The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing the ReSharper 8 EAP – Dmitri Nesteruk announces the first Early Access Preview (EAP) of ReSharper 8. Already this version includes new features around autocomplete, code navigation, code inspection, CSS Support and much more.
• Update to Immutable Collections – Immo Landwerth announces the next drop of the Immutable Collections library from the BCL team, discussing the feedback received from the last release which has been acted upon in this update.
• Use Git 0.8.0.0 to run scheduled builds and resolve conflicts – Andy Lewis and Matthew Mitrik announce an update to the Git Tools for Visual Studio taking the version number to 0.8.0.0. This release adds further support for resolving conflicts and scheduling builds in TFS

Information

• Building a Game with JavaScript: Making Things Move – Christopher Bennage continues his series of posts looking at the creation of a game using JavaScript, sharing the implementation, and detailed discussions of how things are being made to work, looking at adding and moving ‘ships’ around the screen,
• License all the things with Portable.Licensing 1.0 – Steffen Forkmann highlights Portable.Licensing a cross platform open source software licensing solution, and looks at how easily it can be used, exploring its use from F#
• Speeding up your application with the IIS Auto-Start feature – Jeremy Jarrell takes a look at the IIS Auto Start feature which allows you to configure your IIS hosted web applications to automatically start when the service starts, rather than on the first reqest.
• Semantic Release Notes – Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar (the chaps behind the Glimpse project) share a proposal for a common format for Release Notes based around semantic structuring and adding meaning to this important part of the software development cycle. They are actively seeking feedback, so if you have ideas get in touch with them.
• The Start-Up Trap – "Uncle" Bob Martin has a new post on his belief that software craftsmanship is vital for startups, and that they should focus on the quality of the code early on. This post has sparked a number of interesting responses:
  • Startups and TDD – Greg Young
  • Uncle Bob’s viewpoint considered harmful – Rob Ashton
  • When should you test? – Jimmy Bogard

  All of which make for interesting reading.

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Information

• Security Code Review Techniques: Cross-Site Scripting Edition – Jonathan Rozenblit shares a guest post from Sherif Koussa discussing the various security risks in ASP.NET applications where cross site scripting vulnerabilities may be exposed, highlighting areas to watch out for in code reviews.
• Polymorphism Part 2: Refactoring to Polymorphic Behavior – John Teague continues his series looking at polymorphism, with a look at refactoring procedural code to polymorphic behaviour, converting code which uses switch statements to a more object oriented approach.
• Async, Exceptions and Library Design – Bill Wagner discusses the exception handling behaviour of async methods, looking at how they wrap exceptions up in faulted tasks, and shares a technique to add in synchronous exceptions for things you consider to be programming mistakes like argument exceptions.
• Parallel and The C# Memory Model – Bnaya Eshet discusses how the same program utilising parallel programming will operate differently depending on the execution environment, with the build mode and presence of a debugger altering the behaviour, and shares links to some articles on the subject which go deeper.
• Guest Post: Getting started with Windows Azure Mobile Services – Sarah Lamb shares a guest post from friend of the brew Gary Pretty, giving a getting started guide to working with the Windows Azure Mobile Services.
• ASP.NET 4.5 – FAQs on SignalR Script Exceptions – Vincent Maverick S. Durano takes a look at the causes and solutions to three common exceptions in client side code which pay occur when you are getting started with SignalR .
• Formatting .NET Assembly Summary Documentation – ‘cigwork’ discusses the format of the XML Documentation files generated by the compiler which document your code (using the XML Documentation comments you add), and look at processing it with XSLT to produce documentation for your code (in real human readable form) in this Code Project article

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Software

• March CTP ("CTP4") of Visual Studio Update 2 now available – Charles Sterling announces the availability of the March CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, including the new HTML Client for LightSwitch, improved diagnostics and debugging for Sharepoint 2013, along with a bunch of improvements for Team Foundation Server
• CTP4 (March) of VS/TFS 2012 Update 2 is available – Brian Harry digs a little deeper into the new features included in the CTP4 of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 specifically focusing on the Team Foundation Server features.
• Now Available: Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012 – Somasegar announces the release of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2012, allowing development of Office integration in your applications, both online and offline
• Announcing a New Preview of the LightSwitch HTML Client – The Visual Studio LightSwitch team discuss in detail the new HTML Client included in the CTP4 Update for Visual Studio, allowing applications to be run on mobile devices just using the web browser, and also to be published to Sharepoint.
• Announcing NCLDR (Alpha) – Guy Smith-Ferrier highlights the first Alpha release of NCLDR a port of CLDR to .NET. CLDR is the Common Locale Data Repository and contains rich information about cultural elements such as number, date, and other formatting, and contains a huge amount of culture more than the basic .NET System.Globalization framework does.
• jQuery 2.0 Beta 2 Released – Dave Methvin announces the second beta release of jQuery 2.0. This version of jQuery depreciates a lot of old functionality (as did 1.9) and also drops support for IE6,7 and 8

Information

• Windows Azure Updates: Android Support, SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory, More… – Scott Guthrie announces the latest selection of new features added to the Windows Azure platform including further improvements to Mobile Services, SQL Reporting Services, Active Directory, storage and much more.
• Monads, part four – Eric Lippert continues his exploration of Monads, looking at building on the previous patterns to more general operations on monadic types, continuing building the definition and requirements for a Monadic type.
• Test Better – Phil Haack discusses the art and science of testing, and the importance of actually testing the applications you work on by using the application, as while unit tests give a certain sense of safety and security that your code works, its not until you actually try using it that you know if it really does.
• Should websites be required to publicly disclose their password storage strategy? – Troy Hunt continues discussion of the storage of passwords by web applications discussing some recent security breaches, and the legal and other implications of the breaches.
• Free Xamarin Studio and Free Chapters 1-4 Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C# – Wallace B. McClure discusses the recent releases from Xamarin, including the free starter Xamarin Studio which allows you to try out the functionality of their frameworks, along with the release of the first four chapters from ‘Professional Android Programming with Mono for Android and .NET/C#’ providing a useful guide to help you get started.

Community

• Windows Azure: Your Journey to the cloud FREE Training 2 May 2013 – Lee Stott highlights a 1 day free training session form ‘Microsoft Cloud Experts’ looking at getting developer up and running on the Azure platform. The Session is hosted in London on 2nd May 2013 running from 9am to 16:30.

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