The Morning Brew

Software

• Update 4.0.3 for Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Roundup – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the .NET Framework 4.0.3 update for .NET 4. This runtime update brings a few new features and high priority bug fixes to the .NET framework Runtime, including SustainedLowLatency mode for Garbage Collection, support for Windows Workflow in partial trust, and 3 other new features.

Information

• Why are local variables definitely assigned in unreachable statements? – Eric Lippert discusses why and how the compiler is designed to prevent you from reading from variables until after they have been definitely assigned, discussing how this is intended to place you in the pit of success.
• Visual Studio 11 Beta Performance Part #1 – Larry Sullivan kicks off a series of posts looking at the performance of the Visual Studio IDE, and discussing what the team learnt from Visual Studio 2010, and how they have worked to improve the performance of Visual Studio 11 in a number of areas.
• Mass Assignment Vulnerability in ASP.NET MVC – Josh Bush discusses Mass Assignment Vulnerabilities, and how one was recently used to compromise GitHub, and looks at how, with bad design, it is possible for your ASP.NET MVC applications to be similarly vulnerable, and discusses thigns you can do to avoid such issues.
• On the nightmare that is JSON Dates. Plus, JSON.NET and ASP.NET Web API – Scott Hanselman discusses the pain of dates in JSON format, looking at the number of different ways in which they are represented, and discusses the ISO 8601 standard which seems to be the prefered format for dates going forward.
• It’s Time To Spring Forward An Hour in the US and Canada: Daylight Saving Time Arrives Sunday – On a loosely related note, M3 Sweatt reminds us that Daylight Savings starts in the most of the US and Canada this weekend – useful information for those of us in the UK hoping to attend virtual events.
• Modern Web Development – Part 7 – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at the modern practices in Web Development, in this part discussing the role of Version Control software in the software (and web) development process, looking at the modern style of distributed version control systems.
• Zooming and Panning with CSS and Script (BYOSP Part 9) – K. Scott Allen continues his series looking at building a slide presenter application to create slideshows using HTML5 , CSS and JavaScript. This part looks at the creation of some zooming and pan style animations for transitions between slide states.
• Free webook, "Learning JavaScript Design Patterns" (168 pages) – Greg Duncan highlights this great free ebook from Addy Osmani, which has been updated once again, covering over 20 patterns in good detail, including looking at implementations in jQuery.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Introduction – Derek Greer kicks off a new series of posts looking at getting up and running with RabbitMQ on Windows and .NET. This first part looks at the installation and setup of RabbitMQ and its dependencies
• Alt.Tekpub REST & REST and Urls – Rob Eisenberg and Ayende join in the discussion about REST API design started by Rob Conery asking for assistance with the design of a REST API for Tekpub
• First look at the ASP.NET Web API – John V Petersen takes an introductory look at creating HTTP APIs using the WebAPI included in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release.
• Don’t try to model the real world, it doesn’t exist. – Udi Dahan discusses the difficulty in modelling the real world in software applications, looking at a number of scenarios which illustrate this difficulty, and shares some useful advice on creating working models and ubiquitous language.
• C# Delegates, Actions, Funcs, Lambdas – Keeping it super simple – Bruno Terkaly discusses the implementation of a number of the newer C# constructs, Delegates, Actions, Funcs and Lambdas, looking at how they are implemented by the compiler, allowing you to work with reduced complexity (even if the syntax does seem more confusing)
• INotifyPropertyChanged, The .NET 4.5 Way – Dan Rigby highlights three new attributes in .NET 4.5 which, at compile time, allow you to have your code annotated with information about the calling method – allowing an easier way of implementing INotifyPropertyChanged.
• Visual Studio 11 Beta Page Inspector Tutorial live in asp.net – The Web Development Tools blog highlights the availability of tutorial content looking at one of the exciting new features of the Visual Studio 11 beta. The Page Inspector brings Firebug like capabilities to the Visual Studio IDE, and with it lots of power to work with and debug your pages.

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Another later edition today – normal service resumes tomorrow

Software

• Windows Server "8" Beta – Mark Michelet highlights the Windows 8 Beta release, released last week in amidst the excitement of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview release.
• ReSharper 7 EAP for Visual Studio 11 Beta is now OPEN! – The team over at JetBrains announce the opening of their Early Access Program for ReSharper 7, which now targets the Visual Studio 11 Beta release, giving you a taste (and them valuable feedback) about the next major version of the product.
• CSLA 4 version 4.3 release – Rockford Lhotka announces the v4.3 release of his CSLA 4 application Framework. This release adds support for Silverlight 5 to the extensive lists of supported platforms and technologies

