The Morning Brew

Software

• Version 0.8.2 (stable) – The Node.js team announce the release of version 0.8.2 (stable) which includes updates to npm, along with a variety of fixes for reported bugs. The release is available for all major platforms and also as source.
• More info on the availability dates of Windows 8 for education – Ray Fleming shares the news on the planned release dates for Windows 8 with RTM at the beginning of August, and general availability and Surface coming at the end of October.

Information

• Node.js development with WebMatrix 2 and Express – Steve Sanderson discusses the use of WebMatrix 2 as an IDE for working with Node.js and shares the first of three screencasts looking at building mobile single page applications using Node.
• JavaScript Data Binding Frameworks – Dan Wahlin highlights the multitude of JavaScript Data Binding frameworks which bring rich data binding capabilities to your client side code, discussing the approach needed when working with these types of framework.
• "JavaScript Succinctly" – Another free (reg-ware) eBook from Syncfusion – Greg Duncan highlights another free e-book from the folks over at Syncfusion which, in its 140+ pages, takes a look at the key basics of working with JavaScript, a great primer for the language.
• Integrating Knockout, JSRender, and Tweeter bootstrap with MVC4 – Slava Khristich walks through the use of JSRender templates in a Knockout.Js based ASP.NET MVC4 application, throwing in some use of Twitter’s BootStrap for good measure.
• Twitter Bootstrap styling conflicts with plug-ins like jqGrid and other third part libraries – Renso Hollhumer discusses the problem of having too generic CSS selectors like in Twitter’s BootStrap, and some of the problems it can cause with other libraries, looking at a solution to the problem.
• Implementing synchronous MediaTypeFormatters in ASP.NET Web API – Pablo M. Cibraro looks at the implementation of your own MediaTypeFormatters in ASP.NET WebAPI, discussing how the framework makes use of the Task Parallel Library to make them Asynchronous, and explores how you can take some synchronous work and make it fit this model.
• CLR Hosting – Customizing the CLR – Part 2 – Mattias Högström continues his look at hosting the .NET CLR in a custom process, looking in this part at how you can manipulate the CLR and provide your own exception logging, increased security, assembly loading, and memory handling.
• StreamInsight 2.1, meet LINQ – The StreamInsight Team discuss the use of LINQ, and delve behind the screen of magic to look at how it actually works behind the scenes, before exploring how they have introduced LINQ to perform operations in StreamInsight.
• How important is HTML5 Off Line ? – Joe Stagner discusses the role of Offline support in HTML5, especially how important it is in making good affordable mobile applications.

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Software

• Three Years, Five Million Downloads – Many congratulations to Jialiang Ge and all the other folk behind the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework on hitting the 5 million download mark. This post highlights this achievement and also shares some interesting statistics on who is using the All-In-One Code Framework.
• Hawaii goes v2.0 (as in Project Hawaii Cloud Services SDK 2.0) – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Project Hawaii Cloud Services which include cloud based OCR, Speech to Text, Translation, Text-to-Speech, etc.

Information

• Targeting Multiple Platforms with Portable Code: Overview – Brandon Bray shares a post from Mircea Trofin discussing the portability of code between the different .NET platforms using the portable class library assemblies functionality of Visual Studio.
• MassTransit v2.5.3 Now Supports the TPL – Chris Patterson discusses his efforts to integrate the MassTransit Message Bus with SignalR, and how he ended up adding Task Parallel Library support to MassTransit to enable it to play nicely with SignalR.
• What’s Happening in NUnit – Charlie Poole gives an update on the NUnit Universe, highlighting a planned 2.6.1 release later this month, a new update to the Visual Studio Test Adapter to support the RC release, an update on NUnitLite and the plans for NUnit 3.0
• Is recursion really bad? – Li Chen follow on from a recent tip about increasing Stack Space with a discussion as to whether recursion should be considered a bad thing, discussing the performance improvement that converting to loops gives, and looking at the expense of the additional code required.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Cascades & Lazy Scalar Properties Must Be Auto – Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at some of the potential gotchas in NHibernate, this time looking at the use of Cascade operations, and the use of lazy properties
• Tree Surgeon 2.0 – The future on the T4 Express – Malcolm Anderson follows on from Bil Simser’s recent discussion of the Tree Surgeon project, discussing why he believes that there is still a future for the project in giving a good development tree experience.
• My NuGet Package for Color Conversion (RGB, HSL, HSV, CMYK, XYZ, LAB) – Saveen Reddy shares a NuGet package for conversion of colour codes between the different ways of working with colours.

Community

• Dev Camps (in London) – Phil Cross highlights the Dev Camp events, initially taking place in London in mid to late July, which will be covering all things Windows Phone and Windows 8

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Software

• xunitcontrib-resharper 0.6 – Theory support! – Matt Ellis announces the latest update to the ReSharper Xunit.NET test runner which now supports for the Theory style attributes, bringing the support ot ReSharper 6.1 and 7.0
• New Drop of the Identity Training Kit Shows WIF in .NET 4.5, VS 2012 – Vittorio Bertocci announces the latest release of the Identity Training Kit which updates the kit to .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 RC and uses WIF 4.5

Information

• More C#/.NET Generics Research Project History – The MSR white paper from mid-1999 – Don Syme continues his unearthing and sharing of some of the early research work which went into the .NET 2.0 Generics Implementation, sharing further insights into the evolution and development of the ,NET CLR.
• The Turkish ? Problem and Why You Should Care – Phil Haack discusses the dangers of doing string comparisons the wrong way, illustrating with an interesting feature of the Turkish Language, and goes on to look at how you can use FxCop to ensure that your projects only contain string comparison and other Globalization concerns done correctly.
• FormsAuthentication on ASP.NET sites with the Google Chrome Browser on iOS – Scott Hanselman discusses the new iOS based Chrome browser, highlighting a compatibility issue with earlier versions of .NET (pre-4.5) where forms authentication would always use its cookieless mode, and shares the fix to resolve this.
• FluentAssertions – Unit Testing Made Better – Part 1 – Chris Surfleet takes a look at the FluentAssertions library, available via NuGet, and looks at how it can be used to improve the structure and readability of assertions in your tests.
• CLR Hosting – Customizing the CLR – Mattias Högström takes a look at the process for hosting the .NET CLR in your own process, sharing a simple C++ program which hosts the CLR inside the unmananged code, allowing you to execute .NET code inside the parent application.
• F# Luhny Bin: Luhn Algorithm – Josh Bush takes a look at using F# to implement the Luhn Algorithm, a checksum used in credit card numbers, showing two iterations of the code, showing how F# can be refactored to cleaner versions of code.

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