The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual Studio 2010 – The BCL Team announce the release of Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual Studio 2010. This update to the portable library tooling originally released in June 2011 adds further API features support and an improved UI.
• Silverlight 5.1.10411.0 Released Today – Pete Brown highlights an update to Silverlight 5 which most significantly addresses a security issue regarding true type fonts. Pete gives the full details in his post.
• Json.NET – Download: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5 – The JSON.NET team announce their latest release of what is fast becoming the most popular .NET JSON library. Release 5 brings a couple of new features particularly in handling loops in object graphs, along with some bugfixes and other improvements.

Information

• The best multi-threading debugging tool is Microsoft Excel – Ayende discusses attempting to debug and fix issues which are multithreaded, and race condition like, discussing how he makes use of logging and uses Excel to help process the output.
• What JavaScript taught me about C# – Understanding "Access to modified closure" – Sean Blakemore discusses what the Resharper warning "Access to modified closure" in your C# code actually means, by way of understanding the issue in JavaScript, illustrating the issue with examples.
• Inversion of Control: Overview with Examples – Himanshu Manjarawala gives a nice overview and introduction to the concepts behind inversion of control in this CodeProject article
• Help Me Improve The Marionette Wiki – Derick Bailey appeals to the community making use of his Marionette project, which has featured in The Morning Brew on a number of occasions, to help improve the documentation for the project over on the Wiki by helping out answering questions and contributing content.
• Cross-Browser Debugging CSS – Nicole Sullivan shares a number of great tips for helping to debug issues with CSS styling of pages across browsers, sharing her process for getting to the bottom of such issues.
• Using DebugDiag to capture a dump on First Chance Exception – Kaushal Kumar Panday discusses the use of DebugDiag as an easy way of capturing dumps of code when first chance exceptions occur, walking through the use of the tooling.
• MSDN Magazine on your Kindle – Liam Westley shares a tip for getting the online MSDN Magazine content onto your Kindle to facilitate offline reading – a useful tip, and one I’ll probably be making use of.
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore – Scott Hanselman takes a look at a number of common icons used in applications and the world in general which are now somewhat dated.

Community

• Speaking at SQLRelay. Will you be there? – Jamie Thomson highlights the SQL Relay event taking place at the end fo the month in Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and London over 5 days, featuring some of the best and brightest SQL Server speakers in the UK

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Software

• Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC – Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience, Microsoft Developer Tools Division discusses the changes that are being made to Visual Studio 11’s UI since the beta release, showing what has changed in response to feedback in the forthcoming RC release.
• SharpDevelop 4.2 – Christoph Wille announces the release of the SharpDevelop 4.2 IDE. This release brings .NET 4.5 targeting support, an updated UI, support for ASP.NET MVC 3, WCF Service References, Improved JavaScript editing capabilities and much more.
• Knockout 2.1.0 released – Steve Sanderson highlights the release of Knockout JS 2.1.0, the latest version of this MVVM JavaScript implementation. This new release includes support for CommonJS and Asynchronous Module Definition, a bunch of new features, and the usual bugfixes and improvements.

