The Morning Brew

Software

• Announcing Release of Windows Azure Media Services & Broadcast push notifications to millions of mobile devices using Windows Azure Notification Hubs – Scott Guthrie and the Windows Azure team announce thier latest service updates, including the general availability of the Windows Azure Media Services providing a huge range of options for the Uploading, Encoding, Delivery, and consumption of video. Scott also announce another new piece of functionality, Notification Hubs, which provides an easy way to route push notifications to large userbases across a number of different platforms.
• Now Available: Windows Phone SDK Update for 7.8 – Cliff Simpkins announces the release of the Windows Phone SDK Update for 7.8, allowing you to develop applications for the latest release of the Windows Phone 7 platform, including the new live tile capabilities.
• Hello mathy – Aaron Powell shares his Mathy library a mathematical formula parser implemented in TypeScript (which will of course compile down to JavaScript)
• Try F# 3.0 Launched Today! – Visual F# Team Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – The Visual Studio FSharp Team announce the launch of TryF# 3.0, a web based F# experience which allows you to run F# directly from your browser, providing the easiest way to experiment with the F# language. The V3 includes full F# 3.0 support, along with an improved user interface and support for graphs and charts and social code sharing
• Announcing: Literate programming tools for F# – Tomáš Pet?í?ek shares a markdown parser, and F# code formatter, which combine into a literate programming tool for F# which will produce documentation from Markdown content, with well formatted F# language samples.

Information

• An RxJS to Rx.NET bridge – Jérôme Laban takes a look at bridging the gap between the Reactive Extensions for C# and those for JavaScript, something which becomes useful in ‘Metro Style’ applications whcih can call code from the other language
• Bird’s -eye view of Microsoft "˜Modern-Trend" Technologies – Cesar de la Torre shares a rather nice lookign info graphic looking at some areas of the current Microsoft focused technology space
• Poor, confused C# compiler – Charles Young looks at some interesting problems with compilation of circular references in structs in C# when using auto properties.
• Adding Request.IsLocal to ASP.NET Web API – Filip W takes a look at implementing the IsLocal check on web requests in ASP.NET Web API, sharing an extension method implementation, and looking at it in use
• Ben’s Unit Testing & TDD Courseware for Visual Studio 2010 (for free) – Greg Duncan highlights the no freely available courseware from Ben Day;s Unit Testing and Test Driven Development course which targets Visual Studio.

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Software

• Announcing TypeScript 0.8.2 – Jonathan Turner announces the 0.8.2 Preview Release of TypeScript. This release includes highly rated features and bug fixes, along with focusing on improving the tooling and usability for the language, including JDoc support and compile on save functionality.
• Umbraco 6 RC is here – The Umbraco team announce the release of Umbraco 6 Release Candidate, following on from the feedback received on the beta release, a good chance to get ahead of the curve and try out the new release just before its officially released – and as usual with RC release, the team want your feedback on any problems which might need fixing before the final release.

Information

• Nullable micro-optimization, part eight – Eric Lippert continues his series looking at compiler optimisations possible in C# when dealing with nullable types, discussing in detail the answer to his poser from the last part, refreshing us on how C# processes operands, working through the example, and discussing how this optimisation made it into Roslyn.
• Naming Roslyn concepts – Kirill Osenkov and the Roslyn team seek developer feedback regarding the naming of of an important central component of the Roslyn framework, describing the feature and functionality, and soliciting feedback of suitable names they could use for it.
• TypeScript Modules – Part 4 – John Papa continues his series looking at the TypeScript language in this part discussing the structuring of code using modules, looking at defining, importing and working with both your own modules and externally defined modules.
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Modules – Ricardo Peres looks at a different sort of module, exploring the use of HttpModules in ASP.NET Web Forms and the extensibility that they provide to the ASP.NET framework
• Hosting an Express Node.js website on Azure – Ahmed Sabbour walks through the process of publishing a Node.js based application to the Azure Websites functionality using the Git publishing, working step by step with plenty of screen-shots
• Testing async Methods in C# 5 – Bill Wagner discusses some of the complications in testing using testing frameworks like MSTest and XUnit when your tests contain use of async and await, looking at how you can work around these potential issues.
• You Are Not Paid To Write Software – Derick Bailey discusses his frustration with hearing people make statements like ‘I’m paid to write software, not tests’

Community

• CraftyCoders – Event – Value Added Testing: Justification beyond verification and dogma for writing automated tests. – The CraftyCoders, a new usergroup based in Bromsgrove, UK, follow on from the success of their first event with (surprisingly) their second, this time featuring Dan Kendall looking at the various benefits of having good automated tests. The event takes place on the evening of Thursday 21st February

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Software

• Caliburn.Micro v1.4.1 Released – Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Caliburn Micro 1.4.1, a release mostly due to the work of Thomas Ibel & Nigel Sampson. The release is available via NuGet and now includes support for WCF 4.5, the latest WUI Library and addresses almost every reported issue from previous versions.
• Proposed StructureMap 2.7 Release – Jeremy D Miller requests community comments on plans for a 2.7 release of Structure Map, including a number os significant changes outlined in the post
• ASP.Net Web Config Transform Console Utility released on nuget – Eric Hexter announces the release of a simple utility which wraps the recently released Web Config Transformation library from the ASP.NET team, allowing its use directly from the command line, very useful in deployment scripts and the like.
• Introducing SvcPerf – An End-to-End trace Analysis tool for WCF – Sajay Antony introduces SvcPerf, a tool which builds on the decision to use Event Tracing for Windows for diagnostics output in WCF, discussing the pro and cons of ETW, and highlighting the capabilities of this new tooling.

Information

• Design-time generation of help page (or client) for ASP.NET Web API – Yao continues discussion of the ASP.NET WebAPI Help Page generation with a look at adding design time generation of the help content without spinning the application up.
• Client-Side MVC Roundup – Paul Hammant shares analysis of the same reference todo list application when implemented in the numerous Client Side MVC frameworks, looking at classifying the frameworks and sharing some analysis of the findings.
• Using Razor engine together with Asp.Net Web API to create a Hypermedia API – Fredrik Normén – Fredrik Normén discusses the design and build of a maze game implemented as a Hypermedia API using ASP.NET Web API, and the WebAPI Contrib library’s Formatting.RazorViewEngine.
• Precompiling Razor views in ASP.NET MVC 3 – manojlds discusses the benefits of pre-compiling Razor Views in your ASP.NET MVC applications, along with looking at the use of the RazorGenerator NuGet package to pre-compile your views on build.
• Getting Too Cute with C# Yield Return – Erik Dietrich discusses the peculiarities of the yield keyword in C#, discussing an example which illustrates common misunderstanding about how yield actually works.
• On Testing: Why write tests? – Krzysztof Kozmic follows on from his previous post on testing with a discussion of why we should test, and particularly why we should automate tests
• Tests and Builds are Made to be Broken – Roy Osherove discusses his feelings on ‘breaking the build’, and how he has grown to feel that the build is there to be broken, sharing his thoughts in this post.
• Build Pattern: Gated Commit, Build Pattern: Extract Script, Build Pattern: Fill In the Blanks & Build Pattern: Location Agnostic Script – Roy Osherove also shares a further 4 posts in his Build Patterns series putting some names to 4 more of the key concepts of automated builds

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