The Morning Brew

Software

• NHibernate 3.3.0.GA released – Oskar Berggren announces the release of version 3.3.0GA of NHibernate. This release includes improvements to the LINQ provider, additional ‘enhanced’ identity providers, and additional capabilities for mapping in code.

Information

• GUID Guide, part one – Eric Lippert kicks off another series of posts looking at the interesting and slightly magical world of the GUID – globally unique identifiers.
• Petzold Book Blog – 2-4-6-8-10 – Charles Petzold shares a unique offer which will get you early access copies and a final e-book edition of his updated ‘Programming Windows’ book. This book is one of the most well known and revered in the space, and the updated edition will be adding content regarding Metro Style Applications development for Windows 8 using C#
  and XAML.
• Announcing ReactiveUI 3.1 at Thursday Night – Paul Betts announces a new release of ReactiveUI. This library is a MVVM framework which is tightly integrated with the reactive extensions for .NET, providing a simple way of writing complex stateful interactions and async operations.
• Compilify – Fast and Simple Online Compiler For .Net Code on a Browser – Jiby John highlights Compilify, a Roslyn based online compiler for .NET code accessible through your web browser. The implementation is open source, with source code available on GitHub, and there is a hosted version available running on AppHarbor.
• WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues) – Colin Eberhardt takes a look at the performance of various WPF based charting solutions, looking at their performance refreshing and animating with different sized data sets.
• Diving deep with WinRT and await – Windows 8 app developer blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Stephen Toub is a guest author over on the Windows 8 App Developer Blog discussing the implementation and use of asynyc/await in Windows 8 WinRT applications, discussing the basics and how the compiler transforms the code.
• Be Mindful With Your Code – Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses code quality, and the reasons you should care about the code you write.
• Concurrency, Performance, Arrays and when Dirty Writes are OK – Ben Watson discusses multiple threads accessing a single shared resource (Array), discussing synchronization, and how you can improve performance by accepting some loss in accuracy.

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Software

• Windows 8 Release Preview Coming June 2012 – Doug Holland highlights yesterday’s announcement by Steven Sinofsky at the Japan Windows 8 Dev Days event that the Release Preview of Windows 8 will be made available in the first week of June.
• F#, MSTest, and FsUnit 1.1.0.0 – Dan Mohl gives an update on his recent work with a new project template for UnitTesting in F# using MSTest and Visual Studio 11, and also discusses the latest update for FsUnit which brings additional asserts and support for VS11

Information

• How to create a custom value provider in WebAPI – Mike Stall continues his series on WebAPI extensibility and Model / parameter Binding with a look at implementing a custom value provider
• ASP.NET Web API: Query string based content formatting – Gunnar Peipman also presses on with his series looking at the other end of the process, formatting the output from WebAPI calls, continuing an example formatting data into a VCard format.
• Developing Windows Azure, Cloud-Based Applications With Windows 8-What you need and how to get there – Bruno Terkaly discusses his new development environment in Windows 8, and walks through getting the required bits for Azure application development set up on Windows 8.
• How to avoid creating real tasks when unit testing async – Peter Provost discusses the use of async / await in unit tests in MSTest and xUnit.net and looks at how you can fake tasks using the VS11 Fakes functionality
• Create a great mobile experience for your website today. Please – Scott Hanselman discusses the various options for making your websites more mobile friendly, looking at how you can utilize frameworks and helper libraries to give a more native application look and feel to your site across a range of devices.
• Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 5 – Basic Animation – G. Andrew Duthie resumes his series diving into the functionality offered by the HTML 5 Canvas element, allowing you to draw and manipulate image content directly on your web page. This part explores simple animation, and if you haven’t seen them before be sure to check out the previous 4 parts.
• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week – Day 2 – David Catuhe is on day 2 of a series of a 5 day blog post series looking at building a simple yet complete Windows 8 application using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Today’s post explores the internationalization of the application, offline mode, and more application functionality.

Community

• Hands-On Windows 8 Camps in May – Mike Taulty highlights a series of ‘Windows 8 Camp’ events running though out May with three events in London, and one in Birmingham, and the possibility of Manchester and Edinburgh events too – a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the Windows 8 development labs with help on hand from experts.

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Software

• WCF Data Services 5.1.0-rc Prerelease – With Version 5.0 released, the WCF Data Services Team are pressing on with their first release candidate pre-release of version 5.1, addressing a number of reported bugs. The release is available as a pre-release package on NuGet.
• #mvvmlight V4RC available on #nuget – Laurent Bugnion announces the preview release of MVVMLight version 4, available as packages for Silverlight 3,4,5, .NET 3.5SP1, 4.0, WP7 & 7.1, and adding support for Windows 8 WinRT Development

Information

• How to bind to custom objects in action signatures in MVC/WebAPI – Mike Stall continues his series looking at binding of parameters in WebAPI, taking a look at 3 different ways of binding values to custom object types, using manual parse, TypeConverters and custom model binders.
• ASP.NET Web API Content Negotiation and Accept-Charset – Henrik F Nielsen also continues his discussion of content negotiation with a look at how character sets and encoding come into play, and the role of the Accept-Charset HTTP header.
• ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats – Gunnar Peipman is also exploring topics relating to content negotiation, looking at how you can use the extensibility of the WebAPI Framework to present data in different formats, specifically illustrating with an implementation of VCard.
• jQuery Documentation Resources to Speed Up Your Development – Dan Wahlin highlights a number of jQuery related resources available online which provide easy access to documentation for this very popular JavaScript library.
• Guidelines for Building Touch-friendly Sites – Jacob Rossi, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team discusses some best practice guidelines for creating sites for use on touch devices, discussing accessing content, and the size of fingers and how this should relate to the positioning of elements on the page.
• Getting Rid of the “Plug-in Not Responding” Message when Debugging Silverlight Applications in Chrome – Michael Crump shares a useful tip for anyone debugging Silverlight Applications inside Google’s Chrome browser, showing how disabling the hang detection features make the debugging experience better.

Community

• First meeting Thurs May 3rd –
  Sheffield .NET User Group – The very first meeting of a new .NET Usergroup is happening next Thursday (3rd May) in Sheffield, hosted at GIST Lab. The first meeting is a planning session looking at what the local .NET community would like from the UserGroup.
• patterns & practices Global Online Symposium 2012 – Grigori Melnik highlights the Patterns & Practices Global Online Symposium, being held tomorrow, streaming live, and featuring a number of well known speakers, along with cloud, phone and web development related sessions.

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