The Morning Brew

Software

• Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is here – The Visual Studio Team announce the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, their first update to the latest Visual Studio / TFS release. Further details can be found in Somasegar’s announcement – , focusing on the big ticket items in the update, Brian Harry -discusses why you should update, and Charles Sterling over on the Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog gives details of the smaller features and improvements across Visual Studio and TFS
• Windows Azure Training Kit – November 2012 – Dr. Z highlights the release of the Windows Azure Training Kit for November 2012, which includes updated labs for the new Azure SDK, Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, a new LAB for Windows 8 consuming Mobile Services, along with all the other great content.
• jQuery UI 1.9.2 – The jQuery UI Team announce the release of their second maintenance release of jQuery UI 1.9, including bug fixes across a number of the UI controls
• Announcing PostSharp 3 CTP – Gael Fraiteur announces the openign of the CTP programme for PostSharp 3, available via the Visual Studio Gallery and NuGet, highlighting some of the new features including Smart Tag support in the IDE, VS2012 Support, support for Windows Store Apps, Silverlight, and Windows Phone and much more.

Information

• Portable Areas three years later – Part 5 – Eric Hexter revisits an old series, taking a look back at the Portable Areas implementation for ASP.NET MVC, and looking at how its has evolved over the past three years
• RabbitMQ On Windows With .NET, A Case Study – Mike Hadlow shares an interesting case study of the use of RabbitMQ in a Windows Based .NET Application he has been working on for a recent client, discussing their use of RabbitMQ and implementation of an opensource .NET wrapper for RabbitMQ
• Ten Ways to Ensure Windows Azure-Based Applications Are Architected for Success – Douglas Chrsytall, Neil Mackenzie & Shay Yannay shares 10 key factors to consider carefully when designing you Windows Azure based applications to ensure that the application architecture is good, exploring everything from performance and scale out to backup and restore.
• Improving LINQ code reusability: Select method – Rui Jarimba discusses factoring out the select part of Linq statements into functions to allow reuse between LINQ Statements and also to aid readability, illustrating with examples.
• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3 – Features) – ‘.ToString(theory);’ discusses the benefits of CSS Precompilers, looking at some of the key features and urging us to consider using such tools in our future projects
• DataBinding performance in WinRT and the Bindable attribute – Jérôme Laban discusses the use of the Bindable attribute in C# classes to allow Metro Applications to generate static meta data, the improvements this gives to data binding performance, and the knock on cost in JITing.
• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #26: Gyrometer – Jeff Blankenburg and Clark Sell continue their joint series on Windows 8 Store Application Development in C#/XAML and HTML/JS respectively with a look at the use of the Gyrometer sensor in applications, sharing sample code to read data from the sensor.

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Software

• TFS Administration Tool 2.2 Released – Grant Holliday announces the latest release of the TFS Administration Tool. This version 2.2 now no longer requires Team Explorer 2010 on the machine it is to be used on, running against the TFS 2012 object model

Information

• How to hibernate async methods (how to serialize Task) – Lucian Wischik discusses why it is impossible to truly serialize a Task, and looks instead at serializing the state of an async method, sharing a sample implementation to illustrate the thoughts outlined in the post.
• Using BlockingCollection To Communicate Between Threads – Mike Hadlow discusses a message passing technique to communuicate between threads using a blocking collection as the communication medium, outlining a few situations where this technique is useful to help prevent cross threading issues.
• ASP.NET Web API and HTTP Byte Range Support – Henrik F Nielsen discusses the support for Range requests in HTTP, outlining its use, and looking at implementing support for range requests in ASP.NET Web API
• Willy’s Cave Dwelling Notes #10 – Managed Extensions Framework (MEF) …simplicity rules! – Willy-Peter Schaub takes a back to basics look at the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), giving a good grounding in the basics which helps when dealing with Visual Studio extensions
• Reducing apps startup time with Pre-JITing and NGEN on a Surface RT – Jerome Laban discusses the use of NGEN to generate native images for managed code applications running on the WinRT platform, highlighting that up to a 3rd of the startup time of an application can be down to JIT
• TDD the Anagrams Kata – Richard A. Dalton shares a walk through the Anagrams Kata exercise in a Test Driven Development way, sharing each of the stages in the process and discussing why and how he did things that way.
• A lesson in automated testing via SlickGrid – Josh Arnold discusses his Ah-ha moment when it came to automated testing, the realisation that the level of friction sometimes involved in automates testing is often the biggest problem with automated testing adoption.
• Automated Deployments: The Tester’s Tale – Ben Adderson discusses similar issues, and how automated deployment is a gateway to better and quicker testing of applications
• Working with legacy databases in NHibernate Part 1 – Compound foreign keys – Pete Sutcliffe kicks off a series of posts looking at some of the issues and difficulties, along with the tools to deal with them, in using NHIbernate with legacy database schemas.
• Application Performance: The Best of the Web – Michaela Murray shares a competition looking for your best ASP.NET Performance tips for inclusion in a new e-Book that RedGate are producing, along with chance to win a Microsoft Surface RT

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Hope all my American readers had a good Thanksgiving – today’s edition is a little light due to low numbers of posts (as a result of Thanksgiving)

Information

• Separating Concerns – Part 1: Libraries – Chris Patterson kicks off a series looking at the principle of separation of concerns, discussing the underluing ideas, the problem that separation of concerns can have with high cohesion, and disucssing the role of the library in addressing separation of concerns.
• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #23: The Compass – Jeff Blankenburg and Clark Sell continue their month long series looking at the various aspects of Windows 8 Development, with the latest instalment taking a look at the use of the Compass Sensor in both XAML/C# (Jeff) and HTML5 / JS (Clark)
• Realtime ASP.NET Web API tracing with SignalR – Filip W takes a look at combining the Web API Tracing ,included in the WebAPI Core in the fall update, with the power of SignalR to create a real time tracing log for you Web API applications
• How to return a CSV file with ASP.NET MVC – Simone Chiaretta takes a look at the returning of CSV data from ASP.NET MVC actions, discussing the process of extending the ActionResult class, and sharing a simple CSV implementation
• Getting started: TypeScript for Windows 8 Projects using Visual Studio 2012 – Shen Yizhe shares a walk through of getting up and running with TypeScript in your projects, looking at using the Web Essentials extension, and how you can use type script in your Windows Store applications.
• A Few New Things Coming To JavaScript – Addy Osmani shares a look at what is coming in the future of JavaScript with the new features in the ECMAScript.next specification, discussing the new features, and looking at them in use in code examples.

Community

• Dublin ALT.NET – November Meetup – Jimmy Bogard on Real World Polyglot Persistence – The Dublin Alt.NET user group welcome Jimmy Bogard for a session on a variety of different data storage mechanisms on Thursday 29th November, at 6:30 in the Central Hotel.

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