The Morning Brew

Software

• Free your Typemock… New Typemock Isolator Basic is now available and free (Updated Typemock Isolator Essential & Typemock Isolator Complete also available) – Greg Duncan highlights the free edition of TypeMock Isolator- TypeMock Isolator Basic allows you to test with basic mocking, smart runner and coverage indicator, a great starting point for new projects without legacy code which needs mocking.
• Oak by amirrajan – Oak is a suite of constructs which brings Ruby features and dynamic typed development to the ASP.NET MVC platform, along with its own data access, change tracking and validation framework – looks like an interesting project to explore.
• Ncrunch goes commercial – Christiaan Baes highlights the newly released pricing for NCrunch, the concurrent testing tool for Visual Studio which runs tests as you type your code. Prices will start from $159 for a private individual.

Information

• Is C# a strongly typed or a weakly typed language? – Eric Lippert has a discussion (with himself?) looking at whether C# is a strongly or weakly typed language, discussing how its depends on the viewpoint of the observer to decide which it is.
• Diagnosing Memory Leaks in Managed Windows Store Apps – Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at how memory leaks can occur in Managed Windows Store applications, exploring the processes memory and discussing the many ways in which leaks may occur in Windows Store applications.
• Using ProcDump to Monitor Windows 8 Store Apps – Michael Crump takes a look at using the SysInternals tools ProcDump and Process Monitor to monitor and observe Windows Store applications behaviour.
• Windows 8 Notifications: Push Notifications – Jim O’Neil continues his series of posts looking at Notifications in Windows 8 applications, exploring the use of Push Notifications in this part, discussing the workflow for using them, and some design considerations for their use.
• Introducing RazorPDF – Al Nyveldt shares a look at his project based on the Razor View Engine for building PDF content using the Razor engine, sharing a screencast showing it in use.
• Test Driven Development of a Generational Garbage Collection – Abhinaba Basu discusses the use of Test Driven Development as it was used with the team building the generational garbage collection system for the Windows Phone Mango OS release.

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I had an excellent weekend up at DDD North 2 in Bradford – many thanks to the organisers, sponsors, speakers and attendees for making it another community event that the developer community can be proud of.

Software

• Pre-Order Windows 8 Pro Now!!! – Doug Holland highlights the pricing for Windows 8 Pro, a $69.99 pre order for the boxed product for delivery on release day, and $39.99 for download. UK pricing looks to be similar with the UK Microsoft store offering the boxed product for £49.99 and the download for £24.99
• Announcing Riak on Microsoft Windows Azure – Basho highlight the news that their NoSQL Database product Riak is now available in a fully supported manner on the Windows Azure platform
• Sandcastle Help File Builder – October 2010 release – Tatworth highlights the latest release of SandCastle, the Help File Documentation Generation tool which examines the XML code comments in your assemblies and generates documentation from them.

Information

• HOWTO: Dial up the static on Simple.Data – Mark Rendle takes a look at applying Impromptu-Interfaces to the dynamic types in Simple.Data giving them a more typed feeling in use, discussing how it works using dynamic proxies to provide static typing.
• Inferred Hierarchies and Evaluation Strategies in Simple.Data – Dan Maharry shares another post inspired by the documentation he is working on for Simple.Data, taking a look at the lazy and eager evaluations with joined tables.
• Hacking is child’s play – SQL injection with Havij by 3 year old – Troy Hunt discusses how ‘hacking’ tools like Havij make it very easy to compromise websites using SQL Injection attacks, illustrating the point with his 3 year old, and looking at the availability of information which makes it so easy.
• Greenfield Development with ASP.NET MVC & S#arp Lite – Billy McCafferty returns with a second post in this series on building a new web application with ASP.NET MVC and his S#arpLite framework, looking in this part at the translation of the vision, user stories, and data dictionary into a domain model
• ASP.NET Web API Help Page Part 2: Providing custom samples on the Help Page – Yao continues looking at the capabilities for generating help documentation for your Web API implementations, taking a look at how you can customize and control the samples generated.
• Take your Web API service consumption up to 11 with CacheCow.Client – Ali Kheyrollahi discusses why you might want to consume ASP.NET WebAPI services using his CacheCow client implementation, comparing its use to the standard WinInet functionality.
• .NET Framework Repair Tool now supports diagnosing and repairing .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 setup issues – Aaron Stebner shares another update to the .NET Framework Repair tool which will help diagnose and fix problems with bad .NET installations. This update brings support for .NET 2.0 SP2, 3.0 SP2 and 3.5 SP1, along with the exising .NET 4 support.
• Where is ASP.NET 4.5 …wait Where is .NET 4.5 ? – Shinva reminds us that the .NET framework 4.5 is an inplace update to .NET 4.0 meaning that it won’t appear in lists of CLR versions in IIS or on disk.
• Why you should (almost) never write void asynchronous methods? – Toni Petrina discusses a potential code smell with asynchronous methods which operate in a fire and forget way with a void return value. Some interesting discussion in the comments of this one.
• XAML Binding Basics 101 – Jerry Nixon takes an introductory look at Data Binding in XAML, giving an overview of how you go about using binding in your XAML, the use of converters and the data context, along with highlighting some deeper resources.
• Cudafy Me: Part 1 of 4, Part 2 of 4, Part 3 of 4 & Part 4 of 4 – John Michael Hauck takes a look at how you can convert code to run on the powerful modern graphics hardware which many machines now have, with a look at three implementations of the traveling salesman problem, moving from single threaded implementation through to using the parallel capabilities of the GPGPU.

