The Morning Brew

Software

• Modernizr 2.5: Supercharged for 2012 – The Modernizr Team announce the release of Modernizr 2.5, their latest and biggest update ever. The new release includes a vast array of additional feature detects, the support of a full test suite. There are also a few backwards compatibility breaks to be aware of before your upgrade.
• Visual Studio Unit Testing Extensions v1.2.0.0 – Jeremiah Clark announces the release of the Visual Studio Unit Testing Extensions 1.2.0.0, a library which adds extension methods to make more readable test when working with the Viausl Studio Unit Testing environment. This release includes additional assertion methods

Information

• When "ExecuteSynchronously" doesn’t execute synchronously – Stephen Toub continues his posts digging deeper into the Task Parallel Library discussing today the TaskContinuationOptions enum which lets you specify how your continuation runs after a task occurs
• 15 Designing Windows Phone Icons – Arturo Toledo discusses at length the guidelines and design strategies for the creation of Icons for Windows Phone 7 Applications as a part of his 31 Seeks of Windows Phone Metro Design series.
• Mango Sample: Give your app the Finger! – Jerry Nixon continues his Windows Phone 7.1 Mango series looking today at making XAML elements movable on the screen using touch and drag. Jerry also shares a video of creating an Azure based Windows Phone App in his post A Cloud-based Phone App in 5 Minutes.
• Backbone.js And PhoneGap Sample App – Ben Forta highlights some recent posts from Christophe Coenraets looking at building HTML5 CRUD applications using Backbone.js, and also showing how backbone,js can be used with PhoneGap to create cross platform mobile applications.
• Rewriting My "Guaranteed Callbacks" Code With jQuery Deferred – Derick Bailey takes a look at jQuery ‘deferred’ objects and ‘promises’ and looks at how they can be applied to some existing code of his for running callbacks when collections are loaded in Backbone.
• Send me a patch for that &
• Kiss The Ring… – Both Ayende and Rob Conery respond to Hadi Hariri’s post included in yesterday’s edition discussing community expectations of open source and providing patches and feedback. More opinions, and most certainly interesting reading
• jQuery Tip #1 – Defining a Context When Using Selectors – Dan Wahlin shares the first post in a new series looking at jQuery and sharing tips on its use. This post focuses on the use of selectors in jQuery, looking at some of the less well common ways of selecting elements.
• Using JSON.net to consume the JSON Stack Overflow API – Jonathan Creamer takes a look at consuming JSON powered APIs using .NET code, looking at the JSON.NET library as probably the best way of consuming such data, and exploring its use consuming the StackOverlfow API.

Community

• Building HTTP services with ASP.NET Web API in MVC 4 Beta – The Community For MVC (C4MVC) have a Virtual Usergroup meeting today, 8th Feb, 12-1PM CST which will be looking at the Web API which is included in the ASP.NET MVC4 Beta. Daniel Roth will be discussing the concepts and looking at building RESTful applications using it in the session.
• NxtGenUG – Event: World Domination: ASP.NET MVC – The Cambridge NxtGenUG group welcome Guy Smith-Ferrier for a session on ASP.NET MVC on the evening of Tuesday 6th March at Microsoft Research Cambridge. In the session Guy will look at the localisation of your ASP.NET MVC applications, sharing his wealth of knowlege on the subject.
• WPUG presents #NotAtMWC12 – The London based Windows Phone User Group will be meeting on the evening of Tuesday 28th February for an event looking at the wider world of mobile, including discussions of the goings on at MWC in Barcelona.

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Update: The broken HTML gremilins made an appearance today merging the links to Hadi Hariri and Derick Bailey’s links – should be straightned out now

Software

• ServiceStack/Bundler – Demis Bellot shares Bundler, a Compiler, combiner and minifier for Less, Sass, CoffeeScript and JavaScript files in which bundling is done at compile time. The implementation is in Node.JS and ships with a Windows node.exe, and is available as a Nuget package for easy inclusion in your projects.

