The Morning Brew

Information

• FrazzledDad: 31 Days of Testing – Day 22: Why Collaboration Matters (A Real World Example)` – Jim Holmes returns from the holidays with the next part of his series on Testing. This post is a repost of an article from Jon Kruger discussing the role and importance of collaboration between QA and Development
• Your First Metro style App in JavaScript
  & Metro style JS Apps in Visual Studio 11 – Chris Sells kicks off a series of posts looking at building Metro style applications using JavaScript and HTML, looking at the basics of the application, packaging the application, and the Visual Studio tooling so far.
• Mango Sample: 5 Must-Have Animations: Part 1, Part 2 &Part 3 – Jerry Nixon continues his series of posts looking at samples and concepts for Windows Phone 7.1 Mango development. This mini-series of three parts looks at the importance of animation in Windows Phone applications and exploring the use of the various animations.
• Why my CI server gives me a false sense of security – Mark Pearl discusses a situation which arose where his Continuous Integration server started giving false results due to tests running against old versions of assemblies, and outlines two key practices to ensure you don’t fall foul to this type of error.
• Four Philosophies behind Technology Choices – Paul Stovell discusses the 4 different philosophies which underpin most people’s decision making, looking at what they might mean in the .NET / Development arena.
• Web Development Recipes now in print; January magazine – The Pragmatic Programmers give an update on their latest titles and announce the availability of PragPub magazine’s January edition, discussing the importance of writing tests first, Agile practices, and Scala
• ALM Summit 2011 recordings available on Channel9 – Nick J Trogh highlights the availability of the recordings of the sessions from the ALM Summit 2011 held in November now available for your viewing pleasure on Channel9
• IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1% – Bruce Kyle highlights the significant news that Internet Explorer 6 usage in the US, Czech Republic, Mexico, Ukraine, Portugal and the Philippines has now dropped below that magic 1% level.

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Software

• Announcing FsUnit 1.0 – Dan Mohl announces the release of FsUnit 1.0. This 1.0 release brings with it support for further testing frameworks, adding xUnit.net and MbUnit support alongside the existing NUnit and adds an additional assertion function. The release is available as Nuget packages, and the project source is hosted on GitHub.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: January 2012 – The January 2012 edition of MSDN Magazine is now available, with articles on building Windows Phone 7 applications, Caching on Windows Azure, building HTML5 applications, Nuget, Orchard, ASP.NET security, screen based input, and much more – add to that all the usual columns and you have something to ward off the post-holiday-season blues.
• Shortest String That Contains All Words – Chris Eargle has a go at a programming problem posed by Mango12. This Kata like problem involves finding the shortest string which contains all the specified words, and Chris takes a look at using a weighted graph algorithm to establish the shortest string, working through the principle and sharing the code.
• Mapping and Auto-Mapping Objects – Elton Stoneman kicks off a series of 5 posts looking at the use of his Sixeyed.Mapping anything-to-object mapping library. In this first post Elton takes a look at the type of problem this library is intended for and the basics of object mapping using this library.
• Keeping up with the Web Standards – Tommy Lee highlights the availability of recordings of all the sessions from the recent W3C Web standards event held at and sponsored by Microsoft
• If I can build a Phone App anyone Can – What project type to choose? Pivot? Panorama? – Susan Ibach continues her series of posts on building Windows Phone applications with a discussion of the 9 different project templates available for Silverlight based Windows Phone applications.
• Windows Azure with Windows Phone 7 – Subodh Pushpak shares the slides and session recordings of a sessions he recently delivered on Windows Phone 7 development with Windows Azure.
• Open Source Developments on Microsoft Windows Azure – Eric Troup discusses the announcements from Microsoft about continuing efforts working on Open Source developments for the Windows Azure platform, including Node.js, MongoDB, Hadoop, Memcached, and Solr.

Community

• Shropshire Dev Net | 25 Jan 2012 – Mark Rendle Talks Simple.Data – The newly formed Shropshire Dev Net Usergroup welcomes Mark Rendle for a talk on Simple.Data at their inaugural event on Wednesday 25th January. Along with a great talk, there will be pizza and a swag give-away
• NxtGenUG – Event – Micro ORM – The Birmingham NxtGenUG Chapter welcome Ian Russell for a talk on Micro ORMs on Tuesday 17th January 2012

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Happy New Year Everyone, many thanks for your kind comments on the 2011 review post, and many congratulations to the new and renewed January MVPs. Now on to today’s links….

