The Morning Brew

I had a fun evening presenting at my local UG last night, many thanks to all those who came along.

Software

• WMemoryProfiler is Released – Alois Kraus highlights his latest project, a managed memory profiler which aims to be an aid to integration testing, working in .NET from .NET 3.0 to 4.5 across x86 and x64 platforms.
• Announcing the June 2012 Release of the Ajax Control Toolkit – Stephen Walther announces the June 2012 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit available now from NuGet. This release includes significant security related improvements to the HtmlEditorExtender, along with a number of improvements to the ComboBox and other controls.

Information

• Foolish consistency is foolish – Eric Lippert shares a discussion about implicit and explicit typing with the use of var, discussing how as languages evolve there will be times when there will be small inconsistencies due to the way things worked in the past.
• Windows Phone Summit – Channel 9 – Channel 9 have the video content online from last week’s Windows Phone Summit where the main topic of discussion was the Windows Phone 8 platform.
• Infrastructure as a Service Series: Virtual Machines and Windows – Corey Sanders discusses the use of Windows Azure to host Virtual Machines giving an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering as a part of Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Evolution – Deploy Web Sites (WAWS Part 3) – Shawn Xu is continuing his series looking at the evolution of Windows Azure, currently taking a look at deploying websites to Azure, in this post exploring the Git publishing option.
• Single Page App Using Knockout and ASP.NET – Bangla Gopal Surya gives an introduction to using Knockout,JS with ASP,NET to create single page web applications in this CodeProject article.
• Knockout.js Performance Gotcha #3 – all bindings fire together – Ryan Niemeyer has an interesting post discussing one of the potential performance problems you may encounter when working with Knockout.js, discussing some platform changes which are being investigated to help alleviate the issues.
• When Should I Use An ORM? – Mike Hadlow discusses when we should use an Object Relational Mapper in this well thought out article giving a considered view on the problems that ORM aims to address.

Community

• Sheffield NET User Group – The Sheffield .NET User Group are meeting on the evening of Thursday 5th July at the Showroom Cafe Bar in Sheffield, where John Stovin will be giving a session titled "Farewell P/Invoke. Interop in WinRT with C++/CX" and Mark Kirschstein will be delivering a session on "Refactoring Horrible .NET Code"
• Building Better Integration Tests with Colin Bowern – For those on the other side of the world, the Wellington, New Zealand .NET user group are hosting an evening event on Wednesday 4th July with Colin Bowern looking at integration testing using a variety of frameworks.
• NxtGenUG – Building on Windows Azure – The NxtGenUG group running out of Daresbury (Manchester / Warrington / Liverpool areas) welcome Tom Carter for a session looking at the new and exciting features of Windows Azure on the evening of Wednesday 18th July.

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Software

• Mighty Moose Free – Greg Young announces the new that Mighty Moose, the continuous Testing tool for .NET will now be a free product, discussing the reasoning behind the decision, as well as talking a bout the history of the project.

Information

• How we got rid of the database – ;part 5 – Gabriel Schenker continues his series discussing how his team did away with their database by adopting CQRS and Event Sourcing techniques, bringing together the various elements and discussing the solution as a whole in this part.
• ASP.NET Web API vs. ASP.NET MVC "APIs" – Dave Ward discusses the differences between ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API, discussing some of the key additional features that WebAPI offers, such as Content Negotiation, flexibility and a better structure for separation of concerns.
• Using controllers from an external assembly in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W.discusses how you can move controllers into their own assembly in your ASP.NET Web API projects, although its not quite a straightforward as i might be, looking at a solution he derived with help from Henrik Nielsen.
• Safely Test a JavaScript Change Without Touching the Server – A Huge Time Sever – Ed Hintz shares a neat trick for testing your JavaScript code changes on your site without actually uploading them, making use of the Fiddler Debugging HTTP Proxy to serve updated version of your JS.
• My book "Debugging with Fiddler", is now available – Eric Lawrence announces the availability of his in-depth book on Fiddler ‘Debugging with Fiddler’ available in 330 page print and PDF formats. Fiddler is a very useful, and very powerful tool, and this book will be a great reference. Prices start from $10 for the PDF version.
• Developer Guidance for Web Sites with Flash Content in Windows 8 – Rob Mauceri discusses the support for Adobe Flash in Windows 8 versions of Internet Explorer, talking about the new power-optimized, touch-friendly Adobe Flash Player.included in IE10, and discussing how flash will be permitted in the Metro based IE but only for sites listed in compatibility mode.
• Developing a Windows 8 Metro App Part 3: Metro Design & Part 4: My "Reveal a Picture" Algorithm and Basic Code – Jennifer Marsman presses on with her series on building Windows 8 Metro applications with a discussion of UI design in a Metro environment and looking at the code which makes up her ‘reveal a picture’ sample application.
• UI Composition Techniques for Correct Service Boundires – Udi Dahan discusses how composition based UI structure can help lead you towards the correct structure for your backend services

