The Morning Brew

Software

• February CTP for Visual Studio Update 2 – Charles Sterling announces the release of the February CTP release of the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, adding further functionality for Visual Studio and TFS, including Clone Test Cases, HTML and JavaScript Profiler, Fakes in Premium SKUs, pausing and resuming test case execution, and attachments to test outcomes, along with all the features of the January CTP
• Autofac 3.0.1 Released – Travis Illig announces the release of AutoFac 3.0.1, a bugfix release which addresses a memory leak in the 3.0.0 release when used in long running applications – if you’ve moved to 3.0 this is an update you will want.
• PhoneGap 2.4.0 Released – The PhoneGap team announce the release of PhoneGap 2.4.0 available for download now, and featuring a substantial number of changes, improvements and bugfixes across the supported mobile platforms.

Information

• Static constructors, part two – Eric Lippert continues discussion of static constructor sin in C# with a look at one of the edge cases which exposes the leaky abstraction of inheritance with static methods and constructors which results in constructors not being called when you might think they would.
• But I don’t want to call Web Api controllers "Controller"! – Filip W takes a look at the auto discovery of controllers by the naming convention, and explores how you can customise the convention to load controllers your own way.
• Don’t mix await and compound assignment – ‘JaredPar’ takes a look at the use a async/await as a part of assignment operations discussing how the compiler re-writes code in these situations and how the evaluation actually takes place taking into account the async possibilities.
• Postcards from the post-XSS world – Michal Zalewski takes an interesting look at the variety of techniques available for cross site scripting attacks, discussing the attacks in detail. Well worth reading to get inside the head of potential attackers and to better think about the security of the code we write.
• Security Code Review & In depth Cross Site Scripting – ‘Chris’ takes a look at the practices of performing code reviews specifically focused on security, and also explores a number of other Cross Site scripting attacks
• NHibernate Pitfalls: Sets and Hash Codes – Ricardo Peres continues his series looking at some of the common misconceptions or confusions with NHibernate, looking at the use of Sets and Hash Codes within those sets

Community

• Virtual Classroom : Building Web Apps with ASP.NET Jump Start – Scott Hanselman and Jon Galloway host a Microsoft Virtual Academy session on building modern web applications using ASP.NET adn ASP.NET MVC 4. The session is free, and available virtually, taking place on February 19th running all day (8am-5pm PST)

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Software

• Glimpse RC2 now available! – The Glimpse Team announce their second Release Candidate release, building on the feedback from the previous release with a bunch of community contributions including improved support for SignalR, Cassette, IE9, API improvements, and much more. Assuming this RC release goes well, I have it on good authority that the final V1.0 release will likely occur this week!
• RavenDB 2.01 Stable Release – Ayende announces the release of RavenDB 2.01, a minor stable release which addresses reported issues, and adds a couple of features to the V2.0 release made last month

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Explicit Interface Implementation – James Michael Hare continues his series of posts looking at some of the less known aspects of the C# language and .NET Framework with a post on the implementation of Interfaces looking at implicit implementation, and then at Explicit Implementation, and the reasons you may have to chose between them.
• XML’s 15th Birthday – Tim Bray looks back at the past 15 years of developers having XML in their life, celebrating the 15th Birthday / Anniversary of the publication of the first publication of the W3C recommendation.
• A Caveat with NuGet Source Code Packages – Phil Haack discusses the ability to include source code, and have its namespace transformed, in NuGet packages, allowing source distribution of library code in a way that they compile into the destination project – a neat feature, but Phil explores some of the potential difficulties, and looks at possible solutions
• Using the asp.net lego blocks to create a synchronized Kanban board. – Eric Hexter takes a look at combining the various ‘Lego Blocks’ of ASP.NET Functionality into a working project sharing the implementation of a synchronised Kanban board which uses ASP.Net MVC, ASP.Net WebAPI, SignalR, KnockoutJS, jQuery, jQuery UI, and Twtitter Bootstrap.
• Writing modular frontend components in 2013 – .NET Magazine has a nice article from Angelina Fabbro on the techniques available for use in building frontend web components in 2013, looking at the pros and cons of each technique
• Lifesaving Tips for Developers – Chris Eargle shares a collection of tips for survival as a developer, ranging from warnings about over complexity to the importance of backup – all useful reminders
• Protect your Queryable API with the validation feature in ASP.NET Web API OData – Hongmei Ge continues exploration of the OData functionality in ASP.NET Web API, looking in this post at how you can add validation to the parameters passed to your API helping you to limit the behaviours of methods.
• Writing Fast, Memory-Efficient JavaScript – A slightly older article from Addy Osmani on the performance of JavaScript over at Smashing Magazine, which goes into great detail about the various things we as developers can do to play best with the performance characteristics of the JavaScript engine you are using.
• Feature Toggles vs Feature Branches – Dylan’s $0.02 – Dylan Smith joins the discussion on Feature Toggles and Feature Branches sharing some thoughts on the use of these techniques to control development and available functionality in applications

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• Client-side Messaging Essentials – Jim Cowart shares 6 key ideas when working with and on Client Side Messaging, exploring two common patterns Observer and Mediator, looking at their use and which scenarios you should use them, along with sharing a number of other bits of best practices advice.
• Managing Events As Relationships, Not Just References – Derick Bailey discusses an alternative view of event handlers, considering them as a relationship rather than just an object reference, discussing the shift in thinking, and looking at an example of using them in JavaScript with Backbone.
• Nancy.Testing – executable specifications through the full stack, in memory – Marcus Hammarberg continues his series looking at the types of testing that are made possible on the Nancy Web Framework, in this post discussing how you can take functional specifications written in human readable language, and implement them as tests against a Nancy Web Application using Specflow
• Async and Await for Http Networking on Windows Phone – Andy Wigley looks at bringing the goodness of async/await to the Web Client on Windows Phone 7.5/7.8 and 8
• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: URL Mapping – Ricardo Peres takes a look at another classic and oft forgotten feature of ASP.NET, URL Mapping, the precursor to Routing which still provides a simple way of mapping human readable URLs to pages with query strings, etc.
• A touch from the distributed NoSql DB world, Using MongoDB from C#, A little of RavenDB, Installing Couchbase under Windows 8 & More NoSql stuff :: Couchbase from C# – Mauro Krikorian has a nice series of posts looking at the various NoSQL databases there are, taking a look at MongoDB, RavenDB, and looking at running Couchbase on Windows and connecting to it from C#.
• Closures and asynchronous chaining in Office JavaScript – MarkBrew takes a look the concepts behind JavaScript Closures, one of the more confusing concepts of JavaScript, and explores how misunderstandings of them can result in issues with some Office JavaScript API methods
• Visual Studio 2012 Update 1: Understanding Code Map – Zain Naboulsi takes a look at the new Code Map (not source maps, this one is something different) functionality in the Visual Studio 2012.1 update, discussing what they give you and looking at theirr use.
• Sorting big files using k-way merge sort – Chaker Nakhli takes a look at sorting the contents of huge files, looking at a technique that helps, and sharing an implementation of the K-way merge algorithm

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