The Morning Brew

Information

• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Stopwatch Ticks are not TimeSpan Ticks – James Michael Hare continues his ‘little pitfalls’ series which explores areas of the C# language and .NET Framework which can be confusing, misleading of simply a little strange. In this post James explores the Stopwatch’s ElapsedTicks property and how they don’t necessarily represent the same ‘ticks’ as used elsewhere in the framework.
• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentStack – Simon Cooper continues his series looking at the internals of the Concurrent Collections introduced in .NET 4. This post sees the ConcurrentStack fall under the microscope, with a look at how it works internally and how concurrency is supported.
• Scoping CQRS/ES Guidance Project – Grigori Melnik discusses a pending project from the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft to create a reference implementation of a Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and Event Sourcing (ES) based architecture. The team have a questionnaire which they would appreciate your feedback to help them focus and scope the project.
• Using Rx? Subscribe to exceptions! – ‘BenWilli’ highlights the ability within the Reactive Extensions for .NET to gracefully handle exceptions, and discusses a recent situation where he didn’t make use of this feature which resulted in a large number of crash reports of his Windows Phone 7 application.
• A C# Extension Method using Expression Trees to Create an instance from a Type – Steve Wilkes shares an extension method which will create an instance of a type from the type object, making use of expression trees to make the instantiation perform well.
• Integration testing with Azure development storage – Rory Primrose discusses the problem with the Windows Azure development storage when you want to use it in a unit testing scenario, discovering a solution for the Azure SDK 1.0, and updates and shares a version which works with the 1.6 SDK.
• Charles Petzold on His 25 Years with MSDN Magazine – Michael Desmond celebrates 25 years of MSDN magazine (as both the Microsoft Systems Journal and MSDN Magazine as it is today), sharing a recent interview with Charles Petzold, a contributor to the publication since its inception.
• ASP.NET MVC 3 Real Time Collaborative Apps with SignalR – Sumit Maitra walks through the creation of a simple application using ASP.NET MVC 3 and the SignalR asynchronous signalling framework which allows you to create persistent connections between your client side code and server side code.
• Bringing Cut the Rope to Life in an HTML5 Browser: Behind the Scenes – MSDN UK Team blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Sara Allison shares an article from Microsoft Senior Technical Evangelist Giorgio Sardo discussing the migration of the iPhone Game ‘Cut the Rope’ to a HTML5 implementation to run in Internet Explorer, highlighting the chalenges of perfomance and the tooling used.

Community

• Developing iOS applications with C# and .NET using MonoTouch – The Canary Wharf .NET User Group welcome Chris Hardy for a session on using C# and .NET to build applications for iOS making use of MonoTouch. This event is currently fully booked, but a waiting list is running so there is still a chance you will be able to attend.

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Software

• jQuery UI 1.8.17 – The jQuery UI Team announce the release of jQuery 1.8.17, the 17th maintenance release which includes fixes for a number of UI controls along with support for jQuery 1.7.1
• BugAid – Enhanced C# Debugging tool (and free for non-commercial open source projects too) – Greg Duncan highlights BugAid, a set of tooling which enhances the debugging capabilities of Visual Studio, adding a bunch of great features. The BugAid team are also offering free licenses to those involved in Open Source development.
• The ‘Cloud Numerics’ Programming and runtime execution model – The Cloud Numerics team announce their project to the world. Cloud Numerics is a programming framework for .NET which is geared towards performing distributed numerical calculations, using techniques and technology like map reduce, Windows Azure and Hadoop.
• Kicking off StructureMap 3 – Jeremy D Miller shares his plans for the next major release of his StructureMap IoC project, outlining the changes and features he hopes to include

Information

• Eduasync part 18: Changes between the Async CTP and the Visual Studio 11 Preview – Jon Skeet continues his series looking at the Async coming in future versions of C# / .NET functionality, reviewing the differences in Async functionality between the Async CTP and the Visual Studio 11 preview release.
• How to deploy Mono projects with Heroku – Ben Hall shows how he got .NET projects (such as Nancy) running under Mono up and running on the Heroku cloud hosting platform, walking through the process step by step.
• Advanced Debugging in Visual Studio – Pankaj Chamria shares a number of debugging tips and tricks, many of which are less well known or understood in this CodeProject article.
• Controlling Selection with CSS user-select – Sharon Newman of the Internet Explorer Team discusses their implementation of -ms-user-select a CSS property which allows web developers to control which areas of the page can have content selected, allowing you to refine the user experience for text selection.
• Vendor Prefixes and JavaScript – Martin Beeby discusses the use of vendor prefixes in CSS, and discusses the concept behind them and how they are named when accessed through JavaScript.
• Getting stated with Git and GitHub – Simone Chiaretta collects together a number of good resources to help you get up and running with distributed versioning using git and GitHub.
• User Login done right – Jaco Pretorius takes a look at the humble login page, exploring implementations from FaceBook and Google looking at some of the differences in how they handle incorrect usernames, passwords and other user account behaviours such as lockout.
• Tips for a YSlow “Grade A” website with ASP.NET MVC 4 – Harvey Kandola discusses the use of YSlow to identify performance problems on your website, looking at ho his team addressed the identified issues in a recently launched ASP.NET MVC 4 site.