Information

• MSDN Magazine: March 2012 – The March edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online with articles looking at the StreamInsight technology, the use of streaming on Windows Phone, building HTML 5 applications in Sharepoint, AppFabric Service Bus, and much more
• Visual Studio 11 Beta currently incompatible with AsyncCtpLibrary*.dll – Stephen Toub highlights the incompatibility between the current Async CTP for C# and VB.NET and the new Visual Studio 11 beta release, before moving on to look at Implementing a simple ForEachAsync,in response to a question from Jon Skeet, and shares slides and code from his session "The Zen of Async" at the MVP Summit 2012.
• Async Mashups using ASP.NET Web API – Henrik F Nielsen takes a look at combining multiple WebAPI services using Tasks and Asynchronous programming , looking and querying and combining multiple services without blocking the server thread
• ASP.NET Web API & Http Messaging – Sankarsan Bose takes a look at how the various parts of the WebAPI framework architecture come together to for the request processing piepline
• Looking Forward: Single Page Apps, Client-Side Databinding, Entity Change Tracking, and Windows 8 – Dan Wahlin highlights some of the new features of the releases of the last few weeks, discussing Windows 8 and the new Single Page Web Application features in the ASP.Net MVC beta, along with some further resources on the subjects
• What is Single Page Application? – Kalyan Bandarupalli takes a look at the architecture and some of the features behind the ASP.NET MVC Single Page web applications, looking at how they come together to provide for this new style of application.
• HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript improvements in Visual Studio 11 – Pawel Bejger discusses some of the new functionality and improvements to the Visual Studio IDE for those working in web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
• ASP.NET Internals – Managed runtime loader – Jose Reyes discusses the Managed Runtime Loader and how you can control the CLR settings for the instance of the runtime loaded for specific application pools in IIS
• What’s new in WCF 4.5? WebSocket support (Part 1 of 2) – Ido Flatow continues his CodeProject series looking at the new features of WCF in .NET 4.5, with this part being the first of two looking at support for Web Sockets in the platform, giving an overview of the concepts of Web Sockets and how they are implemented in WCF.
• 5. Generic Parameters – Static typing without typing – Dorian Corompt continues this series on F# and Functional Programming with a look at static typing, and how F# performs analysis on the types used to infer the types being used, and how it differs from the imperative languages like C#
• XNA for Windows Phone Walkthrough–Creating the Bizzy Bees game – Tess Ferrandez shares a 7 part series looking at the creation of her first XNA game for Windows Phone 7, focusing on certain interesting aspects of the game’s creation
• Introducing MEF Lightweight Composition and an Updated Composition Provider for ASP.NET MVC – Nick, of the BCL team highlights the latest preview for the Managed Extensibility Framework for .NET which focuses on Lightweight composition, for a wider range of applications, based upon the feedback received for the MEF Composition Provider for ASP.NET MVC, looking at some of the changes and improvements made in this preview which is available via NuGet
• Moving The Philosophy Into Machinery – The latest chapter of the great RESTful debate continues, with Rob Conery issuing a challenge to some of the people involved in recent debates to help him design the most appropriate API for his Alt.Tekpub site, with John Sheehan weighing in with his suggestion in ‘Don’t build the best REST API, build the best HTTP API ‘ and Sean Fao following up in ‘Building a RESTful API – A Followup to John Sheehan‘

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Update – Even later than planned as I forgot to hit publish!
A later than usual edition, mainly caused by me falling asleep while reading my way through RSS items for today’s edition – this is in no way a reflection on the quality of posts, and has much more to do with a busy week here in Bellevue at the MVP summit catching up on me

Information

• What’s New for Parallelism in .NET 4.5 Beta – Stephen Toub discusses some of the new features for parallel programming included in the .NET 4.5 beta release, including the increased proliferation of Aysnc methods, diving into some detail of SemaphoreSlim.WaitAsync, improvements to the TPL Dataflow and the use o the await pattern and much more
• New Features for Web Development in Visual Studio 11 Beta & New time saving features for Web projects in Visual Studio 11 Beta – The Web Development Tools Team blog about some of the new features of the IDE which help web developers be more efficient in Dev11
• What’s New in IIS 8 – Scott Forsyth shares a look at the new features of IIS8, available in the public beta release of Windows 8 Server made available from yesterday
• WebApi and Json Deserialization into an object model – Derik Whittaker continues his look at the ASP.NET Web API included in the ASP.NET MVC4 beta, showing how easily the framework allows you to deserialize JSON data into objects.
• NancyFX Migration from 0.9 to 0.10 – Alexander Beletsky shares his experiences in upgrading his IdeaStrike project from NancyFX 0.9 to the new 0.10 release stepping through the errors encountered during the upgrade and the resolution of those errors.
• A NancyFx Content-Negotiation Extension – Richard Cirerol discusses implementing content negotiation in NancyFX, allowing Nancy based code to determine which data format best suits the consuming user agent.
• Beginning F#: Records – Ian Voyce continues his series looking at Beginning F# with a look at the concept of Records in F’#, looking at their definition and use
• Thread-Safety with the Interlocked Class – Richard Carr of BlackWasp takes a look at the use of the Interlocked class in multithreaded programming to assist with implementation of thread safety and the creation of atomic operations.
• The open-source maturity model – Andreas Håkansson continues the debate around open source software, proposing a set of levels for how open source a project actually is. Interesting discussion, continued in the comments of this one.
• What’s changed for app developers since //build/ (part 1) – Jake Sabulsky gives an update on the app development experience for Windows 8 applications in the new Community Preview release, outlining changes to XAML and HTML based applications, along with related functionality.
• Software Performance for Metro Style Applications – Rico Mariani shares some thoughts on the creation of applications with good performance on the Windows 8 consumer preview, discussing some of the way that applications work, and how they drive you towards good user experience.
• Internet Explorer 10 Consumer Preview Minor Changes List – Eric Lawrence shares a list of some of the minor changes included in the Internet Explorer 10 preview included in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, along with highlighting further resources on IE10.

Community

• Windows 8 UK Developer Tech.Days Events – Mike Taulty highlights 3 Tech.days events taking place at the end of March and April, and the beginning of May in London, Manchester and Edinburgh which will be focusing on development on the Windows 8 platform.
• Series of Windows Azure Online Conferences – AnitahC highlights three 2 hour virtual events being held in late march looking at Windows Azure from the point of view of a new Azure developer, and experienced Azure developer and an architect / business decision maker

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