Bailey discusses the use of Modernizr to make your HTML 5 web applications work with older browsers by way of the shim implementations which patch the missing functionality into browsers, illustrating with a real world example of its use.
• Please ship your next Windows Phone app with GZip: speed requests 50-80% – Jeff Wilcox highlights GZipWebClient library by Morten Nielsen which brings GZip Compression capabilities to your Windows Phone applications allowing them to retrieve compressed data and benefit from the performance improvements.
• Mythical man month : 10 lines per developer day – Patrick Smacchia discusses the use of LoC (logical lines of code) to measure development performance, and how the actual numbers of lines of code we craft on average over the long term is surprisingly low, sharing example stats from his NDepend project to illustrate.
• Skip Intro – CSS3 is the new Flash – Scott Hanselman looks back at the evolution of Flash and other browser plugins which supplement browser capabilities and takes a look to the future where angle brackets will likely rule the roost in these areas with HTML5 and CSS3 bringing a lot of the capabilities developers and users require.

Community

• Slides and notes from Monday 23rd January #6weeksazure sessions now available – Eric Nelson highlights the availability of the slides and webinar notes form the first day of the 6 weeks of Azure virtual learning event.

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