The Morning Brew

As websites all over the internet go dark to protest SOPA, I arrive at the 1024th edition of the Morning Brew. I had planned this to be a big celebration, but due to a variety of factors I haven’t had the time to do anything grand, and due to bad road traffic today’s edition is even shorter than usual 🙁

Software

• Gate 0.2.1 implementation of OWIN online at NuGet – Louis DeJardin announces the 0.2.1 release of the Gate implementation of OWIN (the Open Web Interface for .NET). Gate is a reference implementation of the standard for connecting web servers and web applications, and is available as a NuGet Package
• SisoDb v9.0 Released – Daniel Wertheim announces the V9 release of SISODB, a free and open source document oriented provider for SQL Server and SQL CE 4 Databases. This release includes compatibility with SQL 2012 Express RC0, a new indexing structure in the database and some initial work to support future plans for providers which do not support transactions.

Information

• January 17th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio – Jason Zander gives an update on the last few months from the point of view of the Visual Studio team, giving a nice recap of the significant events and releases over the past few months including the Roslyn CTP, Azure SDK, TFS on Azure, TFS Power Tools and the ALM Summit.
• Modern Web Development – Part 1 – Shawn Wildermuth kicks off a new series looking at the evolved state of Web Development and sharing some of the experiences he has had building FirstInked. This first part focuses on the changes in the art of web development in the past 10 years.
• 10 Things ASP.NET Developers Should Know About Web.config Inheritance and Overrides – Jon Galloway shares 10 key tips to understanding the way in which web config values are inherited and set in a variety of different (yet common) situations. Essential reading for anyone doing any web development beyond the most basic ASP.NET sites.
• Utilising MEF to self-register HTTP modules – Tom Pipe discusses how he used the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) to register HTTP Modules in his application without configuration in web.config, using attributes on the type to locate the modules and have them loaded using the DynamicModuleUtility.RegisterModule() method to register them with ASP.NET.
• Restful WCF / EF POCO / UnitOfWork / Repository / MEF : 1 of 2 – Sacha Barber kicks off a new two part post series looking at constructing a RESTful service layer using best practices and the Microsoft technologies WCF, Entity Framework, MEF and the repository pattern. This post focus on all the key technology and implementation with a forthcoming second part looking at the creation of a consumer application.
• Speech Recognition – Exploring Grammar Based Recognition – Robert Lucero has been exploring the use of Speech Recognition in your own applications, in this post discussing the use of grammar to control the words recognised, illustrating with a sample application. Be sure to check out Robert’s other posts on this topic too.

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Software

• Coded UI Tests : WPF Utilities – Jonathan Antoine shares a collection of helper methods for Coded UI Tests to help when working with Tree View, List View, and general control instances, along with simpler expand, collapsem invoke and select helpers.

Information

• What is the defining characteristic of a local variable? – Eric Lippert discusses the actual meaning of a ‘local scope variable’, looking at some of the common misconceptions and implementation details which often get swept up into the definition.
• Struct vs. Class, Safety vs. Speed – Bill Wagner discusses some points and questions which were raised at CodeMash about the use of Structs in place of classes for performance, looking at a couple of different scenarios and rules about the use of structs.
• Eduasync part 19: ordering by completion, ahead of time… – Jon Skeet continues his eduasync series exploring the ordering of the results of tasks exploring the implementation and a sample which illustrates it in operation
• Building the next generation file system for Windows: ReFS – Steven Sinofsky and the Windows 8 team are still innovating away, and in this post Steven discusses the new file system ReFS based on the ideas behind NTFS and additional customer requirements, which is to be included in server editions of Windows 8.
• Approval testing – value for the money – Krzysztof Kozmic discusses some of the common problems with automated testing, including the burden of test code which adds little value, and introduces the concept of Approval Testing, a practice he has been using on recent projects, looking at an example from the Windsor project to illustrate the practice.
• How Do You Pick Open Source Libraries? – Dany Brion discusses some of the things he considers when attempting to pick an open source library from the vast array available to solve a particular problem.
• Marines vs. Boy Scouts – Chris Brandsma discusses the two common approaches to working on an existing code base, the ‘get in get out’ marine approach and the “Leave thing better than you found them” Boy Scout approach, discussing that both have disadvantages when used inappropriately.

Community

• Skills Matter : London .NET User Group : Gain Trust and Crea – Garry Shutler will be presenting a session for the London .NET User Group at SkillsMatter on the softer skills of Gaining Trust and Creating Change within organisations. The session is on the evening of Monday 30th January

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Software

• Fluent Assertions 1.7.0 has been released – Dennis Doomen announces the latest release of this Fluent Assertions library. 1.7.0 Contains new functionality for checking collections of types for particular methods and attributes, XElament and XAttribute assertions along with bugfixes from the previous version. The library is available via NuGet.
• EF 4.3 Beta 1 Released – The ADO.NET Entity Framework Team announces the release of the first beta of Entity Framework 4.3, the final planned public release before RTM. This release brings the Code First migrations into the main EF package, along with improvements to CodeFirst Migrations, and a variety of bugfixes for the DbContext API and CodeFirst.
• DBDeploy.Net 2 – Robert May announces DBDeploy.NET 2, a complete re-write of the original DbDeploy which adds support for deployment to SQL Azure.

Information

• Autocorrecting unknown actions using the Levenshtein distance – Jef Claes takes a look at ‘autocorrecting’ calls to actions where the user gets the name of the action (on the URL) incorrect, taking a look at how ASP.NET MVC works internally, exploring the Levenshtein distance algorithm, and putting them both together into a neat solution.
• A quick look at MetroRadio: quick spacing, margin, and icon tips for Windows Phone devs – Jeff Wilcox discusses some of the slight UX issues in a real world Windows Phone application, exploring both the actual application and looking at spacing and alignment and looking at how the application is displayed in the marketplace.
• Comparing Strings in Unit Tests – Phil Haack discusses some of the pain in Unit testing when comparing strings, and how the output from the assert method is often less than useful in identifying what is wrong. Phil shares a simple method which supplements the output with a breakdown of the strings. Be sure to check out the comments for discussion of other techniques and libraries of helper asserts.
• JavaScript Performance – Steve Souders shares slides and discussion from his recent talk at the San Francisco JavaScript Meetup where he looked at the implementation of the Google Analytics Async loader discussing its performance impacts.
• Understanding CoffeeScript Comprehensions – Karl Seguin discusses the role of Comprehensions in CoffeeScript, illustrating their use with a simple example.
• Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type> – Rick Strahl discusses some of the difficulties you may encounter when working with code which loads types into different AppDomains, highlighting the use of the .NET Fusion Log Viewer for help in diagnosing issues when loading assemblies.
• Input Parameters in Fluent API – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at his bddify library. This part of the series looks at how the library handles input parameters when working with the Fluent API allowing your test methods to be parameterised and to have the BDD scenario output reflect these values.
• FAQ on Task.Start – Stephen Toub answers 8 commonly asked questions on the Task.Start method, discussing what the method is useful form how it differs from Task.Factory.StartNew, the role of Task.Result, and using tasks in your API.

Community

• New year, new venue and making more money! – The London based Windows Phone User Group welcome Alan Mendelvich to a new venue for a talk on making money with your Windows Phone 7 Applications on Tuesday 31st January.
• Event: Straighten Spaghetti with C# 5 – The Cambridge NxtGenUG Chapeter welcome Jon Skeet for a session looking at making clean clear straight forward code using C#5 and the new Async support on the evening of Thursday 16th February 2012.

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