The Morning Brew

This post is the last one for the week. Morning Brew tradition dictates that public holidays here in the UK are my days off (and a chance for a lie in), so the Easter break means that there will be no post on Friday or Monday, with The Morning Brew returning on Tuesday 10th April (usually with a larger than usual edition to catch up with all the posts over the long weekend).

Software

• NuGet 1.7 – Th NuGet Team announce the release of NuGet 1.7. This release adds the ability to see pre-release packages in the UI, supports opening of a readme.txt file after package installation, Package restore in the UI and support for solution level packages.config.
• WebApiContrib is Alive – Chris Missal highlights the existence of WebApiContrib, a community package which adds features to ASP.NET Web API, much like MvcContrib does for ASP.NET MVC.
• WiX Toolset – Download: WiX v3.6 RC0 – The Windows Installer XML (WiX) team announce the release of their first Release candidate of version 3.6. The most significant change in this release brings support for Visual Studio 11 Beta.
• TFS Integration Tools – March 2012 Release – Willy-P. Schaub announces the release of the March build of the TFS Integration Tools. Developed by the TFS Product Group in conjunction with the Visual Studio ALM Rangers, it provides means of integrating and migrating data from other systems into TFS.

Information

• Rx TOC – I’ve been enjoying Bnaya Eshet’s series of posts looting at the Reactive Extensions for .NET, and this convenient Table Of Contents gives links back to all his previous posts on the subject. Bnaya also has a new post on Join – which merges streams together
• NuGet 1.7 available – Easy installation of Rx v2.0 Beta – The Reactive Extensions Team highlight the release of NuGet 1.7 and how it makes getting their pre-release package of the latest version of the Reactive Extension (2.0 beta) easier with its pre-release package support.
• Moving from Action Filters to Message Handlers – John V. Petersen responds to community feedback by taking a look at the use of HttpMessageHandlers for implementing securing of Web API services, looking at how they allow you to intercept before controllers get involved.
• You Really Should Log Client-Side Errors – Karl Seguin discusses how you can capture Client Side JavaScript errors in your applications and easily have them reported back to your server allowing you the opportunity to find out the errors people are encountering with your web applications on the client side.
• Can JITs be faster? – Miguel de Icaza discusses and responds to a piece from Herb Sutter on the way JIT works and its performance and optimization, discussing how JIT optimization is handled in .NET and Mono. A complex topic, and plenty of good comments to read along with this one.
• PragPub #34 – The Pragmatic Bookshelf announce the release of their 34th edition of PragPub magazine, an electronic magazine available in range of formats. This month technical blogging, defensive programming and Scala are amongst the featured articles.
• Become a Visual Studio 11 Master Detective – A Look into the Page Inspector – Carl Bergenhem takes a look at one of the exciting new features for Web Development in the Visual Studio 11 release. The new Page Inspector gives the power of tools like FireBug integrated with the Visual Studio environment, and an understanding of where CSS, HTML and JavaScript comes from in your backend code.
• F# IntelliSense Improvements in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Brian McNamara of the Visual Studio F# Team shows off some of the improvements made to Intellisense for F# in the Visual Studio 11 Beta.

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Software

• "April 2012 Updates to Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta (x86 and x64)" available on MSDN Subscriber Downloads (from VS 11.0.50214.1 BETAREL to 11.0.50323.1 QRELB) – Greg Duncan highlights a small (15 mb) update to Visual Studio 11 Beta, currently available only to MSDN Subscribers. Like Greg, I haven’t seen any details of what this update includes, so I suspect we will be seeing some blog posts about it in the coming days.
• Announcing SQL Azure Data Sync Preview Update – The Windows Azure Team announce a new preview release of the SQL Azure Data Sync, a way of keeping data in sync between cloud and client applications. This release adds support for editing schema of sync groups without having to recreate the whole sync group.
• SHIPPED!!! Windows Phone Developer Guidance updated for Mango (WP SDK 7.1) – Francis K. Cheung announces the release of updated Developer Guidance for Windows Phone developers using the Windows Phone SDK 7.1. The guidance is broken down into three sections, developing using MVVM, Building advanced WP applications, and building testable WP applications.

