The Morning Brew

Software

• Threading threading safely with the Immutable Collections Preview from the BCL Team – Greg Duncan highlights a preview release from the BCL team released lat last year which provides immutable collections for .NET, allowing you to safely work with collections across multiple threads

Information

• Replace JSON.NET with ServiceStack.Text in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W discusses how the plugability of ASP.NET Web API affords you the ability to swap out various components used, taking a look in this post at swapping out the standard JSON.NET Serializer with that from ServiceStack.Text
• Asynchronous error handling in JavaScript – Ruben Verborgh takes a look at handling errors in JavaScript, exploring how you can go about handling them when they occur in synchronous and asynchronous ways.
• TypeScript Classes and Interfaces – John Papa takes a look at the implementation of Classes, Interfaces and inheritance using the TypeScript language to bring these features to JavaScript Code.
• Thoughts on TypeScript – Aaron Powell shares his thoughts on the TypeScript language having used it recently to implement a small formula parsing library
• Mitigate The Billion Dollar Mistake with Aspects – Phil Haack discusses the evils of the null reference, and looks at how you can use aspect oriented programming techniques (usign PostSharp here) to provide protection from the evil null.
• A Windows Phone 8 Run Tracking App in 100 Lines of Code – Colin Eberhardt shares a nice article which looks at the easy and limited amount of code required to build a fully featured Windows Phone applications
• Using sql compact for integration tests with entity framework – Eric Hexter discusses the use of SqlCompact for providing a database for use in integration tests when working with Entity Framework
• MEF 2.0 TOC – Bnaya Eshet kicks off a new series of posts looking at the Managed Extensibility Framework 2.0, with the first two parts of what looks to be a 7 part useful reference series
• Template Generator for JavaScript – JSRazor – CodeProject – Adrian Holland takes a look at the use of CubeBuild.JSRazor to provide client side templating functionality for web based applications

Community

• "Unplugged" LIDNUG online talk with me on Tuesday (Jan 9th) – Scott Guthrie kicks off the new year with another Unplugged session with LIDNUG. The session will follow the usual format for this now quite regular event, and will be taking place from 2pm PST on Tuesday 9th January

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This year’s ‘Year in Review’ post is a little later than usual, and will probably be a bit shorter too – but hopefully will have all the fun facts you’ve come to expect (and maybe even enjoy?).

This year saw The Morning Brew pass the ‘10000000000’ posts mark (1024 in binary), probably the last significant milestone we’ll see for a long time. In actuality post 1024 wasn’t as grand as was hoped, and to this date I still haven’t got round to completing the Morning Brew website 2.0 – maybe that will happen this year.

This year for me was a fun one – for the first time this year I got out there and delivered a number of Conference and Usergroup sessions on SignalR and Web Sockets. I think in total I probably spoke to a combined audience of about 350 people across a number of the DDD conferences and a couple of Usergroups. A great experience, and something I hope to do more of this year (probably with a new session or two). I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who attended my sessions for both their attendance and also the (on the whole) good and useful feedback they gave on the sessions.

Ok, enough waffle from me – time for some stats:

Website and Feed traffic

2012 was another year of pretty constant growth, with RSS subscriber numbers rising from ~8000 at the beginning of 2012 to just over 9000 at the end – maybe by this time next year I’ll hit the magic number or 10000 subscribers!

Daily website visitors also increased slightly over the year with about 1500 now visiting on weekdays. Once again the visitor loyalty numbers on the site are great – an amazing 85% of visits are from people who have visited before, and clear trends in visitors returning every day.

The Content

This year The Morning Brew has included over 3000 links across the 250+ posts this year. This years top contributors are:

This Years top contributors are:

• 1. Greg Duncan – 81 links
• 2. Scott Hanselman – 66 links
• 3. Ayende – 55 links
• 4. Eric Lippert – 43 links
• 5. Parallel Programming Team Blog – 39 links
• 6. Less Than Dot (Mostly Christiaan Baes and Eli Weinstock-Herman ) – 37 links
• 7. The Internet Explorer team – 35 links
• 8. K. Scott Allen – 34 links
• 9. The NxtGenUG – 33 links
• 10. .NET Web Development and Tools Blog – 29 links
• 11. Jimmy Bogard – 28 links
• 11. The Windows Azure Team Blog – 28 links
• 13. Scott Guthrie – 26 links
• 14. The Visual Studio Team Blog – 24 links
• 14. Simple Talk (Many authors) – 24 links
• 14. Jerry Nixon – 24 links
• 17. Derick Bailey – 23 links
• 17. Jason Zander – 23 links
• 17. Filip W. – 23 links
• 20. UK MSDN Team Blog – 21 links
• 20. WCF Data Services team Blog – 21 links
• 20. Brian Harry – 21 links
• 20. Windows 8 app developer blog – 21 links
• 24. Phil Haack – 20 links
• 25. James Michael Hare – 18 links
• 25. Somasegar – 18 links
• 25. .NET Framework Blog – 18 links

In Conclusion

I’d like to again thank all the authors mentioned above, and also to the 750+ other blog authors who’s posts have appeared in The Morning Brew during 2012 – as always without you this blog would be nothing. I’d also like to thank all you readers out there too – its because of you and your nice comments and emails that I continue to put these posts together each day.

All that remains is for me to wish you all a healthy and prosperous 2013 – have fun everyone.

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Information

• Nullable micro-optimization, part three – Eric Lippert returns with the next instalment in his series looking at how the C# Compiler optimises operations using Nullable Types, this time exploring binary operators acting on nullable types.
• Asynchronously streaming video with ASP.NET Web API – Filip W reminds us that ASP.NET WebAPI is not just about making and exposing APIs, despite its name, and discusses its importance in enabling the HTTP Programming Model in .NET, looking at one aspect of this in the streaming of video
• C# is the "Language of the Year" – Brandon Bray highlights the news that according to the PYPL index, C# is the language of the year, and to celebrate Brandon shares 5 areas in which many of us could learn something new about C#
• Windows Phone 8 & 7.x Design Cheat Sheet – Matthias Shapiro highlights a cheat sheet / reference card created by Nathalie Belval which focuses on designing applications for Windows Phone, including details for Windows Phone 7 and 8
• A Simple Overview on How Pattern Match Compiles – ‘colinfang’ takes a look at how F# Pattern Matching actually works under the hood, comparing the F# implementation to the decompiled from IL C# version, providing a great opportunity to help C# developers understand what actually happens with pattern matching in terms of a language they understand, and also illustrates the expressive power of F# pattern matching.
• Creating a complete ASP.Net MVC 4.0 application with Visual Studio 2012, C# , EF 5.0 (Code First) – part 6 – Nikolaos Kantzelis continues with his series looking at building a sample application using ASP.NET MVC4 / Entity Framework 5 Code First, etc. This post looks at adding validation to data capture forms.
• Windows Runtime – what’s supported where? – Jim O’Neil discusses which parts of the Windows Runtime apply on which platforms, discussing the documentation, differences and gaps between the different platforms, and ending on the advice to ensure you look at the correct documentation for the platform you are developing for.

Community

• Presenting VS2012 at VBUG Bristol on 16 Jan 2013 – Tarun Arora is delivering a session at the Bristol VBUG User Group on the evening of the 16th January in Filton, Bristol where Visual Studio 2012 is the topic, with a session giving an overview of what is new and exciting in VS2012 for end to end application life cycle management.

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