The Morning Brew

Software

• SourceForge.net: SharpDevelop: News – The team behind SharpDevelop announce the beta release of SharpDevelop 4.2, which includes support for ASP.NET MVC3 development, Code Quality Analysis, a refreshed UI, along with all te other features from previous releases.
• Python Tools for Visual Studio – Download: 1.1 – The Python Tools team announce their latest release. Python Tools 1.1 introduces python integration for more of the core Visual Studio IDE functionality, a few new sample applications, improvements to the Debugger, REPL and project structure.
• Json.NET 4.0 Release 8 – Bug fixes – James Newton-King announces the latest bug fix release to JSON.NET. This release addresses all currently know bugs, removes the strong naming of the Windows Phone and Silverlight assemblies and adds a few other minor improvements.

Information

• Building Async Coordination Primitives, Part 1: AsyncManualResetEvent , Part 2: AsyncAutoResetEvent, Part 3: AsyncCountdownEvent , Part 4: AsyncBarrier, Part 5: AsyncSemaphore, Part 6: AsyncLock & Part 7: AsyncReaderWriterLock – Stephen Toub goes on a blog post marathon with 7 great posts looking at some of the core synchronisation primitives in the and how they can be implemented and combined with the Task-based Async Pattern
• Hacking the browser cache with JQuery and ASP.NET MVC – Pablo M. Cibraro (aka Cibrax) – Pablo M. Cibraro takes a look at controlling the caching of data being requested using ajax calls from jQuery, discussing the key features available to control caching and give your applications a performance boost.
• Studioshell more PowerShell for Visual studio – Christiaan Baes highlights the StudioShell extension which brings enhanced PowerShell capabilities into the Visual Studio IDE, allowing you to make use of extensions such as posh-git from within the IDE.
• Introducing Knockout Hotkeys – Matt Brailsford discusses Knockout.js, and discusses the creation of Knockout hotkeys, an extension which brings easy hotkey support to you knockout client side MVVM applications.
• Find the jQuery Bug #4: Animations Gone Wild – Elijah Manor continues his series looking at common bugs people introduce into their jQuery code, taking a look at when your animations go bad.
• The economics of continuous deployment – Ayede shares in interesting post discussing the economics of software development and the impact that continuous deployment has had on the revenue generated by his profiler projects.
• Client-Side MVC frameworks compared – Paul Hammant takes a look at the many different client side JavaScript MV* Frameworks available, giving a brief example of each in use. I had no idea there were quite as many different frameworks as this – incredible.
• Dynamic Favicons using HTML5 Local Storage and TinyCon – Dean Hume highlights a neat little JavaScript library called Tinycon which allows your applications to add notification bubbles, etc to the FavIcon used in the browser.
• WP7 Sample: Use Location Services *and* get Certified! – Jerry Nixon continues his Windows Phone 7 Samples series with a discussion of the use of Location Services in your application and some of the additional requirements this introduces for your market place submission.
• Background audio in Windows Phone 7.5 (Part 1), Part 2 & Part 3 – The Windows Phone Centre of Excellence blog features an article series from Paul Annetts on the use of background audio on the Windows Phone device allowing your application to continue playing sound when the application is closed.

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Software

• EF 4.3 Released – The Entity Framework Team announce the release of Entity Framework 4.3. The 4.3 release brings the Code First Migrations functionality (previously the subject of many CTP releases) into the main Entity Framework product. This is combined with a number of other changes including Data Annotations support on non-public members, improved configuration via app/web.config along with numerous other bugfixes and improvements.

Information

• EF 4.3 Code-Based Migrations Walkthrough & EF 4.3 Automatic Migrations Walkthrough – Rowan Miller of the Entity Framework Team walks through the two different use cases for the migrations support included as a part of the Entity Framework 4.3 release, showing how you can use the code first capabilities to migrate your database between versions, and looking at how some of the process can make use of the automatic migrations.
• Building Windows for the ARM processor architecture – Steven Sinofsky continues with the story of Windows 8 with a discussion of the building of a Windows for the ARM processor. Windows on ARM (WOA) will run on a new style of personal computer on the ARM processor architecture, will run Metro style applications, and will include desktop versions of Word Excel PowerPoint and OneNote. Also included in the post are a number of pictures and video of the new style Windows.
• SignalR : Best thing since slice bread? – Sacha Barber discusses SignalR, a relatively new and exciting project, explaining what it is, what it is useful for and how its used, illustrating with a simple example (full source available for download).
• Asynchronously Load HTML Templates For Backbone Views – Derick Bailey discusses the importance of making sure complex client side web applications download quickly to the client, and looks at how you can have Backbone.js view templates loaded asynchronously to help keep application load performance good.
• HTML5 made easy with HTML5 Cheat Sheets for tags, event handler attributes, and browser support – Alice Pang highlights some cheat sheets for HTML 5 Developers from the folks at InMotion Hosting. The cheat sheets cover the tags, event handlers ad browser support of the various HTML5 features.
• The Development Pendulum – John Sonmez discusses what he refers to as the ‘Development Pendulum’, the nature of our industry to oscillate from one extreme to the other on most topics, and how this action drives the industry forward.
• Now vendor prefixes have become a problem, want to help fix it? & Vendor Prefixes – about to go south – Christian Heilmann and Remy Sharp discuss a recent meeting of the W3C CSS working group where the notion of supporting the -webkit vendor prefix in other browsers was discussed.
• Free "Introduction to Reactive Extensions"on-demand video training available, with 8 sessions and growing – Greg Duncan highlights a nice work in progress resource from ‘Mr Bool’ AKA Ayad Boudiab looking at the Reactive Extensions for .NET. There are currently 8 parts available in video form looking at various aspects of the Reactive Extensions in use.

