The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Git Integration with TFS & Introducing Kanban – Brian Harry announces two new capabilities for TFS, new features for visualizing your development flow via Kanban boards and the ability to integrate Git into your TFS based development workflow along with TFS.
• Mono 2.11.3 is out – Miguel de Icaza highlights the latest preview release of Mono 2.11, which includes Entity Framework and .NET 4.5 async features.
• SQL Data Sync Preview 6 is now live! – The SQL Azure Sync Team announce the news that their latest release has now been fully rolled out to production, which brings with it the improvements to performance of provisioning and sync tasks, and improves performance between on-premise and cloud databases.

Information

• Synchronous to Asynchronous Explained – Jeremy Likness discusses the techniques and considerations in taking a synchronous task and converting it to an asynchronous task.
• Reliable job scheduling with NServiceBus and Quartz.NET – Jimmy Bogard takes a look at task scheduling, and looks at a solution which combines Quartz.NET for the scheduling part and NServiceBus for the actual execution of the tasks.
• Release Preview edition of Programming Windows, Sixth Edition available tomorrow – Microsoft Press announce the planned availability of the Preview edition of Programming Windows Sixth Edition, available today as an e-book at a reduced rate.
• Windows 8 Release Preview Guide – Tim Bush highlights a useful guide to some of the major changes and new features of Windows 8. If you’ve not yet tried Windows 8, or simply haven’t experimented much with it this guide will give you some useful tips
• Windows high speed logging: ETW in C#/.NET using System.Diagnostics.Tracing.EventSource – Vance Morrison discusses some of the reasons why you should consider using Event Tracing for Windows as a high performance way of adding logging into your applications

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Software

• dotCover 2.1: Early Access Program is Open – JetBrains announce the opening of their Early Access program for the next release of dotCover. The Early Access Program gives you access to the early pre-release editions of dotCover allowing you to try out the new features and give feedback.
• Great Visual Studio integration – another of the many reasons to upgrade to SpecFlow 1.9 – Marcus Hammarberg highlights SpecFlow 1.9, and particularly the new and improved Visual Studio integration making it ever easier to work with SpecFlow
• A Tool to Remove Source Control Bindings from Visual Studio Solutions and Projects – Saveen Reddy highlights his latest project – VSUnbindSourceControl – a tool to help remove the source control bindings from your projects before you send them on (or move them to a different Version Control tool).
• Unity 3.0 Preview for .NET Framework 4.5 and WinRT – Grigori Melnik highlights the release of an updated build of Unity 3.0 ported to .NET 4.5, and now compatible with the 4.5 RTM release. The build is available as a Pre-Release NuGet package.

Information

• Tiny Happy Features #1 – T4 Template Debugging in Visual Studio 2012, #2 – ASP.NET Web API in Visual Studio 2012 & #3 – Publishing Improvements, chained Config Transforms and Deploying ASP.NET Apps from the Command Line – Scott Hanselman kicks off a new series of posts looking at some of the little improvements to the .NET Framework and Visual Studio in their 4.5 and 2012 releases. The first three of these are a look at the T4 Template debugging, ASP.NET Web API, and configuration transformation improvements.
• Performance Tips: System.Text.StringBuilder and String.Concat & Performance Tips: String.Split – Feng Yuan shares some performance tips for code working with strings, looking at when you should use StringBuilders, and exploring the performance of String.Split.
• To "as" or not to "as" – Kathleen Dollard discusses one of the great questions of C#, should you cast using the as operator or perform the case directly.
• Inline MSIL in C#/VB.NET and Generic Pointers – Roy Lawliet takes a look at how you can mix Intermediate Language with your C# and VB.NET Code to achieve things not usually possible in those languages in this CodeProject article.
• Avoiding Messy Situations With KnockoutJS and Javascript – Rob Connery discusses how a conversation with KnockoutJS creator Steve Sanderson changed his opinions about this client side MVVM framework.
• MVVM with HTML5/KnockoutJS/SVG – Henry Tan Setiawan takes a look at using KnockoutJS along with SVG and HTML5 to create a simple drawing application
• Build Single Page Apps – Part 5 – HTML 5 and ASP.NET Web Optimization – John Papa continues his series looking at the techniques and technologies behind building single page applications in HTML5

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Just discovered that today’s edition hadn’t published successfully – must have closed my laptop lid too quickly 🙁

Software

• jQuery 1.8 Released – The jQuery Team announce the official release of jQuery 1.8. This release adds significantly to jQuery, including significant re-work of the Sizzle selector engine, animations, the auto application of CSS vendor prefixes and much more.
• Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.7.1 – After 18 months of work, the Prototype team have released Prototype 1.7.1. This release has re-worked the DOM library, along with making the library ECMAScript 5 compatible.
• Download: Unity 2.1 for Silverlight – Microsoft release a minor service release of their Unity Dependency Injection Container for both .NET and Silverlight.
• ReSharper 7.0 Plug-ins – Matt Ellis highlights the vibrant plug-in ecosystem surrounding ReSharper, looking at the impressive array of plugins which have already updated to support ReSharper 7.
• FaultTrack is a new kind of bug tracker for .NET developers. by DCOM Productions – DCOM Productions are looking to gain funding for a rather interesting looking take on BugTracking, Metro and Visual Studio styled and Visual Studio integrated bug tracker with integration to the debugger and support for all CLR compliant languages.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Interlocked Increment(), Decrement(), and Add() – James Micheal Hare returns with another post in his C# Little Wonders Series today looking at the Interlocked class and how it allows increment, decrement and addition to be performed on numbers in a thread safe way.
• How to create Web Deploy packages in Visual Studio 2012 – Sayed-Ibrahim-Hashimi discusses the creation of Web Deployment packages in Visual Studio 2012, discussing the reasons for the changes in the process.
• Knockout.js pro tips – working with templates – Filip W. shares some tips on working with databinding and Templates when using Knockout.js discussing the structuring and use of templates in your code, and looking at interactions with bindings.
• Properties in JavaScript: definition versus assignment – Dr. Axel Rauschmayer takes a look at the declaration and assignment of Properties in JavaScript, sharing best practices for working with Properties in different scenarios.
• 24 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design | #23 Perceived Performance – Arturo Toledo returns with the next instalment of his Windows Phone Metro design series, looking today at the various factors which affect perceived performance of your Windows Phone Applications.
• Learning ILAsm, the backbone of .NET – Buddy James takes a look at IL, looking at how you can write and compile it, sharing some simple samples (hello world and a calculator) which illustrate how you can drop down to the lowest level and write the IL directly, bypassing the need for higher level languages such as C#, VB.NET and F#.

Community

• "Unplugged" LIDNUG online talk with me on Friday (August 10th) – Scott Guthrie is pulling up the metaphoric bar stool for another of his Unplugged events hosted by the Linked In .NET Usergroup. The session runs from 2-3:30pm Paciific for open questions and answers, and the audio recording will be available after the event.

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