Community

• DDD attendance leaderboard, where do you rank? – This weekend was DDDNorth 2, a splendid conference, and I plan to pull together a list of related posts later this week (let me know if you’ve posted about DDD North). The Speaker and Helper T-Shirts generated a bit of a buzz with a full list of the DDD Conferences that have occurred on the reverse. Gary Ewan Park is compiling a leaderboard of conferences attended (which I’m currently at the top of, although expecting to have many others above me before long).

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Really looking forward to this weekend at the DDD North 2 Community Conference. I’m there delivering my session on Web Sockets and SignalR, and generally being spoiled for choice with the vast array of other excellent sessions. If you see me there please come and say hello.

Software

• Web Essentials 1.4 released – Mads Kristensen announces the release of Web Essentials 1.4, the latest version of his Visual Studio Extension which adds further support for modern web development to the Visual Studio IDE. This release includes automatic CSS Schema File updates, enhanced support for Modernizr classes in the CSS editor, in IDE minification, CSS and LESS document outline view, enhanced intellisense (including settings to limit to W3C standards only) and much more.
• We did it! Office 2013 RTMs today! – Jerry Nixon highlights the news that Office 2013 has now RTM’d, with enterprise and WinRT device users getting it by the end of the month, and general availability next year

Information

• MSDN subscribers worldwide get Pluralsight Starter Subscription – Brian Harry highlights an awesome offer from MSDN and Pluralsight, offering MSDN Subscribers a free Pluralsight Starter subscription providing access to 25 online courses. To qualify you have to register before 11 December, and sadly there are some restriction on the types of MSDN you have to have (partner programme, *Spark programme and MS FTE MSDN subscriptions don’t qualify)
• Five (so far) free Windows 8 On-demand video training sessions from Jeffrey Richter & Wintellect – Greg Duncan highlights 5 free Windows 8 On Demand training sessions from Jeffrey Richter and Wintellect, looking at Application Architecture & Language Projections, Working with WinRT’s Async API’s, Windows Store App Threading Model, Building the App Package and working with Storage Files & Folders.
• Introducing Rhino.Events – Ayende introduces his latest Open Source Project, Rhino.Events is a .NET library which provides a lightweight and fast embedded Event Store implementation. Source is available on GitHub
• How to call WinRT APIs in Windows 8 from C# Desktop Applications – WinRT Diagram – Scott Hanselman takes a look at how ou can actually call the WinRT APIs from your C# Windows Desktop applications on Windows 8 machines, walking through an example looking at calling Sensor APIs.
• Some excellent free developer books – Succinctly series – Kevin LaBranche highlights a series of free e-books from Syncfusion covering a range of development topics including Git, HTTP, Knockout.js, JavaScript, jQuery and a few more.
• A Beginner’s Tutorial on Implementing IEnumerable Interface and Understanding yield Keyword – Rahul Rajat Singh takes a back to basics look at the IEnumerable Interface and how you should go about implementing and using it, along with a look at the much under used yield keyword.
• Casting is a Polymorphism Fail – Erik Dietrich discusses how the use of casts in polymorphic code hints at a failure to properly implement polymorphism, illustrating with examples.

Community

• Black Marble Events – A Windows Azure Update – The fine folk over at Black Marble are running another of their half day technology briefings on Wednesday 14 November which will be looking at recent developments on the Windows Azure Platform.
• Event: Tech.Days Online in the UK: 30/31 October ˜’12 – Planky highlights the online complement to the IT Pro TechDays events taking place at the end of this month, with content from both days (30/31 October) running online as well.
• Shropshire Dev Net | 7th November – Chris Alcock – Web Sockets and SignalR – On the 7th November I will be taking a trip down to the Shropshire Dev Net usergroup in Telford where I will be delivering my session on Web Sockets and Signal R (possibly for the last time). This is practically the same session that I have delivered at the UK community conferences this year (including DDD North 2 tomorrow), and provides a ‘last chance to see’. I look forward to seeing some of you there.
• DDD North 2 Windows Phone 7 Agenda application – Gary Ewan Park highlights the availability of an agenda application for the DDD North 2 conference for Windows Phone 7. The conference takes place tomorrow, and the app has not yet been approved in the market place, but Gary provides the details of how you can still side load the application onto your developer device.
• Next F#unctional Londoners Meetup – F# on the GPU with Alea.CUDA, Thursday, October 18, 2012 – Don Syme highlights the next F#unctional Londoners event taking place on Thursday 18th October where Dr Daniel Egloff will be taking a look at running F# code on the GPU using Alea.CUDA.

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