The Morning Brew

Slides and demo code from my DDDSW 4 talk on WebSockets and SignalR can now be found here.

Software

• AspectMap – Aspect Oriented Programming for Complete Beginners – Chris Surfleet announces the first release (0.5) of an Aspect Oriented Programming framework for StructureMap. The library is available on NuGet and provides a simple way of wiring in cross cutting concerns into your applications by way of Structure Map.

Information

• Welcome to the Developer Tools Blog Network & Welcome to the new blog design – Lisa Feigenbaum and Jason Zander announce the new look Developer Tools Blog Network, bringing together the developer tools related blogs on MSDN under one common banner
• My Favorite Features: Managing Projects with the Backlog, Sprint Planning and Taskboard Features in Team Foundation Server 11 – Jason Zander (on his new look blog) continues discussion of his favourite features of Visual Studio 11 and TFS 11 with a look at some of the planning features included for managing and planning work.
• JavaScript Strict Mode Explained – Rachel Appel gives a brief introduction to JavaScript Strict Mode, looking at how your code will be handled when running in a strict mode environment, and showing how you can enable strict mode.
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App – Part 5 Drawing on Canvas – Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at the development of Line of Business applications using HTML5 features, exploring the use of the Canvas element in this part.
• Working With Micro-ORM Dapper In MVC – Prashant Khandelwal.gives a nice introduction into the use of the Dapper Micro ORM in MVC based applications, walking through a sample application, and looking at the performance of Dapper in comparison to other ORM implementations.
• Fun with HTML5 Canvas, WebSocket, JQuery and ASP.NET. End-result: A live white board on a web page! – Al-Farooque Shubho walks through the creation of a live white board application using HTML5 Canvas and WebSockets – a somewhat extended version of one of my demo apps from last weekend’s talk on WebSockets and SignalR at DDDSW.
• Client-Side vs. Server-Side Rendering – Karl Seguin discusses Twitter’s recent decision to move away from client side rendering and back to server side rendering to improve page load performance, discussing how client side rendering works, and looking at when and why you might use it.
• Miguel de Icaza on ASP.NET MVC, Moonlight, and the Android Lawsuit – Jonathan Allen shares an interesting interview with Miguel de Icaza on progress with the Mono Project and the fate of Moonlight the Mono Silverlight port.

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As a few of you pointed out to me, Monday was a public holiday in the US, hence my lack of content for yesterday’s edition.

Software

• CSLA 4 version 4.3.11 beta available – Rockford Lhotka announces the beta release of the latest update to his CSLA application framework. As is usual, this release addresses reported issues, along with adding a few of new features.

Information

• Visual Studio Dark Theme – Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience for the Developer Tools division discusses the new Dark Theme for Visual Studio 11, showing what the dark theme will look like, and discussing the key UX features of the theme.
• Windows Explorer Preview Pane for .vb files – Kirill Osenkov shares a nice tip for adding previews of source code (VB) in the Explorer preview pane. I’m sure this technique could also be applied to C#, JavaScript and any other language you care too.
• Free eBook’ed guidance – "Developing an Advanced Windows Phone 7.5 App that Connects to the Cloud" & Mighty Metro Morphing! – Design case study of morphing a HTML5 page into a Windows 8 Metro app – Greg Duncan highlights a new Patterns and Practices guidance e-book looking at developing Windows Phone 7.5 applications which interact with the cloud, and also highlights a case study which looks at migrating a HTML5 page into being a Windows 8 Metro style application.
• My take on Win8/Metro – John V Petersen shares his notes and thoughts on Windows 8 and Metro applications following on from a Developer Camp event focusing on Win8.
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App – Part 4 Using Modernizr, Polyfills, YepNope – Bruce Kyle continues this series on building LOB application in HTML 5 with a look at the use of Modernizr to assist with working with browsers with partial HTML5 support, and looks at the use of pollyfills to add in missing functionality.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Headers Exchanges – Derek Greer wraps up his series looking at RabbitMQ with a discussion of using Header Exchanges, walking through an example of them in use.
• Using GitHub for Windows with non-GitHub repositories – Phil Haack discusses and shows how GitHub for Windows can be used with non-GitHub hosted git repositories.
• Creating an efficient HTTP Web Server for .NET Microframework (NETMF) – Laurent Ellerbach discusses the implementation of a very minimal HTTP server for use with the .NET Micro Framework where there is very limited memory available on the device (netduino)
• The Magic of Visual Studio 11 Page Inspector – Sumit Maitra gives a run through of the functionality included in the Visual Studio 11 Page Inspector, one of the best new features (for web devs) in Visual Studio 11.
• Synchronization Domains and Task Parallel Library in C# – Erol Esen takes a look at two different approaches to building multi-threaded applications available in the .NET Framework, exploring synchronization domains and the Task Parallel Library.
• She let me take the computer home. – How did you get started in computers and programming? – Scott Hanselman shares his story of how he got into computing at an early age, and urges you to share your story.

And Finally…..

• ClippyJS – Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia – Clippy (and friends Merlin, Rover and Links) make a return to your screen this time in the web browser with this neat little JavaScript based library for Smore to allow you to provide help and assistance to users in a retro way.

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A rather light edition today as my RSS reader was rather empty this morning – maybe its the effect of the warn weather, or maybe there have been too many folks away at conferences and the like.

Information

• JavaScript for the C# Guy: The confusion about ‘this’ – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at JavaScript from the point of view of a C# Developer. In this part Shawn takes a look at the role of ‘this’ in JavaScript, exploring its use in a couple of different contexts.
• Globalization, Localization And Why My Application Stopped Launching – Paulo Morgado discusses the use of the AssemblyCultureAttribute and how you generally won’t want to use it as you generally will want to use the NeutralResourcesLanguageAttribute instead.
• Modernizr Rocks HTML5 – Laila Lotfi discusses the role that Modernizr plays in making the confusing world of the HTML 5 specification more useable in today’s browsers.
• Windows 8 Tablets… what I’ve spotted so far – Eric Nelson highlights the (somewhat limited) information available regarding Windows 8 tablet hardware, linking to information and designs from Intel, Lenovo, Samsung and Dell.
• PartitionKey or RowKey containing the percent ‘%’ character causes some Windows Azure Tables APIs to fail – &
• Character Encoding Issues Related to Copy Blob API – The Windows Azure Storage Team discuss a couple of issues you may run into when working with the Windows Azure Blob and Table storage APIs

Community

• Welcome to the website of the UK Windows Azure Users Group – The UK Windows Azure User Group have two events scheduled in early June, one in Manchester, the other in London. The Manchester event is on Wednesday 6th June, and will focus on Windows Azure Storage and Building Mobile Applications on Azure. The London meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 12th June and features an open panel discussion, with a panel consisting of Richard Conway, Andy Cross, and others.

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