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Software

• Announcing Windows Phone 8 – Joe Belfiore gives the official word on the Windows Phone 8 platform, the next evolution of Windows Phone.
• Did you see Windows Phone 8 Preview? – mbenkov gives an overview of the key feature and changes as a part of the Windows Phone 8 platform announcement
• A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 – Colin Eberhardt gives a developers eye view of the changes in Windows Phone 8 which will impact developers.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Joy of Anonymous Types – James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series looking at C# and .NET features which make our lives as developers easier. In this part he explores the use of Anonymous Types, looking at creating, initializing comparing, using and converting to string.
• Eric Rambles On About C#, Again – Eric Lippert highlights an interview he gave to Rachel Roumeliotis where he discusses async/await, the Roslyn project, performance analysis and engineering discipline, along with sharing his own personal thoughts on where we might go post Roslyn.
• The LightSwitch HTML Client: An Architectural Overview – Stephen Provine gives an overview of the LightSwitch HTML Client, discussing how it is built and the common technologies it leverages, along with discussion of the UI/UX experience.
• Visual Studio 2012 New Features: Solution Explorer – Zain Naboulsi takes a look at the new features of the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio 2012, an area which on initial inspection looks the same as always, but has a number of useful additions included.
• The Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool: A better way to submit bugs – The Visual Studio Team highlight the updated Visual Studio 2012 feedback tool, te best way to submit details of any bugs you encounter in the IDE. Additionally the team discuss the way that bugs are handled.
• Evolution of the Entity Framework: Lesson 2 – K. Scott Allen continues his history lesson looking at the origins and evolution of the Entity Framework, discussing the first version of Entity Framework, and the issues it had.
• Parallel Work in Async MVC Actions – K. Scott Allen also discusses the use of Async in ASP.Net MVC Actions, sharing and explaining some simple examples.
• Managing multiple web service calls with Rx – ‘BenWilli’ discusses how the Reactive Extensions can be used to make much easier the task of calling multiple web services in parallel, and handling all the failures and updates required when the do or don’t return.
• Automated UI Testing Done Right – Mehdi Khalili gives a tast of whats to come in his DDDSydney talk on automated UI testing, looking at how unfriendly prescriptive UI test can be refactored into reusable methods to make your testing much easier.
• Unit Testing with Moles – SumanthP takes a look at making use of the Moles functionality when unit testing code, such as ASP.NET code, which may depend on external objects which you do not control (such as Request, Session, etc).

Community

• NxtGenUG – CQRS and Event Sourcing – Ashic Mahtab is presenting at the NxtGenUG in Coventry looking at the patterns of CQRS and Event Sourcing and how they can help focus you ob requirements for your software and making a simple extensible implementation. The event takes place on Monday 25th June
• The Stack – Liverpool .Net User Group – June 2012 – The Liverpool based Stack Usergroup are meeting on the evening of Monday 25h June at the usual venue of Studio 2, Parr Street, where I will be giving a slightly more relaxed version of my recent DDD South West talk on Web Sockets and SignalR.
• In The Brain of Udi Dahan: Commands, Queries – Skills Matter are hosting another of their ‘In the Brain of’ events on Monday 2nd July where Udi Dahan will be discussing building complex CQRS based applications which support large data sets and parallelism.

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