Today’s edition is a bit of a beast, with lots of interesting stuff coming from the opening day of //build.
In other news, lots of you read The Morning Brew using Google Reader (and associated 3rd Party apps). As many of you will know, Google Reader is being shutdown on 1st July so I wanted to take a moment to make sure that you are able to take The Morning Brew with you after the shutdown.
There are plenty of options for replacements of Google Reader itself, with a nice comprehensive list at ReplaceReader.com – I personally have moved over to Feedly in the last few days.
As for keeping The Morning Brew in your reader, many of the services will extract your existing Google Reader subscriptions (assuming you migrate before it shuts down), but should you need it here are the options for getting The Morning Brew:
- RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReflectivePerspective
- Email Subscription: Via FeedBurner Subscriptions
- Web: http://TheMorningBrew.NET/
Service announcement over, now onto the links…
Visual Studio 2012 Update 3, Visual Studio 2013 Preview, and .NET 4.5.1
- Announcing the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview – The .NET Team announce the release of the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview release. This is the next step in the frameworks evolution, and despite the 0.0.1 version number increase there is plenty of good stuff in there including edit and continue support for x64, improved debugging capabilities, improved ADO.Net connection resilience, further capabilities for Windows 8 Store application development, JIT and Garbage collection improvements, and an increasing use of NuGet to help modularise the framework.
- No More Memory Fragmentation on the .NET Large Object Heap – Mario Hewardt highlights the improvements to the .NET Large Object Heap in .NET 4.5.1 which should significantly reduce the risk of memory fragmentation
- Visual Studio 2012.3 is released – Brian Harry announces the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (also known as 2012.3). This is an RTM release, and can be used in production now, and includes bugfixes and a few features for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, as well as improving compatibility with Visual Studio 2013.
- Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (RTM) now available for download – Kunal Chowdhury also highlights the Visual Studio 2012.3 Update RTM, sharing links to the download for the update, and also the original product links.
- Build 2013 and Visual Studio 2013 Preview – Somasegar announces the Preview Release of Visual Studio 2013, and the .NET Framework 4.5.1, and also the Visual Studio 2012.3 Update RTM. This post gives a nice overview of the new features across the stack, and includes links off to more information from the specialist teams on a number of the items.
- Visual Studio 2013 Preview Available Now! – The Visual Studio Blog also announces the release, and provides links to the various ways you can give feedback about the new release.
- Visual Studio 2013 Preview is available & A few more Visual Studio 2013 Preview features – Brian Harry highlights the Visual Studio 2013 Preview release, and takes a look at a couple of the new features, including cloud testing support and the ‘Connected IDE’ feature which allows your settings to roam with you.
- Visual Studio 2013 Preview: Version control and Team Foundation Build – Andy Lewis takes a look at the new features around Version Control and Team Foundation Build included in the Visual Studio 2013 Preview release, and shares some workarounds for known issues in the preview release.
- Debugging support for 64-bit Edit and Continue in Visual Studio 2013 – YanivF highlights the new Edit and Continue support for 64 bit targeted environments, a new feature in VS2013 which will take away that very annoying message which appears whenever you are at a break point and want to edit code when running in 64 bit.
- Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Preview and the refresh update – Xinyang Qiu shares a look at the new ASP.NET features included in the Visual Studio 2013 Preview, including SignalR connections between browser and IDE for debugging assistance, a new HTML Editor, improvements for the ‘One ASP.NET’ initiative making it much easier to product hybrid solutions using a mix of ASP.NET technologies, improvements for running ontop of OWIN especially for Authenitication, ASP.NET MVC 5 and Web API 2, along with SignalR 2.00-beta1 and Entity Framework 6 Beta1
- Episode 70 of Visual Studio Toolbox: Visual Studio 2013 Preview – Robert Green highlights the 70th edition of the Visual Studio Toolbox on Channel9 where he is joined by Dmitry Lyalin, and they take a 1 hour whirlwind tour of Visual Studio 2013.
Windows 8.1 Update, and other //build related announcements
- Windows 8.1 Preview – Microsoft Windows – The Windows 8.1 Preview release has been made available, and includes a number of great enhancements including the return of the start button, login to desktop, the inclusion of Outlook RT (for Surface RT users), and a whole host of other improvements.
- 10 New Features in Windows 8.1 Preview that saved my Surface RT – Scott Hanselman takes a look at his top 10 new features included in the Windows 8.1 Update
- Windows 8.1 Preview : Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) – Rob Margel highlights the offical Windows 8.1 FAQ which provides answers to the most common questions about the use of the Preview release.
- Introducing IE11: The Best Way to Experience the Web on Modern Touch Devices – The Internet Explorer Team announce the release of Internet Explorer 11 Preview included as a part of the Windows 8.1 Update Preview release. This release includes numerous performance improvements, and significantly a completely new set of F12 Developer Tools
- Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Preview released! – Xiaoying Guo highlights the release of the Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 preview, allowing you to continue developing office solutions when moving to Visual Studio 2013
- Introducing The New Bing Developer Center and Services – The Bing Developer Center also announced a number of new features for Windows 8 developers at //Build, with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Services, Text to Speech, new Translation controls and improvements to mapping
Software
- NuGet 2.6 Released and Included in Visual Studio 2013 Preview – The NuGet Team announce the release of NuGet 2.6, and its inclusion in the box for the Visual Studio 2013 Preview release. As well as VS2013 compatibility this release includes the integration with the XDT transform engine for better configuration transformation, machine wide configuration, improved contextual search and better statistics tracking for packages, including breaking down direct installs and dependency installs.
- ASP.NET updates to support Windows Azure Active Directory – – Sayed-Ibrahim-Hashimi highlights an update to the Visual Studio 2013 preview which adds ASP.NET support for the Windows Azure Active Directory within its authentication controls/libraries.
Information
- Advanced Unit Testing Techniques in JavaScript – Guido Kessels takes a look at the use of SinonJS and BusterJS to provide mocking, stubbing and testing capabilities to enable you to test JavaScript code in depth
- SPA Authentication in a .Net world – Nathan Gloyn takes a look at Single Page Application Development, and specifically at the authentication options available for use in such applications
- Quickly swap Windows Azure Web Site version in the Portal with zero downtime – Magnus Mårtensson has shared a series of short videos looking at the various aspects of deployment of Windows Azure Websites, including using the different Version Control based deployment options. Check out the links in this post to the other videos in the series.
- Please Don’t Recycle Local Variables – Erik Dietrich discusses the benefits of recycling in the real world, but urges you to not recycle variables in your code, helping you to move away from the bad old days of procedural code, and to help refactoring tools to operate correctly by not inter-relating unrelated concepts by sharing variables.
- Upgrading VSIX extensions from VS2012 to VS2013
– Tarun Arora takes a look at the process to upgrade Visual Studio Extensions Projects to target Visual Studio 2013
Community
- LIDNUG Global Coding Contest – InnerWorkings and LIDNUG have teamed up to run the LIDNUG Global Coding Contest, a challenge where you solve a variety of coding challenges using Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8, and can win great prizes from a variety of .NET Tools vendors.