The Morning Brew

I fell into my usual mistake when preparing The Morning Brew on a day when I’m off work – I got too caught up reading interesting posts, so today’s edition is a bit on the late side.

Software

• New OSS VM Image Depot for Windows Azure – A big step for VM kind & Pulling into the Windows Azure VM Depot (lots of VM’s, even Linux, all ready to be Azured) – Glenn Block and Greg Duncan highlight VM Depot, a one stop shop for pre-configured Virtual Machines which you can easily deploy to Windows Azure, making the process of getting up and running with many open source operating systems and platforms easy.
• A Lightweight web stressing tool – Wei of the Microsoft APGC DSI Team shares a simple web stress testing tool which supports GET and POST requests allowing you an easy way of generating some load to test your web applications.
• Introducing Kona Guidance for Windows 8 Application Development (Think of it as Prism for Windows 8, but not really) – Brian Lagunas highlights a new Patterns and Practices project called Kona which is designed to be a guidance project for developers building Line of Business applications using Windows 8
• Only 22 more days to get Windows 8 Pro for £24.99 – Rob Margel reminds us that the limited time offer for Windows 8 upgrades at only £24.99 runs until the end of the month – cease (doh!) seize the opportunity to get all your machines upgraded while the price is low.

Information

• New Windows Azure Mobile Services Getting Started Content – Nick Harris highlights the new vast range of content about the Windows Azure Mobile Services, highlighting video, code sample and tutorial content available for free and produced by him and the rest of the Azure team
• Writing a Profiler of Windows Store apps – David Broman highlights an interesting paper on working with the CLR Profiling API and the changes to make your use support Windows 8 Store Applications
• The Role of Interfaces in TypeScript – Dan Wahlin continues his discussions of the features that TypeScript adds to JavaScript, exploring how interfaces are used within TypeScript Code
• Introduction to TypeScript Language and Tooling – The Keyhole Software blog takes a brief look at the TypeScript language and the Visual Studio 2012 tooling support for TypeScript.
• Mapping ASP.NET SignalR Connections to Real Application Users – Tugberk Ugurlu takes a look at how you can tie SignalR connections to specific application users, using the canonical example of Chat
• Ten Tricks for Razor Views – K Scott Allen shares ten useful tricks and tips for working more efficiently with and using the features of the ASP.NET MVC Razor view engine
• Cache busting in ASP.NET – Mads Kristensen discusses the configuration of static content caching using IIS and takes a look at an implementation of Fingerprinting to allow you to easily change content when you update your application.
• Minify resources with source map at runtime using Web Essential – Ugo Lattanzi takes a look at a feature introduced in the latest release of the Web Essentials Tools which allows you to define bundles at runtime, but obtain the correct location of errors in your combined code using Source Maps and a browser which supports their use.
• NuGet Package(s) of the Week #12 – Accessing Google Spreadsheets with GData from C# *and* hosting Razor Templates to generate HTML from a Console App – Scott Hanselman resumes his NuGet Package(s) of the Week series with a look at retrieving data from Google Docs Spreadsheets, and discussing the benefits of donating development work to charities.
• Code review guidelines – ‘ludovicianul’ shares some thoughts and guiding principles for participating in good code reviews.

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Software

• An update is available for the .NET Framework 4.5 in Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Server 2012 – The Microsoft Support team have released an update package for the .NET Framework 4.5 on Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Server 2012 – the update is being shipped via Windows Update and the details of the issues addressed are included in this article.
• NuGet Addin for MonoDevelop – Matt Ward announces the release of a NuGet Add-in for SharpDevelop bringing the same UI features as available in the Visual Studio Edition
• Git-TF 2.0.1 Released – Brian Harry announces a new binary release of the Git-TF tools for interacting with GIT based TFS repositories which addresses some issues introduced with the recent work to restructure communication with TFS.
• Recent Updates to the Windows Azure SDK – .NET 4.5, Windows Server 2012 and more – Mohit Srivastava and Dennis Angeline discusses some of the recent changes and improvements in the latest edition of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET

Information

• Why Use The Bootstrap Grid? – K. Scott Allen discusses the role of a Grid System on the web and takes a look at the use of the BootStrap Grid and how it enables responsive layouts.
• MapReduce / Map Reduction Strategies Using C# – Jake Drew takes a look at implementing map reduce functionality in C# using the Task Parallel Library, and data structure which work successfully in multithreaded environments.
• Simple immutable objects – Andrew L Arnott takes a look at how you can construct immutable objects, following on from the announcement of immutable collection types from the BCL team.
• Web Dev .NET: Does Browser Sniffing Still Have a Place? – Elijah Manor discusses the sticky issue of browser user agent sniffing, discussing the good, bad and alternative techniques and where you may want to validly check a user agent

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Software

• RavenDB 2.0 RTM – Ayende announces the release of RavenDB 2.0 a substantial new version created from 4,975 commits to source control by 68 different contributors, including lots of new features, performance and operational improvements and much more.
• New version of TraceEvent / PerfMonitor Posted to bcl.codeplex.com – Vance Morrison highlights the latest update to the ‘Trace Event Library’, released on CodePlex. This update takes the library behind PerfView to its latest internal version and provides Event Tracing for Windows, System.Diagnostics tracing functionality
• SpecsFor 3.0 Preview Available on NuGet – Matt Honeycutt announces the availability of the first preview of SpecsFor 3.0 now available via NuGet. This major new release cleans up the core of the project and includes the implementation of a new way of composing test context.

Information

• Nullable micro-optimization, part four | Fabulous Adventures In Coding – Eric Lippert continues his series looking at the compiler optimisations in the C# compiler to help increase performance of conversions between nullable and non-nullable types, this time looking at conversions between nullable int and nullable double.
• How to keep your ASP.NET database connection strings secure when deploying to Azure from Source – Scott Hanselman discusses how Azure enables you to keep your connection strings private when working with source code deployed Azure applications
• Schemaless Data Structures – Martin Fowler shares a nice presentation on schema-less data structures looking at their differences from the traditional relational model, and how they are implemented in a number of scenarios.
• Esoteric Programming Languages – Zain Naboulsi takes a look at some of the world’s more exotic programming languages, giving a bit of background on them, links to further resources, and showing a hello world example in each
• 8 Most common mistakes C# developers make – Pawel Bejger shares a list of 8 common developer mistakes of a code / best practice variety – read it and don’t make them 🙂
• Web Developer Checklist – Mads Kristensen shares Web Developer Checklist, a good reference of all the things you should check when developing and releasing a website

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