Community

• Selenium, a UI testing paradigm with Nathan Gloyn – The .NET Developer Network User Group welcome Nathan Gloyn for a session on testing your web UI’s using Selenium at the University of West England (Near Bristol) on the evening of Wednesday 22nd February
• NxtGenUG – Event: Web Caching 101 – Seb Lambla will be visiting the Oxfordshire NxtGenUG User group on the evening of Tuesday 6th March where he will be delivering his session on the uses of Web Caching to help your sites perform and scale better.

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Information

• The State of NuGet – Phil Haack breaks some of the blogging silence on NuGet and gives an update on what the project has been up to recently, highlighting the project status page, the issue tracker which details many of the changes coming in 1.7, and also the Jabbr chat room which is the ideal place to go to discuss all things Nuget (and plenty of other topics too)
• Modern Web Development – Part 4 – Debugging – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series of posts covering his re-discovery of web development, and looking at how it has changed from web development of old. This post explores the art of Debugging looking at how you can use browser features and extensions to enable you to successfully debug client side code and styling.
• jQuery Tip #2 – Manipulating the DOM in a Loop – Dan Wahlin continues with his jQuery Tips series with a look at using jQuery to add elements to the page, discussing the performance impacts of the different ways of achieving this.
• Potential pitfalls to avoid when passing around async lambdas – Stephen Toub discusses the use of async lambdas and anonymous methods with the Task Parallel Library, discussing their use, before looking at some of the subtle bugs that incorrect use can introduce.
• WF3 Types Marked Obsolete in .NET 4.5 – Jurgen Willis of the WorkflowTeam discusses the decision to mark the WF3 implementation ‘System.Workflow’ as obsolete in the forthcoming .NET 4.5 release, and also highlights some resources to aid anyone migrating a WF3 app to WF4
• Connection Pool Fragmentation: Use Federations and you won’t need to learn about these nasty problems that come with sharding! – Cihan Biyikoglu discusses how the new SQL Azure Federations functionality makes sharding your data within multiple databases much easier, and reduces the number of connections to databases required
• Using the Battery API – Part of WebAPI – Robert Nyman discusses the Battery API which allows web applications running in Firefox on Windows, Linux and Android to access details about the battery life of the device its running on, allowing your application to respond suitably. Some interesting uses detailed in the comments.
• C# Needs Seqs – Chris Eargle discusses the use of the IEnumerable<T> interface as a great way of working with sequences, and proposes the introduction of a seq<T> keyword/data type in C# to allow easier access to a type which is pretty core to most development.
• Windows Phone 7.5 : Working with Azure Storage Table – Wriju takes a look at the use of Windows Azure Storage to fulfil the storage needs of Windows Phone applications, sharing some code to illustrate it in use.
• Windows Phone Fast Application Switching and Page State – Dhananjay Kumar discusses the improvements in Windows Phone Mango to the Fast Application Switching, and how it relates to Page State
• OSS Rules of Engagement – Jimmy Bogard shares his feelings on the debate about OSS development and community comments / complaints, sharing his 4 rules of engagement for Open Source Software
• Visual Studio 11 not 2011 – Daniel Moth highlights a subtlety of the current naming for the next release of Visual Studio – the fact that it currently is being referred to by its Version Number, and not the year of release.
• Using PowerShell v3 to consume the StackOverflow JSON API – Doug Finke follows on from a post included yesterday about using JSON.NET to consume the Stack Overflow API, instead taking a look at consuming it using PowerShell 3

Community

• standards-next.org – Mobile and devices – standards>next are running an event in Manchester on Saturday 3rd March looking at the future of web standards when applied to mobile and other devices. The event is being held at the John Dalton Building of Manchester Metropolitan University from 1pm to 6pm. The event is free, but registration is required, and at the time of writing there are still 11 tickets available
• In The Brain of Itamar Syn-Hershko: RavenDB – The London .NET Usergroup and Skills Matter join forces for an eventon the evening of Tuesday 28th February where they welcome Itamar Syn-Hershko, a core developer on the RavenDB project to discusses how RavenDB Indexes data, and to discuss Map Reduce, MultiMap, Live Projections and much more.

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