Information

• Async in 4.5: Worth the Await – Brandon Bray shares a post from Alok Shriram which discusses the many changes made in the Base Class Library (BCL) in .NET 4.5 in order for it to work well with the new async / await language features.
• What AnyCPU Really Means As Of .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 11 – Sasha Goldshtein discusses some of the confusion and pain caused by CPU targeting features in .NET 4.0 and looks at what the setting will mean in Visual Studio 11 / .NET 4.5, where the meaning has changed significantly, and ARM has joined the processor options.
• Howto put .Net Framework 4.5 Beta & ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta on Windows Azure – Magnus Mårtensson shares an interesting post taking a look at how you can get ahead of the game by getting .NET 4.5 Beta and ASP.NET MVC4 Beta up and running on Windows Azure. The process is quite involved, but if you need some of the new features well worth it.
• 67% of ASP.NET websites have serious configuration related security vulnerabilities – Troy Hunt discusses some of the finding from his ASafaWeb automated security analyzer, looking at the nature of some of the most common security vulnerabilities found in ASP.NET sites
• Revisiting The Backbone Event Aggregator: Lessons Learned – Derick Bailey takes a look back at some of his early Backbone.js work, revisiting the event aggregator and discussing some improvements to how it worked based on his improved knowledge.

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Software

• TFS 11 Power Tools Beta Available – Brian Harry announces the availability of the TFS 11 Power Tools Beta. This release integrates with Visual Studio 11 beta and adds a collection of Power tools (extensions to Team Explorer, CommandLine and Windows Shell, process template editor, best practices analyzer), build extensions, and Version Control Integration.
• First Release of SSDT Power Tools – Janet Yeilding announces the first release of the SQL Server Data Tools Power Tools, a collection of extensions to the SQL Server tooling. This release focuses on improving the tooling’s features for viewing schema.
• Release Candidates of Application Initialization and Dynamic IP Restrictions Released – Andrew Westgarth highlights the release candidate releases of two IIS Extensions. Application Initialization for IIS 7.5 is the replacements for the Application Warmup beta extension, and provides a means pre-starting applications on the server, and Dynamic IP Restrictions for IIS7/7.5 provides advanced Denial of Service attack and brute force attack protection.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: April 2012 – The April edition of MSDN Magazine is now available to read online. This month MSDN Magazine welcomes Scriptjunkie under its wing, and features articles looking at CSS3 Media Queries, Kinect, T4 Templates, Windows Workflow integration with Office docs, .NET 4.5, and lots more.
• .NET Versioning and Multi-Targeting – .NET 4.5 is an in-place upgrade to .NET 4.0 – Scott Hanselman discusses the differences between different .NET releases, looking at how .NET 4.5 is an in-place upgrade to .NET 4 (much like 3.5 was), showing how the tooling and CLR support this model.
• Working with Forks on GitHub or CodePlex – Jimmy Bogard gives an overview of forking projects which use Git has their Version Control, as the first stage in contributing back to a project. This use of Git has increasing importance in the .NET world with the new support for Git on CodePlex and the Open Source release of large parts of the ASP.NET Stack.
• Making your ASP.NET Web API’s secure – John V. Petersen takes a look at securing WebAPI implemented services, exploring public / private key based tokens and HTTPS.
• Creating a JSONP Formatter for ASP.NET Web API – Rick Strahl shares a look at implementing a JSONP formatter for ASP.NET WebAPI based services, allowing you to consume the data from other domains in your client side implementation.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Direct Exchanges – Derek Greer continues his series exploring the use of Rabbit MQ on the Windows Platform, carrying on with discussion of the different types of message exchange provided, exploring the direct exchange type in more detail.
• What’s new with T4 in Visual Studio 11 Beta? – Gareth Jones shares a few o the significant new features of T4 Templates in the Visual Studio 11 Beta release, focusing on the new features added since the developer preview. Be sure to check out his previous post to get all the details of everything new.

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