The Morning Brew

Software

• Odoyule Rules Engine for .NET – Chris Patterson announces an early release of his Rules engine for .NET, an open source project with code hosted on GitHub, and with a Visual Studio Debugger visualiser extension to allow you to see what the RETE graph looks like when debugging.
• Looking for a Free .NET Mocking Framework? – Chris Eargle highlights some of the features of Telerik’s JustMock free edition, showing how it is a very powerful supported mocking library you really should consider.

Information

• Multi-Targeting Guidelines for Tools for Managed Code – An interesting article from the BCL team at Microsoft discussing guidelines for anyone working on or with compilers or tools which are consuming metadata from multiple versions and platforms of ,NET
• Modest Proposal for C# – Miguel de Icaza discusses a possible change to the C# compiler to change a common compile error into working code, how the developer would expect it to work, illustrating with examples. Be sure to read the comments on this one as there is a good discussion of this one going on.
• Let’s Talk About Logging – Karl Seguin discusses the importance of logging for diagnosing problems, and the problem with logging implementations in general whcih result in low signal to noise relationships which make it hard to identify actual problems in logs.
• Actions in WCF Data Services – Part2: How IDataServiceActionProvider works – Alex James continues this series of posts looking at the IDataServiceActionProvider interface allows you to add actions to your OData services, looking at the design of the interface and what implementers are expected to code.
• HTML5 Delta Reference – J. Michael Palermo highlights an edition of the HTML5 Specification from the W3C which highglights the areas of the specification which have been added or modified in HTML5
• There and Back Again – A Reprise – Russ Osterlund takes a low level view of a ,NET 4.0 WinForms application running in 64bit mode, drilling down to the JIT and looking at the instructions being executed, allowing a comparison to his earlier article about .NET 1.0 in 32bit environments.

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Software

• EF Power Tools Beta 2 Available – Brice Lambson of the Entity Framework Team announces the release of the second beta of the Entity Framework Power Tools. These power tools provide additional design time tooling support in Visual Studio for working with EF, and this release brings customization of reverse generated code using T4 templates, Generate Views support for Code First and database-first, and DBContext and Database discovery improvements.
• Announcing YUI 3.5.0 – The Yahoo! User Interface Team announce the official release of YUI 3.5.0. This release btings with it a second skin offering, App, Button, CSSButton, Handlebars, Pjax and TestConsole components, improvements to CSSGrids, and lots more.

Information

• Getting Started With ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex & Contributing to ASP.NET Web Stack Source on CodePlex – Henrik F Nielsen looks at getting up and running with the newly open sourced ASP.NET Web Stack, looking at the prerequisites to getting the code up and compiling on your machine, before moving on to look at the process for contributing and creating forks.
• ASP.NET Web API beta Source code: Survival Guide – ‘aliostad’ similarly looks at the open sourced code and getting it working on your machine, focusing specifically on the ASP.NET Web API Beta
• ASP.NET Web API, MVC, ViewModels and Formatters – Jimmy Bogard discusses the role of the View in web programming, looking at how the lack of a view component in ASP.NET Web API can lead to your view concerns being addressed in other aspects of the stack. Interesting discussion in the comments of this one (and also on twitter).
• What’s new in Razor v2 – Andrew Nurse gives an overview of the many improvements in the Razor View Engine in V2, available currently as a part of the current suite of beta releases, and also available in source form.
• ASP.NET 4.5 Beta Web Forms Tutorial Series Published – Erik Reitan highlights a new tutorial series focusing on developing an application using ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and Entity Framework Code First, showing off a number of new features of WebForms 4.5 including the new model binding features.
• Task Parallel Library and Servers, Part 1: Introduction – Brad Wilson kicks off a new series looking at the use of the Task Parallel Library in Server Side Code using ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API
• Actions in WCF Data Services – Part 1: Service Author Code – Alex James kicks off a series of posts looking at the new Action functionality of the WCF data Services and OData, and specifically the provider model being used to allow third parties to add functionality to the core framework.
• New is Glue – Steve Smith discusses how use of the ‘new’ keyword in code generally means that you’ve just coupled two bits of code together tightly, and looks at how you can avoid this coupling, and when it is appropriate to use ‘new’.
• JavaScript Debugging Enhancements – Dmitri Leonov discusses the improvements made to the JavaScript debugging experience in Visual Studio 11, particularly to support Windows 8 Metro Application development.
• Trying Out JavaScript v.Next – K. Scott Allen highlights the support for ECMAScript Harmony, the next evolution of JavaScript, in current stable builds of Google Chrome, showing off a couple of the new language features available.
• WinJS Promises #1, #2, #3, #4, #5 & #6 – Mike Taulty shares a series of screencasts taking the covers off the concept of Promises as implemented in WinJS for Windows 8 Metro Applications

