The Morning Brew

Update: The HTML Gremilins struck this morning, rendering the link to Simon Coopers article broken – Its fixed now – thanks to @monkeyonahill and @leppie and OdedCoster for letting me know.

Software

• Modernizr 2.6 released – The Modernizr Team announce the release of version 2.6 of Modernizr. This version includes a number of new detection tests addressing issues with testing for geolocation, web sockets, flexbox, WebGL, along with new tests for blob-constructor, advanced CSS background properties and much much more.
• Version 0.8.3 (Stable) – The Node.js team announced the release of Version 0.8.3 last week, a release which updates the V8 engine and npm, along with addressing a number of reported issues.
• V3 Final Release – Project "a CQRS Journey" – The Patterns and Practices CQRS team deliver their 3rd and final psuedo production release of the ‘Contoso Conference Management System’ a sample built with CQRS principles, and exploring the use of CQRS in real world software development where multiple releases are made.
• Adobe PhoneGap 2.0 Released – Adobe announce the release of PhoneGap 2.0, including command line support for tooling for Android, iOS and Blackberry, improved documentation, Cordova WebView and Cordovajs.

Information

• Inside the DLR – Callsites – Simon Cooper digs into the .NET Dynamic Language Runtime, discussing how the DLR sits on top of the CLR providing a means for dynamic code to co-exist with static typed code, and looking at the key concept of Callsites
• Roslyn Code Quoter tool – generating syntax API calls to generate any C# program – Kirill Osenkov discusses code generation on the Roslyn CTP, looking at the alternatives to get to a syntax tree ranging from parsing strings of code to using the fluent API to build up code, sharing a sample which generates the syntax API calls for any program.
• Weak Event – Bnaya Eshet discusses a common cause of memory leaks, in the form of events, and discusses how weak referenced events provide a solution where the event handler is allowed to be garbage collected if needed.
• Latency: The New Web Performance Bottleneck – Ilya Grigorik discusses the problem of latency in web applications. While I wouldn’t consider this to be anew problem the discussion here is a good one, with some interesting discussion occurring in the comments.
• How to make a library portable and data binding friendly at the same time? – Ron Jacobs takes a look at building libraries for use on multiple platforms using the portable class luibrary functionality, as well as exploring how you can add eas data binding into your library for any platform which supports it.
• New Blob Constructor in IE10 – Sharon Newman discusses the Bob constructor and Blob Builder interface available in Internet Explorer 10 which supports the in-progress work on the File API.
• JavaScript Exactly Equal – Joe Mayo gives a nice introduction to the triple equals operator in JavaScript, explaining its use in simple terms.
• Backbone.js: Hacker’s Guide – Alex Young shares a nice introduction to Backbone,js approaching it from the point of view of looking at the source of backbone and learning about how it works from there.
• Partially Applied Functions In JavaScript – Derick Bailey discusses the use of partial function application in writing JavaScript in a functional programming style, discussing the concept and looking at a sample use of it
• Using the ASP.NET Health Monitoring Provider to Secure Your Application in the Case of an Attack – Ricardo Peres takes a look at the ASP.NET Health Monitoring features, and discusses how it can be used to provide a security lock down by monitoring events for failed logins and having your application respond accordingly.
• Rant: SignalR, Crazyiness, Head Butting & Wall Crashing – Ayende discusses his experiences of attempting to fit SignalR into RavenDB to provide real time change notification, and discusses the problems he ran into.
• The 5 thing to immediately grab from EF Open Source – Felice Pollano highlights 5 interesting areas of the Entity Framework Code released as open source last week.