Community

• "Unplugged" LIDNUG online talk with me on Monday (Jan 16th) – Scott Guthrie is giving another of his ‘unplugged’ talks for the LinkedIn .NET Usergroup (LIDNUG) on Monday 16th January between 10am and 11:30am PST. This is a great opportunity to learn more about Scott’s work at Microsoft, products and gives you a chance to ask him your questions.
• XPMan XL3 – February 4th 2012 – XP Manchester, the eXtreme Programming group here in the North West of England are hosting their 3rd all day event on Saturday 4th February. The focus of this event is ‘release early, release often’, with a number of hands on sessions planned. The event is also looking for sponsors, so if you or your employer can help out get in touch with them.
• XPManchester 12th January – Refactoring with James McDonald. – XP Manchester also have their first evening event of the year tonight (12th January) at Madlab, featuring James McDonald looking at using refactoring to improve a bad code base.

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Software

• Released RequestReduce 1.7.0: Giving the RequestReduce onboarding story a happy beginning – Matt Wrock announces the release of RequestReduce 1.7.0, the latest update to this library for helping you to reduce the size of your web pages. This release improves the handling of complex CSS involving multiples classes, improves performances of page processing with lots of sprites, adds support for Windows authentication when retrieving files, and better handles CSS with no content.
• Vulnerability in AntiXSS Library Could Allow Information Disclosure – Barry Dorrans announces the release of a new version of the AntiXSS Library to address issues with possible information disclosure as discussed in MS12-007. This update requires you to update your developer tools, and rebuild (test) and deploy applications which make use of the AntiXSS library to gain protection.
• Upcoming Releases: 1.0.1, 1.1, and beyond – Todd Parker of the jQuery Mobile Team outlines the next 3 planned release, with a maintenance release planned for jQuery Mobile 1.0, and then looks at what they hope to include in version 1.1 and 1.2, with lots of new features and widgets planned.

Information

• A Really Empty ASP.NET MVC 3 Project Template – Phil Haack shares a ‘Really Empty’ ASP.NET MVC 3 project template, discussing how you can create your own templates and have them installed into Visual Studio.
• Non-trivial and real-world feedbacks on writing Unit-Tests – Patrick Smacchia discusses some of the significant lessons he has learned over his 8 years of real world unit testing experience, discussing Test Organisation, Test First, specifications, Test and Code Contracts, coverage, refactoring and test execution.
• Fluent API in bddify – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at his bddify library, looking in this part at the fluent API which allows you to create tests using a fluent and expressive way to represent the test case in a BDD style.
• Performance and Design Guidelines for Data Access Layers – Rico Mariani shares some advice on ensuring that your Data Access Layers are optimal in performance and well designed, discussing the concept of Unit of Work, locking and querying.
• DateTime.UtcNow is generally preferable to DateTime.Now – Kirill Osenkov also discusses performance in this post discussing the use of DateTime.UtcNow for non-customer facing times (and timing code) as it offers better performance.
• A C#/.NET Attributes Based Command Line Argument Parser – Pete Barber shares an attribute & reflection based approach to parsing and getting command line parameters in your console applications, discussing and sharing the implementation in this CodeProject Article.
• My app has principles – understanding the Metro design principles – Paul Laberge discusses the key design principles behind the Metro styling for applications on mobile devices.
• Follow Up: Windows Phone Design Principles – Michael Desmond of MSDN Magazine shares a follow up interview with Jeff Smith continuing the discussion started in his ‘How to Translate Common Design Principles to Windows Phone’ article in MSDN Magazine.
• Mango Sample: 3 Solutions to Formatting Problems – Jerry Nixon continues his series of posts on Mango with a discussion of formatting data during databinding, exploring three techniques for controlling how your data looks.

Community

• Knockout.js & YOUR Mobile Future – The DevEvening UserGroup in Woking, Surry welcome Graeme Foster and Matt Lacey to present at their next meeting, on Wednesday 25th January. Graeme will be presenting a session on building client side web applications using Knockout.js, and Matt will be talking about mobile development trends.
• Matt Lacey on Tour – Gary Ewan Park shares the plans for Matt Lacy to visit the various Scottish usergroups, with sessions planned for Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen during the week commencing Monday 20th February.
• Updated agenda for Six Weeks of Windows Azure now available #6weeksazure – Eric Nelson highlights the latest updates to the Six Weeks of Windows Azure, and also reminds us all that it is not too late to sign up for this 6 week course in all aspects of Windows Azure, due to kick off on 23rd January.
• NxtGenUG – Event – This Androids Life – Ross Scott will be delivering his session on the various options for development of Android applications at the Oxford / Abindgon NxtGenUG group in Tuesday 7th February. In the session Ross will look at using HTML5 and Phone Gap, Java and .NET / C# to develop applications for Android devices.

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