The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing ExpectThat: A CoffeeScript Assertion Library – Dan Mohl shares the first version of ExpectThat, an assertion library for CoffeeScript which supports Pavlov, QUnit, and Jasmine and has a similar syntax to FsUnit, allowing you to write your tests in CoffeeScript with a range of assertion types.
• Silverlight Reporting Open Source Printing/Reports Example Updated for Silverlight 5 – Pete Brown shares an update to his simple Silverlight Reporting framework, designed for building simple short multi-page reports in SIlverlight 5. This version brings the Silverlight 5 support, Semantic Versioning and postscript support, and should be considered to be an ‘alpha’ grade release.

Information

• Every public change is a breaking change – Eric Lippert discusses the concept of a breaking change, where code that compiled against the previous version of a library no longer compiles, looking at some of the more exotic causes of this type of breaking change.
• The evolution of asynchronous controllers in ASP.NET MVC – Simone Chiaretta discusses the improvements that have been made to Asynchronous Controllers in the MVC 4 preview release, discussing who the techniques for creating async controllers is now easier, shorter and more comprehendible using the task library.
• Minify JavaScript using UglifyJS and NodeJS – Jonathan Creamer highlights the JavaScript minification offered by UglyifyJS, a minifier which runs on NodeJS. In this post Jonathan walks through the required installations to get the standalone command line tool up and running.
• CSS Corner: Using the Whole Font – Sylvain Galineau of the Internet Explorer Team discusses the enhanced typography which is now possible using the CSS3 @font-face rule and WOFF font packaging format, showing how the features of OpenType can be utilised.
• In .NET, open source does not beget open source – Benjamin van der Veen discusses some of the friction points along the way of getting .NET Open source projects to build and make use of the various open source projects which provide testing, packaging, etc both on .NET and Mono.

Community

• 16 Feb 2012 – Simple.Data and FubuMVC – Mark Rendle and Ian Battersby join the Kent .NET and SQL User group on Thursday 16th February 2012 for two sessions on Simple.Data and FubuMVC respectivly.
• SQLSoton – January 11th – The Southampton SQL Server User Group wecome Chris Webb and John Martin for 2 sessions tomorrow evening (11th January), with Chris presenting a session on ‘Introduction to DAX queries and Calculations’ and John presenting a session titled ‘Service Broker 101’

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• ASP.NET session hijacking with Google and ELMAH – Troy Hunt discusses some of the dangerous information that the ELMAH library can expose to the general public allowing them to gain information which can help to compromise your systems, and looks at what you should do to protect yourself.
• SOLID JavaScript: The Interface Segregation Principle – Derek Greet continues his series looking at the application of the SOLID Principles to development in JavaScript. This post explores the applicability and application of the Interface Segregation Principle.
• The Windows Libraries for JavaScript: Part I – Chris Sells continues his exploration of Windows 8 Metro Style Application Development using JavaScript and the Windows Runtime. This post begins taking a look at the WinJS library which surfaces WinRT in JavaScript.
• C#, Visual Studio 2010, No more Client profile in 5minutes – Daniel Wertheim shows how you can modify your Visual Studio installation’s templates to enable the full .NETprofile rather than the client profile by default. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been baffled by code that should be valid not compiling due to forgetting to switch profiles, so this will be areal time (and sanity) saver.
• An Overview of Functional Programming & 1. Recursion – Where are my for/while loops? – Dorian Corompt kicks off a 9 part series looking at the principles of Functional Programming and the F# language, starting off with an introduction to the series and a look at recursion.
• Mango Sample: Introducing the Info Hub – Jerry Nixon shares his InfoHub class, a class which wraps up access to all of the various properties about the device upon which your applications are running, subscribing to events for properties which may change. Jerry discusses the class’s contents and looks at its use.
• Before you press send – The Windows Phone UK Center of Excellence shares a post discussing the various UI and design aspects which you should consider before submitting your application to the marketplace.
• Essential guide to ASP.NET MVC3 performance – Leon Cullens highlights some of the key features in ASP.NET MVC3 which allow you to improve the performance of your web applications, discussing caching, use of session, asynchronous controllers, client side validation and deployment configuration.
• You are responsible for making that feature work. Write a test. Just do it… – Jason Jarrett urges you to resist the urge to commit code without unit tests, sharing another good reason for including tests to ensure that if anyone has to merge your change into their code that the test will ensure things don’t get lost.
• Unit Testing Myths and Practices – Tom Fischer discusses some of the common myths that prevent the uptake of unit testing in enterprise software environments, discussing each
• Battle of heart vs mind; you win again #Razor :'( – Ian Battersby shares an interesting discussion about making technology choices, looking at the various perspectives involved, and discussing the decision for his team to use the Razor view engine with FubuMVC rather than Spark.

