The Morning Brew

Windows Phone 8

• Meet Windows Phone 8 – The Windows Phone team introduce their latest version of the Windows Phone platform, giving a taste of some of the phones, features and applications coming on the new version of the platform
• Announcing the release of the .NET Framework for Windows Phone 8 – Pracheeti Nagarkar introduces the .NET CLR for Windows phone, which brings the core CLR to the Windows Phone 8 platform, increasing flexibility and performance available, as well as bringing advanced language and framework features to the Windows Phone platform.
• Introducing Windows Phone SDK 8.0 – The Visual Studio and Windows Phone Teams announce the release of the Windows Phone 8 SDK, which comprises of an Express Edition of Visual Studio 2012 dedicated to WP8 development, the emulators, Expression Blend for Windows Phone, Team Explorer and XNA Game Studio
• Building Apps for Windows Phone 8 – Somasegar reflects on the new Windows Phone 8 platform and the development tooling available as a part of the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK.
• Windows Phone Developer registration costs $8 – Wriju highlights a limited time offer which will allow you to register for a Windows Phone Developer account for just $8. The offer lasts for just 8 days, and is provided by way of a refund (so you still initially pay the full registration fee).
• Windows Phone SDK 8.0 now available for download – Aaron Stebner shares a collection of links to the various downloads for the Windows Phone 8 SDK, along with highlighting release notes and discussing the installation process.
• Windows Phone Toolkit – Dr. Z highlights the latest release of the Windows Phone Toolkit, a community collection of components to help Windows Phone Developers get the maximum productivity in their projects. This release updates the libraries for maximum compatibility with the WP7.1 and WP8 platforms.

Software

• Bootstrap 2.2.0 released – The BootStrap team announce the release of Bootstrap 2.2.0. This release was previously scheduled to be released as 2.1.2, however the scope of the changes made them reconsider and make it a more significant release.
• OData Client Tools for Windows Phone Apps Now Available – The WCF Data Services Team announce the release of the OData Client Tools for Windows Phone 8, released separately from the Windows Phone SDK this separate download gives you an easy client experience for working with OData based services in your WP8 applications.

Information

• Synchronizing webpages across devices with SignalR – Eric Hexter takes a look at building a UI for multiple devices which can be loaded on each device and have its state synchronised with changes from one being passed to the others using the SignalR Library.
• //build/ today with open source frameworks on Windows Phone 8 – Olivier Bloch highlights some of the Open Source projects featured at //build which are available for use and support the Windows Phone 8 platform.
• Single Key Multiple Values Data Structure for one to many mapping – Saurabh Nijhawan highlights one of the less well known data structures available in the .NET Framework, looking at the Lookup collection.
• Visual Studio Little Wonders: Box Selection – James Michael Hare deviates from his usual Little Wonders series to take a look at some less well known features of Visual Studio

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1222

Due to an early start at work this morning today’s edition is a little later than usual…

Software

• Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 – Final CTP – Brian Harry highlights the release of the final CTP of Update 1 for Visual Studio 2012. This release offers a range of improvements across the product, and Brian highlights the ones that particularly apply to TFS.
• Download ASP.NET MVC 4 for Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1 – Microsoft Downloads has a download availablw which brings ASP.NET MVC RTM to Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Web Developer 2010 SP1.
• Knockout 2.2.0 released – Steve Sanderson announces the release of Knockout JS 2.2.0, a release which has focused on adding new features, improving performance, fixing bugs, and also improving the architecture of Knockout.
• Your Visual Studio, Your Colors – The Visual Studio Team announce the availabiluity of an extension which allows you to customise the colour scheme of the Visual Studio IDE
• Free ebook: Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – Microsoft Press highlights the availability of the free PDF e-Book of Programming Windows 8 Applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript, offering over 800 pages of excelent free content.
• Windows Phone 8 Development Internals (Preview 1) available now – Microsoft Press also announce the availability of the first preview of the Windows Phone Developerment Internals book, available at a low cost purchase for the preview versions.

Information

• Design patterns in the test of time: Prototype – Ayende continues his series of posts looking at the orignial Gang of Four design patterns with a look at the Prototype pattern which manages the creation of objects which are based on an existing object
• Continuous Deployment with Windows Azure Websites and Bitbucket – Sandrino Di Mattia takes a a look at applying continuous deployment with Windows Azure Websites using the BitBucket repository hosting
• Links to .NET Framework 4.5 deployment guides – Aaron Stebner highlights the availability of the .NET 4.5 Framework deploymetn guides, which give guidance and advice on deploymnet, the use of redistributatble packages, installation, packaging, and much more
• The Complete Guide to Building HTML5 games with Canvas & SVG – David Rousset takes a look at making use of the HTML5 Canvas and SVG graphics to create games in the browser (and beyond), discussing performance, physics, and touch events, highlighting frameworks, and some example games.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1221

Software

• Announcing the Windows Azure SQL Data Sync October Update – Gregory Leake announces the release of an updated edition of the Windows Azure SQL Data Sync. This update allows for multiple sync servers within a single subscription, allowing for sync groups and hubs in different regions.
• Sound Code: NAudio 1.6 Release Notes (10th Anniversary Edition!) – Mark Heath announces the release of NAudio 1.6, and also celebrates the 10th anniversary of the project starting. This release addresses a number of issues in 1.5, and adds a bunch of new features, see the change notes for the full set.
• Tools To Simulate CPU / Memory / Disk Load – The Way I See It – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Shinva takes a look at some tools which aim to simulate three different types of system load, looking at CPUStress for generating CPU load, TestLimit for adding in memory pressure, and SQLIO for generating disk load

Information

• A Web Developer’s Look at the MVC4 Request Pipeline – James Chambers takes a trip down the ASP.NET MVC 4 pipeline discussing the various stages of request processing provided for within the MVC pipeline, illustrating with code samples which highlight the use of some of the features.
• ASPNET WebAPI REST Guidance – Josh Reuben shares some useful notes on implementing REST like service APIs using the ASP.NET Web API, discussing the various key concepts behind RESTful services, and looking at how they map to ASP.NET WebAPI concepts.
• MSDN Magazine November Issue Preview – Michael Desmond gives a taste of what is to come in November’s edition of MSDN Magazine, discussing some of the articles coming from a variety of excellent writers
• Building ASP.NET applications using Knockout.js with a server side defined view model – CodeProject – Paolo Costa takes a look at combining an ASP.NET application with client side data binding using the Knockout.js framework, illustrating with a simple sample application in this CodeProject article.
• Do Not Optimize Without Measuring – Alois Kraus discusses one of the (if not the) most important concepts of performance optimizing – make sure you measure where and what the performance is like before you optimize.
• Initial thoughts on some new-fangled things part 1 – Jeremy D Miller gives his take on some of the more cutting edge technologies, discussing the use of Document Databases, Automated Testing, Command Query Responsibility Separation, and some thoughts on eventual consistency,

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Get your head in the clouds! – The NxtGenUG in Cambridge welcome Andy Cross and Richard Conway for an introduction to working in the cloud using Windows Azure, giving an introduction to all aspects of cloud services on the Azure platform including management, diagnostics, tooling and running sites on Azure Websites.

Comments Off on The Morning Brew #1220