The Morning Brew

Software

• Rx 2.1 is available on NuGet! – The Reactive Extensions Team announce the release of the Reactive Extensions 2.1, a release targeted at adding Windows Phone 8 support, and discuss a change to the way the library is signed, and also to how its distributed with the introduction of NuGet packages.
• jQuery 1.9.1 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.9.1, a release which addresses bugs and regressions introduced in 1.9
• CSLA 4.5 version 4.5.11 beta available – Rockford Lhotka announces the beta release of version 4.5.11 of his CSLA 4.5 application framework. This release adds support for Windows Phone 8, improves the segregation of ASP.NET MVC 3 and 4 and EF 4 and 5 support, allows for better transaction control, and addresses reported bugs. Expect the final release in a few weeks.
• Simultaneous Editing for Visual Studio with the free MultiEdit extension – Scott Hanselman discusses why he uses 3 different text editors, and highlights a Visual Studio Extension from Ala Shiban a Program Manager on the Visual Studio "Core Editor" Team. This extension brings Multi-Edit functionality to Visual Studio allowing you to insert/delete text at multiple points in a document at the same time.

Information

• Static constructors, part one – Eric Lippert kicks off another series of posts, building on a previous post and exploring in detail the strange world of Static Constructors, starting out with pointers to resources on initializer order, before looking at how static constructors work
• OWIN and Razor – Fredrik Normén continues his exploration of OWIN as a foundation for HTTP based services, looking at bringing the Razor View engine into an OWIN sample, and building a very light weight MVC pattern based sample
• Windows Performance Analyzer – Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at how things have moved on in the Event Tracing For Windows world since the Windows Performance Toolkit release in 2008, looking at the new functionality introduced in the Windows 8 SDK
• PragPub Magazine – Issue #44, February 2013 – The Team over at the Pragmatic Bookshelf have released their February on-line magazine, with a focus on celebrating the 20th birthday of the Ruby language, along with various other articles on Software development.
• F# + ServiceStack – F# Web Services on any platform in and out of a web server – Don Syme highlights two articles from Demis Bellot on using F# with the Service Stack framework, allowing you to use F# to create ASP.NET based web application functionality on any ASP.NET compatible server
• Create, Connect, and Publish using Visual Studio with Git – Andy Lewis and Matthew Mitrik take a detailed look at the it support introduced in the Visual Studio 2012.2 Update, showing how you work with it to achieve common goals of version control.

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Software

• How portable is your assembly? Check it with the PCL Compliance Analyzer! – Greg Duncan highlights a neat tool from Vagif Abilov which performs static analysis on an existing .NET library reporting any problems you would encounter in converting it to a Portable Class Library which could be used across a range of platforms.

Information

• MSDN Magazine – February 2013 – The February edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles on the new JavaScript Office API, Async Causality Chain Tracking, Data analysis, Kinect, Windows Store application development, and much more
• Using a Java Framework with F#: The Stanford Parser for NLP – Don Syme discusses the ability fo F# to call functionality from other platforms via TypeProviders and discusses how IKVM provides a means to do this for Java, and highlights some work by Sergey Tihon on getting The Stanford Parser for NLP working in F#
• Preparing your Windows Store app for a world market – Ray Shuman (and a team of contributing authors) discuss the Globalisation of Windows 8 Store Applications, discussing how the platform caters for Globalisation, looking at using the features, and highlighting further resources.
• Meet the New Stack, Same as the Old Stack – Alex Young discusses the explosion and evolution of JavaScript Framework Choices, looking at how the ‘default stack’ of libraries has evolved over time.
• Getting started with NodeJs and Express on Windows – Daniel Wertheim gives a quick start guide to getting up and running with NodeJS on Windows, looking at the creation of application using the package manager NPM and Express, and discussing the IDE support for similar procedures.
• Netflix: Solving Big Problems with Reactive Extensions (Rx) – Claudio Caldato gives an update on progress with the Reactive Extensions, highlighting recent releases, and calling attention to NetFlix’s Java implementation of the Reactive Extensions

Community

• F# Community Code Sprint this Saturday in London – Don Syme highlights a London F# Community ‘Code Sprint’ event being held this Saturday (9th Feb) where participants will ebe helping out with F#’s Open Source Editor integration

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Software

• jQuery Mobile 1.3.0 RC1 Released – Todd Parker announces the release of the first Release Candidate of jQuery Mobile 1.3.0, a release which focuses on responsive web design, and adds a variety of new controls with some level of responsiveness. As usual the team are keen to have your feedback
• Coding4Fun Toolkit v2 Released (aka Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit), now with Windows Store, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Phone 7! – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the Coding4Fun Toolkit which now includes implementations for Windows Phone 7 and 8 along with Windows Store Applications, along with other new features and controls from the Coding4Fun team.

Information

• How to invoke XDT from code – Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi continues discussion of the XDT library, now available on NuGet which powers the web.config transformations, and in this post discusses using the library from your own code to allow you to programmatically transform configuration files.
• Creating a simple REST like service with OWIN – Open Web Server Interface – Fredrik Normén takes a look at the basics of the OWIN implementation which allows you to easily create web server applications from pure .NET Code, exploring how you can quickly and easily create REST-like services.
• TFS Build Custom Activity : TODO Counter – Charlie Mott shares a nice simple TFS Build Activity which processes the source and counts the numbers of TODO comments (configurable) – a nice introduction to the kinds of things you can easily plug in to the TFS Build process.
• Improvements in Windows Store Unit Tests: Test Exceptions in Async Lamba Expressions, Run Tests on the UI Thread – Visual Studio ALM + Team Foundation Server Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Charles Sterling digs a little deeper into some of the improvements for Unit testing Windows Store applications, discussing support for running tests on the UI thread, working with async Lamba Expressions which throw exceptions.
• Trying out Angularjs &amp Angularjs and ng-grid – Christiaan Baes takes a look at AngularJS, a JavaScript MVC framework for building clientside MVC applications, looking at its use with a Nancy backend for providing JSON data.
• Walkthrough: Locking Asynchronous File Operations – Jerry Nixon shares the work of Hans Windhoff who took his StorageHelper class for working with Windows Store Applications Storage, and extended it with improved support for concurrency.
• asynchrony is viral – Daniel Moth discusses the infectiousness of asynchrony, and how by introducing it you will find that it spreads throughout your code base

Community

• Safer Internet Day 2013 – Microsoft’s Australian Government Technology blog reminds us that today is Safer Internet Day 2013 – be safe out there folks 🙂

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