Information

• What is "binding" and what makes it late? – Eric Lippert discusses another of those terms that get banded about which people often have the wrong impression of its meaning. This post explores the concept of binding (in the compiler sense) and takes a look at the concept of late binding.
• FromAsync(asyncResult, …) vs FromAsync(beginMethod, …) – Stephen Toub demystifies another aspect of the Task Parallel Library looking at the two overloads of the FromAsync helper method to convert async begin/end methods to Tasks, discussing the scenarios in which you would use each.
• .NET phone number validation with Google libphonenumber – The AppHarbor team blog shares a piece on the tricky business of telephone number validation, looking at the use of the Google libphonenumber, and more specifically the .NET port from Patrick Mézard, which consists of years’ worth of experience parsing telephone numbers all over the world.
• Web Dev .NET: Differences Between jQuery .bind() vs .live() vs .delegate() vs .on() – Elijah Manor takes a look at four similar jQuery methods (.bind(), .live(), .delegate() and .on()), discussing the use of each, with examples, and helping to explain which one you should be using in which scenario.
• Submit a patch – Hadi Hariri discusses the role of complaining in the software world, discussing how it is generally responded to in the commercial software world, before talking about the open source world, where ‘complaints’ are often less well responded to, sharing an opinion on what can be done to improve matters.
• 3 Stages Of A Backbone Application’s Startup – Derick Bailey discusses the standard method for startup code in Backbone based JavaScript applications, and shares how his Backbone.Marionette addon makes use of application initializer callbacks with added benefits
• The Commodore 64 Emulator: Emulating Pointers in a sandbox when the real thing is not allowed – Pete Brown discusses some of his recent work on his Commodore 64 Emulator, written to run in Silverlight, and drawing on the Frodo C64 Emulator written in C and C++. In this post Pete discusses how he worked around the use of pointers in the C / C++ version when porting to .NET, and specifically Silverlight where unsafe code is not officially allowed.
• Implementing a Code Action using Roslyn – Brian Rasmussen of the C# Team discusses how the Roslyn Services API allows you to manipulate and correct code issues in within Visual Studio from an extension, illustrating with an example which replaces use of Count() > 0 with .Any
• Previous Web Architectures & Web-app model quandary` – Paul Hammant discusses the web architectures of the past, looking at the evolution of web based platforms and the technologies and implementation styles used throughout the ages, before focusing on the current trend for micro web frameworks

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Software

• Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Updates – Nathan Totten announces the latest update to the Windows Azure Tookit for Social Games, a collection of code, samples, and libraries which give you a jump start in building your own games backed onto Azure.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework 2012 January Sample Updates – Jialiang Ge announces the release of the All In One Code Framework January 2012 update, containing a further 8 code samples on Windows Azure, Directory Services, Hyper-V, TFS, WDK, and Windows SDK

Information

• Know Thine Implicit Allocations – Stephen Toub discusses some fo the performance work that the Team have put in on the Task Parallel Library in .NET 4.5, looking at some of the specific performance tweaks and behaviours they encountered. Stephen also shares a look at Building a custom GetOrAdd method for ConcurrentDictionary<TKey, TValue> in another post.
• 4. 1st Class Functions – Dorian Corompt continues this series discussing the practices and principles behind Functional Programming. This post discusses the concept of First Class Functions. Looking at and giving examples of some of their properties.
• The Microsoft C++ Compiler Turns 20! – The Visual C++ Team Blog celebrate the 20th Birthday of the Microsoft C++ Compiler, looking back over some of its history and looking to the future in the form of the VS11 release.
• From C# to C++, the short guide that isn’t (all that short) – Greg Duincan highlights a short (12200 words) guide to C++ for C# Developers from Michael B. McLaughlin.
• Streaming live results to a web site using MSMQ/Duplex WCF/SignalR/jQuery – Sacha Barber takes a look at building a system to stream live results to a website using a combination of technologies ranging from the familiar (MSMQ) to the new (SignalR), explaining and illustrating the use of each in this CodeProject Article.
• HTML5 Web Workers: Classic Message Passing Concurrency – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the concurrency provided by JavaScript Web Workers in HTML5, looking at how they have re-invented concurrency on a platform with no existing implementations.
• A year in review with CQRS – John Teague takes a look back on a year working with an application architected with a CQRS style which went from inception and requirements in January, through to a first release in June, and shares the experiences of him and his team.
• Taking the Single Responsibility Principle Seriously – Ralf Westphal discusses the application of the Single Responsibility Principle, one of the SOLID Principles, looking at how it can be used to improve the quality of code in this article for DeveloperFusion

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