The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Reduced Pricing on Windows Azure Storage and Compute – Steven Martin announces the latest set of price reductions for Windows Azure, with reductions on Storage and extra small compute. This set of changes reduces the price of an Extra Small Compute instance and 100M B SQL Azure Database to under $20 per month
• NServiceBus 3.0 Released – Udi Dahan announces the release of NServiceBus 3.0. This major new release adds features on the inside and outside, with major efforts on the inner architecture, along with Windows Azure Support, and much more

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders – The DateTimeOffset struct – James Michael Hare continues his C#/.NET Little Wonders series with a look at the DateTimeOffset structure and its role in parsing date times, allowing time zone information to be taken into account.
• Eduasync 20: Changes between the VS11 Preview and the Visual Studio 11 Beta – Jon Skeet resumes his Eduasync series with a look at the changes made relating to Async between the Visual Studio 11 Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta releases, along with highlighting the availability of source for his eduasync solution which is updated for the beta release.
• They’re Here! SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book Videos! – Roger Doherty highlights the availability of video content of the presentations and demos from the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption CookBook, with 50 sessions looking at the features for developers, BI, Always On, and other SQL 2012 topics.
• Migrating your apps from Developer Preview to Consumer Preview – John Sheehan discusses the migration of applications written against the Windows 8 Developer Preview and the newly released Consumer Preview, discussing a number of the significant changes to the platform and APIs and what you need to change in your applications.
• On Writing Unit Tests for C# – Patrick Smacchia discusses some of the lessons he has learned in writing unit tests for his code for the last 8 years in an article for Simple Talk, based on a post on his blog from January. In the article Patrick discusses writing tests, coverage, execution of tests, code contracts, tooling, refactoring and design.
• What’s New in Visual Studio 11 Beta Unit Testing – Peter Provost discusses the new and improved features for unit testing in Visual Studio 11 Beta, including the support for additional frameworks, the test runner, improvements to the MSTest framework, and the inclusion of the Visual studio Fakes Framework
• Diff File made easy with VisualStudio 11 – Patrick Smacchia highlights the inclusion of File Diff support in Visual Studio 11 beta, accessible via a command line switch.
• Removing the XML Formatter from ASP.NET Web API Applications – Rick Strahl discusses how you can remove the XML Formatter from Web API applications, meaning that when you request data from the API in your web browser you will get JSON data rather than the XML format which is generated by default due to the content negotiation rules and the content-type preferences of browsers.
• Social Authentication for .NET – A Library Comparison – Marc Mezzacca takes a look at the range of different Social Authentication Libraries available for .NET, comparing DotNetOpenAuth + OpenID-Selector, SimpleSocialAuth.MVC3, SocialAuth,NET and Janrain Engage.
• Plotting Circular Relationship Graphs with Silverlight – Colin Eberhardt shares a look at building a beautiful visualisation in the form of a Circular Relationship Graph in Silverlight in this very detailed (and code rich) CodeProject Article.

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Software

• NCrunch 1.38b Released! – Remco Mulder annouces the release of NCrunch 1.38b, the latest release of the continuous test runner. This release addresses performance issues in the previous release, along with support for Visual Studio 11 Beta, along with new features such as Custom Engine Modes for controlling which tests run and when, Improved impacted test analysis and a number of more minor fixes and improvements
• New features in Web Workbench – Ivan Towlson of MindScape announces their latest release of Web Workbench, a Visual Studio Add-in which adds a variety of web development productivity features. This release improves the Visual Studio 11 Beta integration, adds collapsible outlining to CoffeeScript files, enhances file importing capabilities in Sass and Less, and addresses a number of more minor issues. As usual, this version is available for free, with a pay for ‘pro’ edition available.
• KnockoutCS – Michael L Perry shares KnockoutCS a dependency tracking framework for Silverlight 5 which is inspired by the JavaScript based Knockout.js framework. The Library is available from NuGet, and full source is hosted on GitHub.
• Sencha Touch 2.0 – Built for Amazing Apps – The team at Sencha announce the release of their latest major version of Sencha Touch, a library for building HTML5 based applications for multiple platforms. Major goals for this version were improvements to the speed of the framework, including startup speed, and closing the gap between native and browser based applications.

