The Morning Brew

Information

• How to setup a Load Balanced Web Farm of Virtual Machines (Linux or otherwise) on Windows Azure (command line) – Scott Hanselman gives a detailed walkthrough of setting up load balanced server farms on the Windows Azure platform, showing the process principally for Linux VM’s, but with notes for Windows VMs too.
• C# Performance Benchmark Mistakes, Part Two – The second part of Eric Lippert’s TechPro article series on benchmarking mistakes is now available, in this post exploring the measurement of time and some of the anti-patterns
• Web Performance APIs Rapidly Become W3C Recommendations – Jatinder Mann of the Internet Explorer team gives an update on the status of the W3C standardization process for the various performance related W3C standards-to-be
• RavenDB, Victory – Ayende responds to a couple of the points raised in Jeremy Miller’s recent post on his experiences of working with RavenDB on a recent project
• The Design of Code: Organizing JavaScript – Anthony Colangelo discusses the use of the module pattern, jQuery Plugins and options objects to help keep order in your JavaScript code
• Writing Testable JavaScript – Rebecca Murphey also has a nice A List Apart article on JavaScript, looking at writing client-side interactions which are easier to test, sharing some practices she uses to help ensure you can easily wrap code in tests.
• Cool Kid Training from Pluralsight, that’s free too! Because coding kids are cool kids, right? – Greg Duncan highlights a free series of courses from Pluralsight aimed at teaching kids to code, all made available completely free.

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Software

• Knockout-ES5: a plugin to simplify your syntax – Steve Sanderson shares Knockout-ES5, a plugin for Knockout which takes advantage of modern browser’s support for ECMAScript 5 to simplify and give a more natural syntax for the model and binding code.
• ripple: Fubu-inspired dependency management – Josh Arnold highlights the Ripple Project which aims to provide an alternative to the standard NuGet Package Manager client whcih deals with Continuous Integration scenarios better, while using the standard NuGet feed and package format.
• 64 bits ought to be enough for everybody [TextAnalysisTool.NET update for .NET 2.0 and 64-bit enables the analysis of larger files!] – David Anson provides an update to his TextAnalysisTool.NET tool for reading, searching and navigating large files efficiently. This update brings it onto .NET 2.0 and adds 64-bit support allowing you even more memory space for loading and working with large text files.

Information

• What is lexical scoping? – Eric Lippert discusses the use of the word ‘Scope’ in development, and looks at the two different styles of scoping, dynamic scoping and lexical scoping
• Traversing the GC Heap with ClrMd – Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at working with the ClrMd library to programatically work with the CLR debugging API, exploring how you can walk across the Garbage Collection Heap and explore its contents.
• Some "Laws" of Software Development – Al Noel takes a look at some of the ‘enduring truths’ of software development encapsulated in a variety of named ‘laws’ including Ziv’s, Conway’s and Humphrey’s Laws, before sharing his own software development ‘law’
• Play with Packages, programmatically! – The NuGet Team give a taste of the API available for the NuGet package Manager allowing your code to easily interact with NuGet.
• Modern Art – Phil Trelford proves that F# isn’t just for scientists and financiers, turning his hand to recreating works of art using the F# Language

Community

• Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon at DevTeach – Bill Wagner highlights the Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon event being held at the DevTeach conference at the end of the month, and is a great opportunity to turn your development skills for the power of good.
• Windows 8 for Developers Online Camp – Joe Mayo highlights a Windows 8 Developer Camp Online event, with three hours of content on developing applications for Windows 8 from Joe and Greg Levenhagen on the 21st May.

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Software

• YUICompressor 2.4.8 Released – Joey Smith announces the latest release of the YUICompressor, and the first since they shifted to a contributor model. As a result this release contains contributions from over 10 individuals, and includes updates to both CSS and JavaScript minification
• Just released – Prism for Windows Runtime – Blaine Wastell of the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft announces the release of Prism for the Windows Runtime, previously codenamed ‘Kona’ targeting the development of Windows 8 applications. The release is amde along with an AdventureWorks based reference implementation, three quickstarts and associated documentation.

Information

• Express names in code: Bad vs Clean – Mateusz Roszczak discusses guidelines and recommendations to help with naming in your code, one of the trickiest skills to master in programming
• Creating a Basic CRUD Application with Backbone.js Starter Kit – Kazi Manzur Rashid kicks off a new series of posts looking at building a Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) style application using his Backbone.js based application starter kit
• Working with TypeScript in Visual Studio 2012 – Gaston Hillar gives a nice introduction to TypeScript development in Visual Studio in this Dr Dobbs article
• Overwhelmed by JavaScript Dependencies – Martijn Faassen discusses dependency management in JavaScript based applications, and shares how he has automated some of the processes. Be sure to check out his followup post JS Dependency Tools Redux for more discussion about the various dependency management libraries also available
• The CORRECT Way to Code a Custom Exception Class – Doug Seelinger shares a templates for implementing exception classes which includes all the best practice techniques, along with support for correct serialisation of the data within the exception.
• Getting Started With Glimpse In ASP.NET MVC – John Sonmez shares an introductory tutorial on working with Glimpse with ASP,NET to see what is going on at the server end from right within your browser

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