Community

• NEBytes Jan 2012 – Yes We’re Two!!! – THe NE Bytes UserGroup celebrates its second birthday with two sessions in Newcastle Upon Tyne, one from Gary Short on data mining the social web, and a second from Jonathan Noble on the new features of PowerShell 3. The Event is on Wednesday 18th January.
• Sebastien Lambla on Tour – Gary Ewan Park highlights a series of events taking place across Scotland (and one in Manchester) featuring Seb Lambla discussing Web and HTTP Caching. The talks (and geek dinner) are happening ion Manchester, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and Glasgow.
• UK Developer Events for 2012 – Gary also has catalogued the various major events that will be occurring (or hope will be occurring) during the year that he is hoping to attend.

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Update: A bit of Copy / Paste failure this morning resulted in the title of Mehdi Khalili’s post ‘Executable Attributes in bddify’ ending up with the title of Stephen Roughley’s talk. All sorted now, and thanks to David for letting me know via the comments

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The DateTime TryParse() and ParseExact() Methods – James Michael Hare resumes his C# & .NET Little Wonders series with a look at the parsing of dates using the framework methods TryParse and ParseExact, illustrating their use and discussing the differences in behaviour.
• Inside the Concurrent Collections – Simon Cooper takes a look at how the Concurrent Collections introduced in .NET 4 are implemented, discussing how the achieve concurrency and looking at the types of locking and synchronisation used.
• Executable Attributes in bddify – Mehdi Khalili continues his series of posts discussing his Bddify Behaviour Driven Development framework which allows you to introduce BDD concepts gradually to your tests. This part explores the use of attributes to control the execution of tests.
• PowerShell 3 – Finally on the DLR! – Joel ‘Jaykul’ Bennett discusses PowerShell 3, planned to ship with Windows 8, and currently in available as a CTP release, and discusses it now being based on the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime (DRL) and some of the benefits that brings.
• Building a Windows 8 RSS Reader – Eric Vogel runs through the creation of a RSS Reader application for Windows 8 using the WinRT libraries from C#
• On Infinite Scalability – Ayende follows on from a piece by UDi Dahan, recently linked to in The Morning Brew, about the concept of Infinite Scalability. Ayende discusses the typical scalability requirements, and the notion of being an order of magnitude better to give headroom.
• No Class is an Island – John discusses the creation of classes, the concepts of loose coupling and tight cohesion, and classes relationships to others in the framework they belong to

Community

• The Stack – Liverpool .Net User Group – February 2012 – The Stack Usergroup, running here in Liverpool resumes its events schedule on the 6th February 2012 with two sessions, one from Tim Myers on Azure LOB Application – from Concept to Cloud in 6 weeks, and the second from Stephen Roughley on Isolating the Domain Model from Azure.
• Announcing DDD South West 4 – Guy Smith-Ferrier annouces the planned date for Developer Developer Developer South West 4, set to occur on Saturday 26th May, at the University of West England, near Bristol.
• Minimalist Development with Nancy and Simple.Data with Mark Rendle – Mark Rendle joins the .NET Developer Network Usergroup in Bristol for a session on Minimalist Web Development using his Simple.Data library and the Nancy HTTP Framework on Tuesday 24th January 2012.

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