The Morning Brew

Slightly late edition today as I’m on leave, and had a late but fun night delivering a User Group presentation at the Shropshire Dev Net Usergroup last night. Many thanks to the groups organiser (Martin Evans) for a well run evening, and to the audience who were all very open and engaging, and very generous with the evaluation scores too 🙂

If you are in the area I thoroughly recommend checking out the Shropshire Dev Net group.

Software

• Noda Time v1.0 released – Jon Skeet announces the 1.0 release of Noda Time, a port (and then some) of the Java Joda Time library which aims to make handling the suprising complexity of Time data in your applications easier. As Jon suggests in this post, even if you can’t use Noda Time in your application there is a lot you can learn by reading the code, or userguide.
• Productivity Power Tools 2012 – The Visual Studio IDE Teams announce the release of the Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools 2012, an Visual Studio extension which brings a number of great and very useful additional features to the IDE. The 2010 version of this extension was one of my ‘Must Have’ extensions and I’m sure this one will be the same for 2012.
• SQL Server 2012 SP1 Is Now Available! – The SQL Server team announce the release of Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2012. As is usual for such an update this one rolls together all the hotfix and cumulative updates to date into one convientent package.
• SQL Server Data Tools – November 2012 is now available – Charles Sterling highlights the release of the November update for the SQL Server Data Tools, available for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012, bringing some additional features, and updated components to reflect the SQL Server SP! release.
• Toastr 1.0.3 Available – John Papa announces the release of Toastr 1.0.3, an update to this JavaScript notification library he has created with Hans Fjällemark which provides a really easy way to create ‘Toast’ notifications in your jQuery powered web pages.

Information

• Windows Phone 8: Evolution of the Runtime and Application Compatibility – Abhinaba Basu discusses the changes to the Windows Phone platform architecture in Windows Phone 8, and discusses how the team ensured application compatibility between WP7 and WP8 even with the substantial changes
• 8 days of Windows Phone 8 | Day 8: Wallet and In-App purchases – Geert van der Cruijsen rounds out an 8 part series on Windows Phone 8 Development, covering the SDK, Live tiles and lock screen, new features of the Emulator, the new screen resolutions, Speech, proximity and in application purchases,
• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #8: Local and Roaming Data – Jeff Blankenburg pressses on with his 31 days series looking at Windows 8 Development, taking a look at storing settings and data in the local and roaming profiles
• A non-traditional “Hello World” app with Windows 8 – Amar Nityananda walks through the creation of a (slightly embelished) hello world application for Windows 8, focusing on scaling the UI, handling the different views, and making use of tiles, splash screen, and the share charm.
• Windows 8 Notifications: Push Notifications via Windows Azure Web Sites (Part 1) – Jim O’Neil kicks off a new series of posts looking at creating a cloud backend on Windows Azure Websites to power the push notifications in a Windows 8 Application
• Understanding C# async / await (2) Awaitable / Awaiter Pattern – Dixin continues a series of posts on the async / await functionality available in .NET 4.5, discussing what makes something awaitable, looking at the requirements and how they are implemented on a type.
• Using Private Extension Galleries in Visual Studio 2012 – Jakob Ehn discusses the Inmeta Visual Studio Gallery Service, an open source project on CodePlex which provides a way for you to host your own Visual Studio Extension gallery, allowing you to have internal extensions made easily available to a development team.
• Design patterns in the test of time: Decorator – Ayende continues his Design Patterns ‘revisited’ series with a look at the decorator pattern which allows behaviour to be added to existing objects, one of the patterns that he feels is still as useful today as it was when first proposed.
• 11 Things I Learned By Studying the Metro UI CSS Files – Chris Love takes us on a detailed discussion of 11 things he learn by reviewing the Metro style application CSS files included in in the Windows 8 SDK for creating HTML powered Windows 8 applications.
• Enhancements to Windows Azure Active Directory Preview – Alex Simons announces the release of some further enahancements to the Windows Azure Directory Services Preview, adding a variety of features including Sign Out for WS-Federation in WebSSO, differential query in the graph API, a new 100% managed code Windows Azure Authentication Library.
• Provisioning a Windows Azure Active Directory Tenant as an Identity Provider in an ACS Namespace – Vittorio Bertocci discusses how the new preview of the Windows Azure Active Directory makes it possible to provision a Windows Azure Active Directory tenant as an identity provider, giving the background to this type of problem, and walking through the process step by step.
• Powering Tiles with PowerShell… Creating Shutdown/Restart/Logoff Windows 8 Tiles with PowerShell – Greg Duncan highlights a Script Center sample which provides PowerShell code which allows you to have Shutdown, log off, Restart as tiles on the Windows 8 Start Menu (screen).
• The Cloud and Amazon Web Services screencast, November PragPub Magazine – The Pragmatic Bookshelf give an update on whats been going on for them, and announce the release of the November Edition of PragPub Magazine, covering a range of programming topics from threading to Haskell, available now in a variety of electronic formats.

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