The Morning Brew

Software

• MEF and TPL Dataflow NuGet Packages for .NET Framework 4.5 – Immo Landwerth announces the release of the RTM versions of The Managed Extensibility Framework and Task Parallel Library DataFlow NuGet Packages, These components complement the .NET 4.5 RTM release.
• Lucene.Net becomes top-level project at Apache – The H Open highlights the news that the Lucene.NET project has graduated from the Apache Incubator status, and is now a fully fledged top-level Apache Project.
• Bootstrap 2.1.0 released – The Twitter Bootstrap team announce a new update to Twitter BootStrap, their HTML layouit framework. This release while being a point release contains a large number of improvements and features along with over 120 bugfixes.
• NUnitLite for Silverlight – Charlie Poole discusses the latest progress on NUnitLite for Silverlight, a Silverlight based testing framework which allows the testing of Silverlight code from within Silverlight

Information

• About signing assemblies, GAC and friends – Ran Wahle discusses the ins and outs of signing assemblies and placing them in the Global Assembly Cache, and also takes a look at some of the problems that signing can cause for people working with your assemblies.
• Visual Studio project compatibility and VisualStudioVersion – Sayed-Ibrahim-Hashimi discusses the project compatibility features of Visual Studio 2012 which allows you to work with solutions and projects in both VS2012 and VS2010, looking at how the project file structure is changed and discussing some possible problems you may encounter.
• "Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (Second Preview)" 537 page PDF now available (and still free) – Greg Duncan highlights the free PDF version the second preview version of Kraig Brockschmidt’s book ‘Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript’ which includes 12 out of the 17 planned chapters and provides a great learning resource.
• An Introduction to ASP.NET Web API – Rick Strahl shares a nice introduction to the new ASP.NET Web API included in the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 / .NET 4.5, walking through the use of the features of this platform covering everything from output formats to exception handling.
• Windows Azure Media Services and the London 2012 Olympics – Scott Guthrie discusses how the Windows Azure Media Services where utilized by a number of broadcasters for their online Olympic Games broadcasts, discussing some of the features which made it so successful.
• Visual Studio 2012 Metro Styles for WPF – Winfried Lötzsch shares a set of stylings for WPF applications which give a similar look and feel to that of Visual Studio 2012 in this CodeProject article.

Community

• Visual Studio 2012 Virtual Launch Event — September 12, 2012 – Zain Naboulsi highlights the official Visual Studio 2012 Launch Event which will be taking place ‘virtually’ on 12th September.
• Central Texas GiveCamp needs volunteers – The good folks over at HeadSpring are organising a weekend long GiveCamp event in Central Texas next month and are now looking for people to volunteer their services as designers and developers for the event.
• Learn how to create Windows 8 apps that could change the way people live their lives – In a similar vein Lee Stott highlights an event organised by dev4good, TheGivingLab.org and Givey.co.uk which is technology themed for Windows 8, taking place on 8th September in London.

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Software

• Releasing Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers Core 1.2 – Pranav Rastogi announces the release of an update to the Universal Providers (membership) which shipped in the Visual Studio 2012 RTM release. As things like Universal Providers are all now shipped as NuGet Packages it is easy to get the update, simply update the package using the easy to follow instructions
• EFMVC App Migrated to Visual Studio 2012 RC and ASP.NET MVC 4 RC – Shiju Varghese announces the migration of his sample application which demonstrates Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC to Visual Studio and ASP.NET MVC 4. As always, sourcecode is available from the project’s CodePlex site.

Information

• Inside the DLR – Invoking methods – Simon Cooper continues his series exploring the way the Dynamic Language Runtime works under the hood, taking a look at the actual invoking of methods on dynamic objects, discussing callsite caching and how the whole process gives near static type performance.
• Bandwidth, Priority, and Service Contracts – Udi Dahan discusses the actual capabilities of those Gigabit network cards you generally find in servers, looking at what gigabit means in practice, and what happens to your applications when you start to run out of network capacity
• ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms Tutorial Series Published – 10 Tutorials – ASP.NET WebForms received some considerable improvements in .NET 4.5 and Erik Reitan highlights tutorial series which covers many of the new features
• How integrate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft Account with your ASP.NET MVC application – Ugo Lattanzi takes a look at implementing authentication using the universal providers released as a part of ASP.NET 4.5 (and updated – see above)
• Web API [Queryable] current support and tentative roadmap – Alex D James gives an overview of what aspects of the OData Queryable features are supported currently in WebAPI, and discusses where the future development effort may go.
• Windows 8 apps for the PhoneGap developer–Motion and orientation – Pla.NET Southeast! – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Glen Gordon continues his series looking at Windows 8 Application Development from the point of view of someone familiar with PhoneGap development, taking a look at working eith the accelerometer access in this part.
• Testing Windows 8 apps using Visual Studio 2012 – Rui Sun, Andre Hamilton and a whole host of contributors discuss the testing of Windows 8 Applications, looking at manual testing, unit, integration testing and exploratory testing using Visual Studio 2012
• Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Refactor Your Code – Chris Eargle discusses why you really should refactor your code, looking at the 5 most compelling reasons to do so

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Information

• Upgrading from Visual Studio 2012 RC to RTM – Heath Stewart discusses the supported upgrade path from VS2012 RC to VS2012 RTM, useful information for those who have yet to take the plunge and upgrade.
• 19 Videos To Get You Up To Speed With VS 2012 and .NET 4.5 this Weekend! – Mitch Pronschinske highlights 19 different videos covering .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012 features covering ASP.NET Web forms, Entity Framework, IDE enhancements, MVC4 and much more.
• An, Er, ‘Interesting’ Visual Studio 2012 Colour Theme – Ken Cox warns against hacking the VS2010 Visual Studio Colour Theme editor into VS2012, after ending up with an interesting colour scheme in his IDE.
• Using JSHint inside Visual Studio – the basics – Steve Sanderson discusses JSHint, a liniting tool for JavaScript which integrates nicely into the Visual Studio IDE. In this article Steve also discusses the importance of Linitng code to spot the subtle errors which are difficult to spot when reading code manually
• One (more) ASP.NET – Paul Stovell discusses the ASP.NET landscape, with particular view to ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebAPI, expressing his concern about the divergence of MVC and WebAPI, and how features in one apply in the other too
• What’s really new in ASP.NET MVC 4 (not much) – Max Toro takes a look at what is new in ASP.NET MVC 4 concluding that this release is a consolidation with a few new features and a number of features which exist in their own right as separate modules / packages.
• Build Single Page Apps – Part 6 – JavaScript Modules and Italian Food – John Papa continues his series looking at the construction and best practices for Single Page Applications, taking a look at parceling code up into modules.
• Unit Testing WinJS: First Steps – Christopher Bennage discusses the unit / integration testing of WinJS applications looking at using the Mocha testing framework.
• Entities, Models, and Architecture – Chris Eargle discusses his opinions and recent research on the structuring of software using entities and models, following on from recent discussions in the community about getting data from databases and where the layers of abstraction should be between the database and your application and presentation code.

Community

• Exclusive benefits for those who publish a Windows 8 app before GA – Windows 8 Launch Publisher Programme! – Sarah Lamb highlights a UK programme encouraging and rewarding developers for getting applications into the Window 8 App Store before the general availability release at the end of October.
• Tech.Days Windows Server 2012 Camp – Lee Stott highlights a series of TechDays events being organised by the UK IT Pro team, with events looking at Windows Server 2012 taking place in London, Birmingham, Southampton and Manchester

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