Software

• Last Thursday’s out of cycle update from Microsoft – Tatworth highlights the important security update for ASP.NET released over the Christmas period which addresses a newly announced security vulnerability. As today is the first day back after Christmas for many (especially those in the UK) today is a good day to review your requirements for installing this patch.
• xUnit.net 1.9 – Hot off the press, the xUnit.net team have just released xUnit.NET 1.9, supporting async unit tests (using .NET 4.5 or Async CTP), generic theory methods, new assert methods, theory parameter names included in display names and much more.
• ReSharper 6.1.1 Early Access – The JetBrains team announce the early access preview of ReSharper 6.1.1, a release which will be made officially early this year, and addresses known and reported issues with ReSharper 6.1
• StatLight v1.6 is Out – Jason Jarrett announces the release of StatLight 1.6, tooling which allows you to run your Silverlight Tests on your Continuous Integration environment. This release contains some pretty major internal refactoring, including the introduction of IOC, as well as supporting Silverlight 5.
• Status Update on SpecsFor.Mvc – Matt Honeycutt discusses some of the changes he has been making to this SpecsFor.Mvc project in response to real world use in a mobile web project, and is now looking for some feedback on the changes from the community.

Information

• SOLID JavaScript: The Liskov Substitution Principle – Derek Greer continues his series looking at the application of the SOLID principles to JavaScript. This part takes a look at the meaning and application of the Liskov Substitution Principle to JavaScript where there isn’t the traditional OO inheritance.
• JavaScript for C# developers: the Module Pattern (part 1) &part 2 – Julian M Bucknall kicks off a series of posts on JavaScript from the point of view of C# developers with a look at the module pattern, introducing the use of the module pattern in Part 1 and exploring how parameters can be used with the Module Pattern, and explores the Tightly Augmented Module Pattern and the Loosely Augmented Module Pattern.
• Reducing Backbone Routers To Nothing More Than Configuration – Derick Bailey continues his discussions of Backbone Routing, responding to a readers comments about his routes being pass through calls, and looks at replacing the route callback functions with direct use of the methods on the other object.
• Structuring Unit Tests – Phil Haack discusses his currently favoured way of structuring and organising his unit tests, a practice he picked up from Drew Miller (who in turn picked them up from Brad Wilson and Jim Newkirk), showing how he uses nested classes to group similar tests together.
• Structuring your Unit Tests, why? – Ayende follows on from Phil’s post discussing how he cares less about the structure and organisation of tests, focusing on the internal structure of the tests instead.
• Story in bddify – Mehdi Khalili continues his series looking at the use of his newly ‘1.0’ed bddify library. In this part Mehdi looks at how you can introduce the concept of a story into your behaviour tests.
• Rx – Window – Bnaya Eshet continues his series looking at the use of the Reactive Extensions, taking a method by method approach. In this post Bnaya explores the Window function, explaining its use and purpose.
• Event Centric: super-charge your model with domain events to enable business intelligence – Daniel Cazzulino continues looking at the use of domain events to power business intelligence, exploring the raising of domain events in your domain code.
• IIS7 & Self-elevating PowerShell – Ian Battersby shares the significant chunks of his PowerShell scripts which automate the ‘cradle-to-grave’ test environment which deploys their web application to a clean environment for use in continuous integration and automated testing. The post discusses elevating PowerShell to allow IIS7 configuration, site creation, file copying and the setting of permissions.
• Agile’s Coming of Age – David Starr discusses the current state of agile practice adoption, reviewing the overall world view of agile and looking at each of the key principles discussing the adoption, before looking to the challenges which still remain.

2011 Retrospectives, 2012 Predictions

As I didn’t include any of these in my 2011 in review post I thought I should include some today:

• Web-related development tools I used in 2011 – Mike Chaliy
• 22 Most Popular jQuery Plugins of 2011 – Mike More
• Looking Back On 2011 – Davy Brion
• 2011 Greatest Hits – Scott Hanselman
• 2011 in review for Windows Phone – Den Delimarsky
• 2011 – my Year in Review – Gary Ewan Park
• What I did in 2011 – talk archive with slides, recordings and videos – Christian Heilmann
• Welcome 2012 – Roland Weigelt
• Retrospective of 2011, Looking Ahead to 2012 – Jan Van Ryswyck
• 2011 Year in Review and 2012 Predictions – Darcy Lussier
• Things Learned in 2011 and Plans for 2012 – Sasha Goldshtein
• Tech Predictions, 2012 Edition – Ted Neward
• Hello, 2012 – Christian Nagel

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