The Morning Brew

Software

• Windows Azure: Active Directory Release, New Backup Service + Web Site Monitoring and Log Improvements – Scott Guthrie announces the latest batch of updates to the Windows Azure Platform with the general release of Windows Azure Active Directory for Production use, a new Offsite Backup facility for Windows Servers, and improvements to Windows Azure Websites in terms of diagnostics and monitoring
• Azure Mobile Services Windows Store / JavaScript SDK – now also from NuGet – Carlos Figueira highlights the release of the JavaScript SDK for Windows Azure Mobile Services which can be used for Windows Store applications, and is easily added to your projects using NuGet

Information

• Walkthrough #1: Adding Sign-On to Your Web Application Using Windows Azure AD – Vittorio Bertocci shares a walkthrough and other related content regarding the newly ‘General Availability’ Windows Azure Active Directory, showing how single sign-on can be used in your web applications
• Windows Azure Active Directory Graph Service – Ready for Production & Differential Query in Windows Azure Active Directory Graph – The Windows Azure Active Directory Graph Team highlight the GA release, and discuss some of the changes to the graph which have been made in the GA release, as well as highlighting updated samples, and taking a look at Differential Queries
• Windows Azure Mobile Services "Rent a Home "Sample, Part 3: Authentication – Sasha Goldshtein continues this series looking at the build of a multi-platform mobile application using the Windows Azure Mobile Services, taking a look at how the services provide for user authentication
• Angry Birds of JavaScript: Orange Bird – Templating – Elijah Manor continues his web frontend architecture series with a look at templating, exploring how and why you should use it, and looking at underscore.js, Handbars.js, and highlighting some of the other templating libraries available.
• HTTP: The Protocol Every Web Developer Must Know – Part 1 – Pavan Podila covers what I consider to be a vital subject for any web developer – having a good understanding of the basics of HTTP, exploring the concepts of URLs, Verbs, Status Codes, Headers, the Request Response pattern, data formats, and tooling to watch HTTP traffic.
• Try out ASP.NET Web API CORS support using the nightly builds – Yao highlights the availability of an implementation of CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) support in ASP.NET Web API, available now as a part of the Nightly builds of Web API, and in this post walks through its use.
• WebAPI Tip #8: Working with Tasks – K. Scott Allen continues his WebAPI Tips series with a look at the role of Tasks in Web API Message Handlers
• HMAC authentication in ASP.NET Web API – Piotr Walat takes a look at building HMAC authentication functionality in ASP.NET Web API, exploring the concepts behind HMAC and sharing an implementation
• 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues: The Next Generation
  – Michaela Murray highlights the plans for a follow up to ‘ 50 Ways to Avoid, Find and Fix ASP.NET Performance Issues’ a community sourced free eBook sharing 50 tips for ASP.NET performance, with submissions now open for a second edition

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Software

• Json.NET 5.0 Release 1 – .NET 4.5, BigInteger, Read-Only Collections – James Newton-King announces the first release of Json.NET 5.0, a release which now includes .NET 4.5 and .NET 4.5 Portable class library versions, along with improved support for serializing NaN and Infinity, large actual numbers (in the form of BigInteger) and Read Only Collections.
• Our tiny Bootstrap rich text editor is now opensource – Gojko Adzic announces the release of a simple and lightweight Rich Text Editor component for jQuery and BootStrap which was developed as a part of MindMup.
• Great news for web developers! WebMatrix 3 is here – Amna Mangoosh Al Ali highlights the preview release of WebMatrix 3, made last week which includes improved remote support, update language support to include TypeScript, PHP, Node.js as well as traditional ASP.NET, and integrates with Git and TFS.

