The Morning Brew

I’m attending and presenting at DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper 10 in Reading this weekend – if you see me there please come and say hello!

Software

• Get Windows 8 Metro Elements for as little as $1 … crazy, but true! – The Team over at Mindscape are trying out an interesting pricing model for their latest controls library, allowing people to purchase it for a really low price, but with every purchase increasing the price by $1. The current asking price is $75, and the RRP is $799, so its quite a deal at the moment.

Information

• Getting Symbols and Source with ASP.NET Nightly NuGet Packages – Henrik F Nielsen shows how easily you can get the symbols and source debugging assistance for the ASP.NET Nightly Build NuGet release, walking through the steps to get your IDE set up
• Supporting arbitrary types in Azure Mobile Services managed client – simple types – Carlos Figueira discusses how the Azure Mobile Services allow you to add support for your own more complex data types, showing how support for TimeSpans can be implemented as an example.
• Add cloud to your app with Windows Azure Mobile Services – Kirill Gavrylyuk walks through the setup and simple use of Windows Azure Mobile Services to extend your Windows Store Applications into the cloud quickly and easily
• NuGet Perf, Part III – Displaying the Packages page – Ayende continues his series looking at how migrating the NuGet database backend to a document database like RavenDB can make the querying easier and the performance better
• A guide to asynchronous file uploads in ASP.NET Web API RTM – Filip W. takes a looks at uploading files to WebAPI endpoints using .NET 4.0 compatible code, looking at the server side aspects of the file upload and looking at calling it from the client in JavaScript HTML and .NET applications.
• Evolutionary Project Structure – Jimmy Bogard discusses how he is moving away from layering applications using lots of projects, and complex dependency relationships, focusing on good working code and worrying less about the ‘architectural structure’
• Using JSON.NET for dynamic JSON parsing – Rick Strahl discusses how with the release of ASP.NET Web API the JSON.NET library has become the top JSON library for .NET, and takes a look at its use parsing JSON both statically and dynamically.
• Single Page Application with Backbone.js and ASP.NET Web API – Hongye Sun takes a look at building Single Page Applications using ASP.NET Web API server side and Backbone.js on the client, illustrating key points with a simple ToDo application sample.
• Giving Data to JavaScript – K. Scott Allen discusses a couple of techniques for getting data into your JavaScript Code from the server side
• WP to W8: API Mapping – Jared Bienz shares a useful article mapping the various common API themes in Windows Phone and Windows 8 together, providing a jump start on one platform to anyone familiar with the other.
• Keep Public Interfaces away from Children – Anders Abel discusses segregating class interfaces between those presented to users (public) and that available for sub-classes, highlighting areas where these two merge as being an area for concern
• Remember the Atari 2600? Brace yourself because it’s marrying HTML5! – Paul Laberge highlights a partnership between Microsoft, Atari and Grant Skinner which is brings classic Atari games to to HTML5, and making available various useful tutorials, resources and code which we can benefit from along the way

Community

• Hidden Complexity – Mark Rendle discusses the topic for his latest talk which will be getting its first outing at Skills Matter in London next Monday

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1179

Software

• WCF Data Service 5.0.2 Released – The WCF Data Services Team announce the release of WCF Data Services 5.0.2 which addresses a number of reported issues, including NugetPackage dependency versions, improved true and false support in atom, and a variety of reported bugs.
• Simple.Data 0.18 / 1.0.0-rc1 – Mark Rendle announce the release of Simple.Data 0.18 which is also being considered to be the first release candidate for a 1.0 release, with the last bits of issue fixing and documentation improvement stil underway.
• Cry Ping and let loose the dogs of ICMP… CryPing lets you "ping" HTTP, SMTP, POP3 or NNTP services and more – Greg Duncan highlights CryPing, a tool which lets you ping servers in a protocol aware way allowing you to check that HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc servers are responding correctly.