Information

• ConcurrentQueue<T> holding on to a few dequeued elements – Stephen Toub discusses the behaviour of the ConcurrentQueue data structure when removing elements from it, and how it keeps references to the dequeued items due to how it is intended to operate.
• OrmHate – Martin Fowler discusses a current theme in the development space, Object Relational Mapper ‘bashing’, looking at some of the charges leveled against the ORM and looking at the alternatives both in terms of rolling your own, and changing the way in which we structure data in applications.
• Simple.Data and VB.Net The final queries – Christiaan Baes rounds out his mini-series on the use of the Simple.Data Micro ORM with a look at some more complex queries comparing the VB.NET and SQL created.
• Your WebAPP’s Worst Performance Bottleneck Maybe in the Stylesheet – Peter Qian discusses how end user performance of Web Applications can actually have quite a lot to do with the implementation of your applications style sheets, discussing the use of CSS selector profiler tooling to help identify performance problems in complex selectors.
• Say goodbye to Azure (The name only… all the services live on). Removing &quot;Azure&quot; from Windows Azure Service names usage records – Greg Duncan highlights the news that Microsoft are dropping the Azure name from the product line, making the names of the services somewhat shorter and simpler. The email actuality talks about the ‘usage record downloads’ so I’m not too sure how far the removal of ‘Azure’ actually runs,
• A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 2 of ?) – Michael Crump continues his series looking at the world of ASP.NET MVC 4 from the point of view of a XAML developer, looking at mobile web application development, and adding some more features to his sample application.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Poking around EF5 – Geff Lombardi is visiting the Southampton NxtGenUG on Thursday 24th May for a session looking at Entity Framework 5, looking at the new features of the latest version including enum, table value function, spatial and code first migrations.
• DDD10 – September 1st 2012 – Conference Home – The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper conference in Reading is returning for its 10th outing on Saturday 1st September, and the call for speakers has opened already, so if you are interested in speaking at the conference get your session proposals in (Note: Site seems to be missing lots of content this morning, so might be worth hanging back on submitting until it gets sorted)

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Update: Fixed the Link to ‘Updated NUnit Plugin for VS11 Released’ – thanks to Scott Peterson for letting me know via the comments

Software

• Updated NUnit Plugin for VS11 Released – Peter Provost highlights the announcement from Charlie Poole of an updated NUnit Test runner adapter for Visual Studio 11 Beta, allowing you to successfully run tests written using NUnit from inside VS11
• Babel Obfuscator 5.5 Released – Alberto Ferrazzoli announces the release of Babel Obfuscator 5.5 with added support for Windows 8 Developer Preview and the Visual Studio 11 Beta, Silverlight 5, along with a stack of improvements to the Obfuscator implementation.
• API Improvements made in SignalR 0.5 – David Fowler highlights the 0.5 release of SignalR and discusses some of the API changes made since previous versions.
• Introducing Humanizer – Mehdi Khalili introduces his latest project, a library which takes strings, enums and dates and turns them into human readable strings, dealing with things such as the naming styles for BDD tests.
• Announcing YUI 3.5.1 – The Yahoo! YUI team announces the release of YUI 3.5.1, available as download or via the CDN, and providing a number of bugfixes over the previous 3.5 release.
• Sample Browser v5.1–a small refresh with support of Windows 8 Consumer Preview – Jialiang Ge announces the latest release of the All-In-One Code Framework Samples Browser which adds support for running it on Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows Server 8 Beta.

Information

• GUID guide, part three – Eric Lippert continues with his discussion of the Global Unique Identifier discussing the privacy concerns with using location and time as a factor in GUID generation, rounding off the series with a nice summary of key take aways about GUIDs.
• The perils of conditional mutability – Jon Skeet discusses some investigation into performance issues with the test for his Noda Time project discussing how some issues with invarient culture and mutability of types caused issues.
• A look at the CLR 4.5, Improved Large Object Heap Allocator, Server GC Background Mode and Auto NGen – Greg Duncan highlights a nice article on some of the improvements in .NET 4.5 for the Kernel – large object heap, and garbage collection, and which also discusses the automatic NGen performed on Windows 8 for assemblies in the GAC, helping to improve application performance.
• JavaScript for the C# Guy: The Global Object – Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at JavaScript Development from the point of view of a C# .NET Developer, discussing the concept of the global object in JavaScript.
• Simple.Data and complex types: one to many & PetaPoco: Mapping related objects – Christiaan Baes and Eli Weinstock-Herman continues their respective series looking at the implementation of data access using the micro ORMs Simple.Data and PetaPoco.
• WCF Data Services, now with more releases! – The WCF Data Services Team discusses the recent changes to their development practices and methodology which has lead to more rapid releases, the adoption of semantic versioning, and distribution via Nuget.

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