Information

• Angry Birds of JavaScript: Green Bird – Mocking – Elijah Manor continues his Front End Architecture series with another instalment looking at the use of mocking as a front end developer to allow you to work ahead of the backend developers completing work
• Test Framework Feature Comparisons – What If We Cooperated? – Charlie Poole kicks off a new project ‘ .NET Test Framework Feature Comparison’ aiming to be an up to date comparison of the features and capabilities of the various Testing Frameworks in existence on the .NET Stack.
• Streaming Diagnostics Trace Logging from the Azure Command Line (plus Glimpse!) – Scott Hanselman takes a look at the support for obtaining trace diagnostic logging for remote Azure Websites quickly and easily via the Azure Command Line Interface, and also explores the use of Glimpse, a fantastic tool for getting a view on what is going on server side from the comfort of your browser.
• ARR – Using SignalR in an ARR cluster – Matthew Manela shares some useful tips for running SignalR based services on a load balanced cluster using Application Request Routing (ARR) to spread requests between boxes, highlighting some configuration settings to tweak to ensure you get the best transports possible.
• Why is the IIS default app pool recycle set to 1740 minutes? – Scott Forsyth reveals the real reason behind the 29 hours or 1740 minutes time period between IIS application pool recycles which has been the default configuration for IIS since IIS6.
• jQuery Best Practices – S.Kaur shares 14 jQuery best practices to help keep your jQuery code clean, and efficient in this CodeProject article

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Visual Studio 2012 Update 2

• Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Now Available – Somasegar announces the release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, also known as VS2012.2. This update brings with it all the updates from Update 1 as well as improving the testing features, agile planning features, Windows Store App Development and much more
• VS/TFS 2012.2 (Update 2) released today – Brian Harry highlights some of the TFS Specific enhancements included in the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 release, also highlighting the inclusion of over 500 TFS bugfixes in the release
• Visual Studio 2012 – Update 2 RTM! – Charles Sterling goes into more detail on some of the new TFS features included in the release, showing the functionality and linking to some video content which further demonstrates
• Announcing the Release of the LightSwitch HTML Client! – Visual Studio LightSwitch gains a major new feature in the form of its HTML Client included in the Visual Studio 2012.2 update, and in this post John Stallo discusses this new feature
• How to: Install Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 Offline – Rob Caron highlights how you can get the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 for installation offline, updating his notes from the previous Update 1 release.

Software

• xunitcontrib-resharper 1.0: Stick a fork in it – it’s done – Matt Ellis announces the 1.0 release of his xUnit.Net Test Runner for ReSharper. 4 Years in the making, and with a major update as a part of this release this is a watershed moment for this project, adding some great new features with additional code completion features for testing, live templates.
• Umbraco 6.1.0 beta released – Sebastiaan Janssen announces the release of Umbraco 6.1.0 beta. The team are very keen to hear feedback on this release with a view to helping them progress towards the final release soon.

Information

• What does the langversion switch do? – Eric Lippert discusses a command line switch for the C# Compiler which probably doesn’t do what you expect, instead furnishing with warnings about the features that the code attempting to compile uses which were not supported in that version of the language
• Background Tasks in Async Methods Part 2 – Matt Hamilton follows on from his previous post looing in more detail at a technique mentioned in the comments to the first post for running background operations.
• .NET Memory Allocation Profiling with Visual Studio 2012 – Stephen Toub contributes a post to the .NET Framework Blog which discusses the use of the Visual Studio 2012 Profiler functionality, and how you can performance tune your applications by avoiding too many allocations
• Owin, Katana and getting started – Glavs discusses the OWIN (Open Web Interface for .NET) whcih with its host implementations like Katana provides the fundamental plumbing and interface for web based application programming in .NET separate from the usual requirement for IIS and ASP.NET.
• WebAPI Tip #7: Beautiful Message Handlers – K. Scott Allen continues his series of WebAPI tips with a look at some of the abstractions in WebAPI and looking in particular at the use and implementation of custom Message Handlers.
• Debugging ASP.NET Web API with Route Debugger – Troy Dai and Rick Anderson share a tutorial and tooling which looks at debugging Routes in ASP.NET WebAPI working through a number of examples which show its use
• Hosting Web API in LinqPad – Filip W takes a Stack Overflow question and turns it into a blog post looking at how you ca hook up ASP.NET Web API inside a LinqPad host process

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