The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update Now Available – Cliff Simpkins announces the release of the Windows Phone SDK .1.1 on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. This release is the official release for the CTP that was released last month, and enables development of applications targeting the 256MB devices, and also allows development on Windows 8 based machines.

Information

• null is not false – Eric Lippert discusses the difference between null and false, discussing the implementation of nullable reference types and nullable value types
• Do I need to dispose of Tasks? – Stephen Toub gives three answers (short, medium and long) on why you don’t actually need to dispose of your Tasks when working with them, despite them implementing IDisposable – unless you have a good reason to.
• TDD with CodeRush – Rory Becker give a walkthrough tour of some of the features of CodeRush for performing TDD development, showing how an IDE productivity tool, such as CodeRush, can give quite significant improvements to your development process.
• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentBag – Simon Cooper continues his series exploring the concurrent collections included in .NET 4.0 with a look at the implementation of the , discussing how the bag uses threadstatics internally and looking at its data structure.
• 5 things you never thought about doing with MVC 3 & 5 things to learn about ASP.NET MVC 4 – RobertTheGrey shares two lots of 5 things, first discussing and highlighting further resources on some interesting things you can do with ASP.NET MVC 3 and second looking at 5 things which are new in MVC4.
• Want to know more about VB.Net/C#? Like maybe the full language specification? Check your hard drive, you might already have them… – Greg Duncan highlights a tip sourced from Salvo Davide Rapisarda highlighting the fact that we all have the documentation for the C# and VB languages right at our fingertips in the form of the official specifications – now you too have the information to become Jon Skeet like in your knowledge of the languages. 😉

Community

• The Stack – Liverpool .Net User Group – May 2012 – The Liverpool, UK based The Stack Usergroup announces its May 2012 event, with a session from visiting speaker Guy Smith Ferrier looking at internationalization and Globalization of ASP.NET MVC based applications. The event is on Monday 14th May 2012, and is free to attend (although registration is requested)

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Software

• EF5 Beta 2 Available on NuGet – The Entity Framework Team announce the release of their second beta of Entity Framework 5, now available via NuGet. This release has focused on improving quality, with improvements to Migrations for Visual Studio 2010 users, simpler SqlExpress / LocalDB configuration, and some namespace changes.
• OpenSource CSV Reader on Nuget – Mike Stall shares a CSV file reader / writer implementation he created, available as open source on GitHub and as a NuGet Package – one to keep in mind next time you are tempted to re-invent this particular wheel.
• Using SpecsFor.Mvc- Introduction – Matt Honeycutt announces the 1.0 release of SpecsFor.MVC, a library for creating automated acceptance tests for your ASP.NET MVC applications using browser automation. In this post Matt kicks off a series looking at the 1.0 release.

Information

• Modern Web Development – Part 8 – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at the art and science of Modern Web Development, in this post exploring the importance of Facebook, looking at the Facebook SDK and authentication of an application.
• Patterns to Isolate Code in Continuous Delivery – Derek Hammer takes a look at various strategies available to isolate unfinished code from deployment in a continuous deployment environment, discussing feature branches, leaving views to last, only pushing when complete, and a few others.
• Securing your ASP.NET MVC 4 App and the new AllowAnonymous Attribute – Ricka on MVC and related Web Technologies – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Rick Anderson discusses security in ASP.NET MVC applications, highlighting how it differs from WebForms (secure controllers/action vs files) and looks at the use of the Authorize and AllowAnonymous attributes in MVC4.
• Should I expose asynchronous wrappers for synchronous methods? – Stephen Toub discusses whether you should expose asynchronous wrapper methods for your synchronous methods in your own API, explaining why the official stance is that you should not, and should keep async methods for those that offer actual asynchrony and the associated scalability benefits.
• Functional Fizz Buzz – Phil Trelford takes a look at the now well-known Fizz-Buzz programming interview question, exploring how it can be answered very concisely in a variety of Functional Programming languages
• Understanding Enhanced Protected Mode – Eric Lawrence gives the technical low-down on the new Enhanced Protection Model of Internet Explorer, discussing how it fits in with the existing multi-process architecture, and the new AppContainer.
• AsyncCTP installation problems (and VS11) – Lucian Wischik shares some tips on getting the current Async CTP release working in a variety of situations where there are common problems with this now quite old CTP update release

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Software

• Mono 2.11.0 is out – Miguel de Icaza announces the release of Mono 2.11.0, the first beta release leading up ot a stable 2.12 release. This release includes the new SGen Garbage Collector, inlining optimisations for ThreadLocal<T>, extensions to the Mono Compiler as a service, support for C#5 Async, and .NET 4.5, along with improvements to performance, debugging and mac support.
• Json.NET 4.5 Release 1 – James Newton-King announces the release of Json.NET 4.5 Release 1. This release adds support for use in Windows 8 Metro applications, along with a collection of other enhancements, and improvements, along with addressing reported issues.
• jQuery 1.7.2 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.7.2, with only one small change from the release candidate addressing a bug with negative margins in animations.

Information

• git commit -m "CodePlex now supports Git!" – Mark Groves shares the exciting news of Git support being added to CodePlex, providing another version control option for the hosting of open source projects on CodePlex.
• The Future of CodePlex is Bright – Brian Harry discusses the CodePlex site, and how it fits in with the overall vision for hosted TFS and supporting the development community within Microsoft, discussing the future roadmap convergence between the two projects.
• The Differences Between Development on Windows Azure and Windows Server – Rachel Appel shares a post contributing to the collaboration between Rachel, Adam Hoffman and Peter Laudati looking at Windows Azure development for ASP.NET Developers. In this post Rachel takes a look at the key differences between working with ASP.NET on Windows Azure versus your own servers.
• Windows Azure from a Data Perspective – Buck Woody shares a look at the Windows Azure platform from the point of view of data storage, discussing data architecture and how the data you need to store can be related back to the technologies that make up the data storage components of Windows Azure.
• Unleash the power of HTML 5 Canvas for gaming – Part 1 – David Catuhe looks at the use of HTML5’s Canvas for providing graphics capabilities for Games, exploring some of the tricks and techniques you can use to gain the best frame rate possible, including making use of available hardware acceleration and scaling, reading picture data from off screen,
• Cool Down with Canvas and JavaScript – K. Scott Allen also takes a look at the use of Canvas, exploring the creation of a command button image which has a cool-down disabled state with animation restoring it to use – a nice effect.
• Fork/Join in JavaScript – Alex Robson discusses the use of JavaScript in asynchronous situations, looking at implementing Forck / Join, and building upon this basis introducing partial application into the mix, and demonstrating how these techniques can be used in the real world.
• Another free ebook from the team at Apigee – "Web API Design: Crafting Interfaces that Developers Love" – Greg Duncan highlights a free e-book from Apigee looking at creating good Web APIs. This book is not about the new Microsoft ASP.NET Web API directly, although the content in the book can be applied to your implementations in ASP.NET WebAPI

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