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Software

• WCF Data Services 5.0 RTM Release – The WCF Data Services Team announces the release of the RTM edition of WCF Data Services 5 (previously known as Project Astoria). This release introduces Vocabulary terms for controlling data and mappings, support for Actions to inject behavior into data models, improved spatial data features, new and updated OData libraries and Entity Data Model libraries, and much more. Glenn Gailey gives some further details in his post ‘My Favorite Things in OData v3 and WCF Data Services 5.0‘
• April 2012 Update for Visual Studio 11 Beta – Xinyang Qiu highlights the general availability of the April update for Visual Studio 11 beta. This release addresses a number of issues with the product across most product areas, improving the stability of the product.
• jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 RC2 Released – The jQuery Mobile team announce their second release candidate release of jQuery Mobile 1.1.0. The team have been at work since the RC1 release addressing reported issues and honing the 1.0 functionality to be the best it can be in this new release.
• Announcing the Refresh of Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs – The Windows Azure team announce an update to the Service Bus Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) features labs. This is a second cut, and gives you the opportunity to explore and share early opinions on these possible future features.
• dotCover 2.0 Early Access Open – JetBrains announce the start of their ‘Early Access Program’ for dotCover 2.0, their next major version of their code coverage tooling. 2.0 brings integration with VS11 beta along with previous IDE versions, an integrated test runner, and extended attribute based filtering.

Information

• AsyncBridge? Async on .NET 4.0 using VS11 – Alex Davies highlights an interesting snippet of code from Daniel Grunwald which allows you to use the real C#5 compiler, yet target .NET 4.0, giving you something equivalent to the functionality offered in the ASync CTP for VS2010 which is now rather old, and difficult to install.
• Make Async Your Buddy With Reactive Extensions – Phil Haack gives an introduction to the Reactive Extensions for .NET, looking at how it makes Async programming a breeze with its powerful and rich syntax. Phill shares some sample code, and also directs you to some more detailed resources on the subject.
• The Practical Guide to Multithreading – Part 1 & The Practical Guide to Multithreading – Part 2 – Ajay Vijayvargiya shares a multi language (and framework) look at multithreaded programming, exploring the concepts and and best practices in C# and .NET and C++ using MFC.
• Overriding Stream Asynchrony – Stephen Toub takes a look at the various Async methods provided by the framework on the Stream class in the .NET Framework 4.5 beta, discussing what their base implementations do and when you should override them in your own stream implementations
• Type initializer circular dependencies – Jon Skeet shares a look at circular dependencies in type initializer code, showing how these types of dependencies can occur, and exploring how you can manipulate the initializers to make them work as you intend, although suggesting that there are better alternatives generally.
• System.DateTime: Good practices and common pitfalls – David Rickard shares a number of key pieces of best practice when working with System.DateTime in your code, helping you to avoid a whole range of errors which can occur when using dates without thinking about how you are using them.
• Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 11 Beta – .NET Portable Class Libraries – Scott Hanselman discusses the inclusion of the .NET Portable Class Libraries feature into Visual Studio 11 Beta, making it easier to create libraries which target and work on multiple .NET based platforms, taking into account the various libraries and features available on each platform.
• Improving how we update Visual Studio – Dave Lubash and David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the improved update story being introduced in Visual Studio 11, making it easier to keep your IDE up to date.
• Elegance, thy Name is jQuery – Steve Wellens shares a look at a tough jQuery question from StackOverflow, digging into how the power of jQuery makes the answer to this complex question succinct and relatively understandable.
• EF5 Performance Considerations – David Obando of the Entity Framework Team highlights a whitepaper which discusses the performance implications of using Entity Framework 4 and 5, and looking at how you can get the most performance out of your EF based applications.
• Updating PowerShell help on Windows"8" – Ben Armstrong highlights the availability of updated and extended help for PowerShell’s new Windows 8 Commandlets
• Tackling performance killers: Common performance problems with Metro style apps – Dave Tepper shares a number of best practices to help ensure that your Windows 8 Metro style applications perform the best they can, sharing some general guidance on building Win8 applications, and digging deeper into some of the more involved things you can do to get the best experience for your applications.
• iOS to IE10 Metro: Building Cross-Browser Plugin-Free Experiences – Rey Bango discusses building applications for the IE10 powered Windows 8 Metro, taking a look at how if you’ve built similar browser based experiences for IOS the migration is relatively easy.
• Back to Basics: Dynamic Image Generation, ASP.NET Controllers, Routing, IHttpHandlers, and runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests – Scott Hanselman goes ‘Back to Basics’ with a look at the ASP.NET request processing pipeline, discussing how HttpHandlers and HttpModules provide hooks for you to create dynamic content on all parts of the ‘One ASP.NET’ stack.

Community

• DDD South West 4.0 – Registrations for this year’s Developer Developer Developer! South West event open today at 10am BST. The event, on Saturday 26th May 2012 at UWE near Bristol brings together a great agenda from top speakers (and there is also a session from me), and is sure to be a ‘not to miss’ event. Spaces will go quickly for this one, so get your registration finger ready…
• Tune in to Lang.NEXT Videos Online & Java for .Net? Yep, the IKVM.NET way… – Jason Zander and Greg Duncan highlight the session recordings from the Land.NEXT events focusing on alternative languages implemented on the .NET Stack.

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