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Update: I mistyped Arturo Toledo’s Twitter handle this morning to get his full name resulting in me mis-crediting his article – apologies to Arturo, and thanks to @robfe for letting me know

Software

• Entity Framework and Open Source – The Entity Framework Team announce the exciting news that the Entity Framework is the latest Microsoft Framework to be made open source, with the project hosted on CodePlex.
• Entity Framework and Open Source & Entity Framework Magic Unicorn (and much more!) is now open source with take backs – Scott Guthrie and Scott Hanselman share their view of the release of Entity Framework as open source, with Scott Hanselman taking a look at future EF async functionality too.
• Windows 8 gets a date: 10/26 – Todd Bishop highlights the announcement of the official date for the Windows 8 General Availability release.

Information

• So you want to contribute to EF? Part 1: Introduction, Part 2: The code , Part 3: Testing, Part 4: Developer experience & Part 5: High-level architecture – Arthur Vickers, a developer on the Entity Framework Team kicks off a series of posts looking at the Entity Framework with a view to assisting developers to get involved with the project and contribute to the framework
• Choosing an ORM strategy – Jimmy Bogard discusses the decision making when it comes to choosing and applying an Object Relational Mapper in your software projects, suggesting that the different data access strategies address different problems, and that we should choose the best one(s) for the task at hand rather than having high expectations of one single solution.
• Introducing Service Bus for Windows Server (Service Bus 1.0 Beta) – Manoj Talreja takes a look at the Service Bus for Windows Server Beta release announced earlier this week, exploring what the service bus is, and how it works.
• When is a non-breaking language fix, breaking? – Lucian Wischik discusses how even the most seemingly safe change to things like compilers can have negative impacts, discussing some recent changes to the compilers in VS2012, and looking at how this non-breaking change can, in extreme situations, still cause a break.
• 24 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design – #9 Layout & Composition in Windows Phone – Part II – Arthur Vinícius Arturo Toledo continues his series on Windows Phone Metro Design with a look at the art and science of designing tiles for the Windows Phone
• Want To Build Win8/WinJS Apps? You Need To Understand Promises – Derick Bailey discusses the aysnc programming style in JavaScript looking initially at callbacks and then moving on to discuss the concept of Promises
• How To Debug GC Issues Using PerfView – Ben Watson discusses the use of PerfView to help you profile, understand and diagnose performance issues relating to Garage Collection, looking at some common scenarios and how to investigate.
• PerfView tutorials gathered as a Channel 9 series – Vance Morrison highlights a series of tutorials from Charles Torre on Channel9 looking at the use of PerfView

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Software

• Benchmarque – Comparative Benchmarking for .NET – Chris Patterson announces the first release of Benchmarque, a .NET Library to assist in performing comparative benchmarks. This is an interesting library, wrapped up in a NuGet Package containing Powershell scripts to perform the actual comparison in the IDE.

Information

• Windows Azure Storage – 4 Trillion Objects and Counting – The Windows Azure Storage Team celebrate a significant milestone, reaching 4 trillion objects stored. The team also share some other statistics on the numbers of requests served, and the growth they have been experiencing.
• Walkthrough: Automated deployment to Amazon EC2 with TFS Preview, MyGet and Octopus Deploy – Paul Stovell discusses how combining his Octopus Deployment service with TFS Preview an provide automated deployment from your hosted TFS project into the Amazon, walking through the steps to achieve this.
• ASP.Net Web API and using Razor the next step – Fredrik Normén continues looking at the use of Razor with WebAPI, in this post exploring how a custom formatter can be used to give rendering in HTML when accessed from the browser
• Customize Json result in Web API – Ugo Lattanzi continues his look at Json in Web API, looking at how you can change how the serialization of the Json output occurs.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Eager Loading Multiple Collections – Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at some of the pitfalls you might encounter when working with NHibernate, looking at how you can better control the loading of collections to avoid cross joins.
• Dipping Your Toes in the SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 Preview Goodness – Jan Tielens shares a nice round up of the links relating to the Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 release previews.
• Troubleshooting SQL index performance on varchar columns – Jimmy Bogard discusses an interesting performance problem he encountered with indexes and the use of an ORM caused by a difference in data type (ANSI vs Unicode). Definatly one to be aware of.

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