The Morning Brew

Software

• WCF Data Services EULAs updated – The WCF Data Services Team announce a change to the EULA (End User License Agreement) for WCF Data Services 5.0.1 and later which allows the DLLs to be redistributed.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Select() and Where() with Indexes – James Michael Hare shares the latest part in his C# and .NET Little Wonders series, continuing his exploration of LINQ methods with a look at the Select and Where methods, looking at how you can work with the index of the elements in the series too.
• NuGet and Bin Deploy – The WCF Data Services Team discus their increasing use of NuGet as a distribution method for their new more frequent release strategy, looking at how you can use NuGet to get and keep up to date with the WCF Data Services.
• WCF Data Service – Dinesh Sabnani walks through the use of the WCF Data Services in creating and consuming a simple data service, and looking at some of the ways you can query the service using URIs.
• Essential Windows Azure (Microsoft Cloud) Knowledge : Part 1: Web roles, Worker Roles – Bruno Terkaly kicks off a new series looking at the essentials of Windows Azure. This first post looks at the concepts of Web and Worker Roles, answering common questions on the technology, and looking at how it all works.
• Awesome with Windows Phone: 13 ways to improve the performance of your app – Matt Lacey shares a simple list of 13 things you can do to help ensure that your Windows Phone 7 applications perform as well as possible on devices.
• "SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide" 454 page PDF on upgrading from SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 & [Limited time offer] Programming Windows 6th Edition Preview eBook is now available. Buy the CP edition today for $10 and get the RP/RTM book updates as they are released, free… – Greg Duncan highlights two Microsoft Press titles, one available for free looking at everything you need to know about upgrading to SQL 2012, and the other an update for Windows 8 of the legendary Charles Petzold book ‘Programming Windows’ available in early access form at a very reasonable price.

Community

• DevEvening goes to the movies – DevEvening, the Woking based .NET Usergroup are hosting a movie night, with a number of pre-recorded sessions on Clean Code (Uncle Bob Martin) and a session on WebAPI on the evening of Wednesday 30th May.
• NxtGenUG – Event – IIS8 Platform for the Future – The NxtGenUG in Hereford welcome Andy Westgarth for his session on IIS8 which will be released as a part of the Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server release. In the session Andy will give background on IIS7 and 7.5 before delving into what is new and exciting in IIS8.
• MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer), 7th June 2012 – Windows Azure MVP Magnus Mårtensson is hosting an online Twitter event for the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June – a great opportunity to discuss the exciting announcements that will be made.

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(For those who enquired yesterday, you will be glad to know that it was a sunny spring day for my fire drill yesterday)

Software

• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Sample Updates in May, 2012 – Jialiang Ge discusses the latest update to the All-In-One Code Framework, highlighting the new samples included for Windows Azure, CLR, Windows SDK, Windows Forms, WPF, IIS, and TFS. If you are ever trying to do something and are not sure how its well worth checking if the All-In-One Code Framework has a sample for it!
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK now available – Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK, made available yesterday this is the support you need to write extensions, commands, shell projects, and much more for the latest Visual Studio IDE.
• Team Foundation Service Updates – 5/15 – Brian Harry discusses the work in the latest sprint of the online hosted TFS service, highlighting the new features and improvements which have made it into the latest update.

Information

• .NET 4.5 Improvements for Cloud and Server Applications – Somasegar discusses the improvements introduced in .NET 4.5 for developers working on the server side and on the cloud, looking at features in ASP.NET such as Web API, WCF, Workflow, Identity, and the Base Class Library, as well as talking about some of the .NET Runtime improvements included.
• Please Learn to Think about Abstractions – Scott Hanselman discusses the important role of abstraction, not just in code but in the real world, and how it is so important in making things understandable.
• Code to Interfaces. Right. What’s an Interface? – Bil Simser is also thinking about abstractions, although this time principally in code, and goes back to basics to look at interfaces and te role they play in supporting the ‘Code To Interfaces’ principle.
• C# Async: What is it, and how does it work? – Clive Tong takes a look at the async support in C#5, digging down into how it works, looking at the implementation of state machines and tasks, before ending up at the IL level.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Fanout Exchanges – Derek Greer continues his series looking at the use of Rabbit MQ on Windows with a more detailed look at using Fanout Exchanges to facilitate publish subscribe and demonstrates this with an example.
• Post-increment Operator and Precedence – Chris Eargle discusses the role of operator precedence in C#, looking at how the rules work and illustrating why understanding these rules is important.

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Today’s edition was cut short due to a fire drill at my office ….

Software

• EF5 Release Candidate Available on NuGet – The Entity Framework team announce the release of a Release Candidate of Entity Framework 5 on NuGet. This release candidate builds on the feedback from EF5 Beta 2 and introduces timeout support for Code First Migrations, creation of tables in pre-existing databases, along with a number of bugfixes from Beta 2.
• 1.39b Changes – NCrunch – The NCrunch Team announce the release of 1.39b of NCrunch, a tool which adds continuous testing support to Visual Studio running your tests as you write code. This release brings improvements to the test window, exports of coverage and other metrics, updates NUnit to 2.6, along with much more.

Information

• Mixing async and sync in distributed systems – Jimmy Bogard discusses user expectations of how systems work, and how this can make having parts of your system work in a more async way difficult, taking a look at how you can go about making operations async in a CQRS environment.
• Ten Features I Like About CoffeeScript – Karl Seguin discusses 10 features he particularly likes about the CoffeeScript language, a language which allows you to write code and have it compiled into JavaScript for running in a browser.
• The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World – Jeremy Likness takes a look at the differences between working with tasks in .NET and Tasks on the Windows Runtime.
• Let’s MEET Windows Azure – Shaun Xu highlights a new Windows Azure website from Microsoft for an event on 7th June. The event will be streamed live via the site

Community

• Scott Hanselman doing user group tour of Scotland – Gary Ewan Park highlights the Scott Hanselman’s visit to Scotland in July where Scott will be tracing back his family’s history along with giving a series of usergroup talks on ASP.NET, Mobile Web and personal productivity. The events take place July 9-13 in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. Scott is an excellent and entertaining speaker, so be sure to register early as these sessions are sure to fill up quickly

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