Information

• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates – Jon Galloway discusses the use of SimpleMembership within the ASP.NET 4.5 Webforms and MVC4 releases, discussing the aims of introducing SimpleMembership to replace the previous Role and Membership providers, addressing difficulties people had in using them, and taking a look at how you use SimpleMembership.
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Handler Factories – Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at the extensibility points in ASP.NET, exploring the use of Handler factories to provide handler implementations for your own types of file.
• OData 101: Bin deploying WCF Data Services & OData 101: Using the [NotMapped] attribute to exclude Enum properties – The WCF Data Services team discus two aspects of working with OData in this series of posts, first exploring how the WCF Data Services can be bin deployed, and looking at one of the things which catches people out when doing so, and also discuss using attributes to hide the currently unsupported Enum properties in your Enity Framework models.
• Caching in WCF Services: Part 2 AppFabric distributed cache – Pieter De Rycke follows on from an earlier post looking at using the in-memory cache in ASP.NET to cache WCF service data, looking in this post at how you can scale the caching out to multiple hosts by using the AppFabric Distributed Cache.
• Building an End-to-End Windows Store App – Part 2: Integrating Cloud Services – S. Somasegar shares the second and final part of this series looking at building a simple Windows Store application for Windows8 using the tooling in VS2012 Express and he features of the OS, creating a simple feed reader application.
• Pinning Useful and Obscure Stuff to the Windows 8 Start Menu – Scott Hanselman continues his exploration of Windows 8 looking at how you can make your stuff easier to access using a variety of techniques and pinning the resulting implementations to the new Start Menu
• Build Single Page Apps – Part 9 – Navigation, Transitions, Storage, and Messaging – John Papa continues his series of posts looking at Single Page Application development, exploring the role and implementation of Navigation, transitions, and storage and messaging in single page applications to enhance the user experience and give restore capabilities to your applications.
• NuGet Perf Problems, part I & Part II – Importing To RavenDB – Ayende takes a look at the database queries behind the NuGet performance problems, discussing the complexity of them due in part to the relational data model behind them, before moving on to look at importing the data into RavenDB and exploring how it offers a more performant way of structuring the data.
• How rainbow tables work – Terry Zink gives a brief discussion of how Ranbow TAbles help ‘hackers’ to break passwords which have been hashed for storage in a database.
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Custom Types and Detecting Changes – Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at possible pitfalls you may encounter when working with NHibernate taking a look today at how user types may be used in your data model, discussing how you need to be able to compare the data easily to know if it has changed.

Community

• A Developer’s Guide to Presentations – Zac Gery shares a number of really good tips for presenters new and old – well worth a look if you are doing a usergroup, workplace, or conference presentation.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1178

Software

• Announcing Windows Azure Mobile Services – Scott Guthrie announces the latest innovation from the Windows Azure Team, Windows Azure Mobile Services. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides an easy way to authenticate users, store data, and notify clients across a range of platforms, while utilizing the cloud for scalability.
• ReSharper 7.0.1: Bugfix Update Available – JetBrains announce the release of ReSharper 7.0.1, a bugfix release which addresses issues reported since the RTM release, with a significant focus on memory and performance related issues.
• New Beta of GhostDoc v4 – Tatworth highlights SubMain’s announcement of a beta release of GhostDoc v4, a tool to make documenting your code base easier. V4 includes a number of substantial new features, and includes Visual Studio 2012 compatibility.
• Announcing TouchDevelop v2.10: tutorial videos, code synthesis, trace+replay, and more! – Nikolai Tillmann and the TouchDevelop Team announce their latest release, V2.10. This release is the result of the work for the Team supplemented by some summer interns, and includes new debugging features, editor improvements, and improved documentation.

Information

• Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services – Carlos Figueira, who has been working with the Windows Azure team on the Windows Azure Mobile Services discusses what he feels are the key areas which these services offer best value.
• Evolving the Reflection API – Brandon Bray discusses how the Reflection API has changed in the .NET API set for Windows Store Apps, discussing how the team went about deciding what functionality to include based upon the common usage scenarios, and how they went about re-organising the API
• Async in Entity Framework 6.0 – K. Scott Allen takes a sneak peek at the new Async support coming in Entity Framework 6.0, showing how some of the new methods look in use in common scenarios.
• TFS Shipping Cadence – Brian Harry discusses the TFS team’s development practices and how they have been moving to a shorter release cadence, with planning reaching out to 12-18 months
• Rapid Prototyping, the MVC Working Model – Edward Charbeneau shares some techniques and practices for building good looking functional working prototypes using ASP.NET MVC
• Data Duplication and Replication – Udi Dahan discusses the role of duplicated data in CQRS based architectures, looking at different types of duplicated data (business data and de-normalised data) and discussing how he considers duplicate data in these scenarios.

Community

• DDD North – Agenda Released and Registration Open – The Agenda has now been finalised and released, and Registration has now opened for the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper North conference on Saturday 13th October taking place at Bradford University. Be sure to register quickly for this event as place are sure to fill up quickly.
• Windows 8 Code Weekend – Another reminder for the dev4good organised Windows 8 Code Weekend, running in conjunction with TheGivingLab.org and Givey.co.uk, and taking place on the weekend 8/9th September in London
• How I learned to stop worrying and love my community – Ben Dornis shares his inspiring story of how community involvement really helped him grow as a developer, and encourages you to get involved with your community

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1177