Information

• Introduction to the ASP.NET Web API – Stephen Walther takes a look at the ASP.NET Web API, walking through the process of using the Web API to power client side AJAX behaviours for reading, creating an updating data records.
• WCF or ASP.NET Web APIs? My two cents on the subject – Ido Flatow shares his thoughts on the factors which play into the decision as to which framework to use for your integration API, looking at the pros and cons of both WCF and the new Web API, and the different scenarios they are best suited to.
• What’s new in WCF 4.5? WebSocket support (Part 2 of 2) – Ido also shares the second part of his look a the Web Sockets API support in WCF 4.5, looking at creating and calling a simple web sockets service.
• Why Visual Studio 11 Requires Space on the System Drive – Heath Stewart discusses why the Visual Studio 11 Beta installer requires quite a considerable amount of disk space on the system drive of the target machine
• Optimizing the .NET Framework Deployment Experience for Users and Developers – Brandon Bray discusses the experience for uses of Windows 8 who attempt to run applications which use versions of .NET not currently installed on their machine, comparing to the behaviour of Windows 7, and sharing numbers about the uptake of versions of .NET.
• Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out! Ready to write an app? – Dave Isbitski discusses developer readiness for creating applications on Windows 8 Consumer Preview, highlights a number of resources, including video, SDK, Visual Studio 11 beta, and guidance in what has changed since the //build preview, to help you get started developing on the platform
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Building Your First Application – Derek Greer continues his series looking at the use of RabbitMQ on Windows and from .NET, in this part looking at the high-level concepts of message queues, and looks at creating a first simple application.
• LINQ for F# – Jonathan Allen highlights one of the new features fo F#3, the inclusion of Linq syntax into the language using query { } syntax , along with highlighting a few other new features including Type Providers, Portable Libraries and auto implemented properties
• Structure and Organization of CSS – K. Scott Allen discusses the organisation and structuring of CSS files making a number of suggestions to help keep your styles in check and well structured, thus avoiding problems down the line with massive increases in complexity.
• Unit testing with Coffeescript – Colin Mackay takes a look at unit testing CoffeeScript using the QUnit JavaScript testing framework, running Coffeescript directly in the browser rather than precompiling
• Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won – Jimmy Bogard sparks debate on one of the classic programmer arguments, regarding the use of tabs or spaces for indenting in source code.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Introduction to DDD – The NxtGenUG in Oxford welcome Ian Cooper for a session on Domain Driven Design on Tuesday 3rd April. The session will look at the concepts introduced by Eric Evans, exploring how these allow us to model a domain, and create better domain models.

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Software

• Microsoft IIS 8.0 Express Beta is Released! – Robert McMurray highlights the release of IIS Express 8.0 Beta. This release brings self-contained IIS8 features to Windows Vista SP1, Windows 7, Windows 2008 Server (and R2), and Windows 8 in both 32bit and now 64bit
• Download: Reactive Extensions (Rx) v2.0 Beta – The Beta release of the Reactive Extensions for .NET v2.0 is now available on the Microsoft Download site. This release includes support for .NET 4.5, .NET 4.5 Metro Apps, Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.1, and includes the first preview of Rx 2.0 as a .NET Portable Library
• SQL Server 2012 RTM Day Download Link Round-up – Greg Duncan rounds up all the key links regarding the SQL Server 2012 RTM Release, providing a simple way to get to all the bits that make up the release, including Evaluation and Express editions, feature packs, application connectors, and much more.

Information

• Visual Studio 11 Beta Razor editor issue workaround – Xinyang Qiu of the Web Platform and Tools Team highlights a known crash bug in Visual Studio 11 Beta when working with the Razor View Engine in the Editor and includes details of a work around to prevent the crash.
• ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta – Bundling and Minification Demystified – John Petersen takes a look at the bundling and minification support included in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and in .NET 4.5 Beta, showing how you can easily combine and minify your JavaScript and CSS using a few lines of code.
• Single Page Application packages and samples – Steve Sanderson follows on from his ASP.NET Single Page Applications presentation (which if you haven’t watched you really should) giving pointers in getting up and running with Single Page Applications, and sharing the source of some of this sample applications.
• Find the jQuery Bug #5: Defective Data – Elijah Manor continues his ‘Find the jQuery Bug’ series of posts taking a look at the reading of data attributes on , and some of the confusion and bugs that can be introduced when using these methods.
• Building Hypermedia Web APIs – Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the Hypermedia concepts of Web APIs, discussing URL generation on the server, and looks at the proposed HAL media type specification for Hypermedia APIs on JSON and XML
• Visual Studio 11 Beta Testing Documentation – Howie Hilliker highlights the updated documentation on MSDN relating to testing on Visual Studio 11 Beta, along with taking a look at compatibility considerations, and some of the new features of the Beta relating to testing
• Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% – Scott Hanselman discusses the concept of the ‘Dark Matter’ developers – that vast majority of developers who don’t get involved in the tech community, and are not particularly visible, but are actually working hard and producing applications using stable versions of technology.
• Pretty Code (BYOSP Part 10) – K. Scott Allen wraps up his series on building a slide presenter application on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript with a short discussion of formatting code on slides, along with giving an overview of the libraries used in the whole project, and hinting that there may be future posts looking at extending this simple application.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: What’s what in SQL 2012? – The NxtGenUG in Birmingham welcome Dave Ballantyne for a session looking at the enhancements to TSQL that have been made in SQL Server 2012, exploring the changes, and areas where functionality has been lost
• Free Webinar on Team Explorer Everywhere from Black Marble – Giles Davies highlights a Webinar event hosted by Richard Fennell of Black Marble which looks at the Team Explorer Everywhere product from Microsoft which allows Eclipse users interact with Team Foundation Server. The event is on the morning of Monday 19th March, and is free.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Making Powerful Kinections – The Coventry chapter of NxtGenUG welcome John Price for a session looking at working with the Kinect Sensor on the evening of Monday 19th March.

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