The Morning Brew

Software

• Introducing VsixCompres – a NuGet package to compress your Visual Studio Package – Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi shares a NuGet package which manipulates the build process for your Visual Studio Extension projects to add in generation of a fully compressed VSIX build artefact.

Information

• Reactive benefits with commodity option barrier events – Wes McClure takes a look at refactoring some code to make use of the reactive extensions and along the way making the code clearer and simpler
• CSI: Visual Studio – Unable to translate Unicode character at index X to specified code page – Scott Hanselman discusses the tracking down of a bizarre build error caused by some invalid characters in the PATH environment variables.
• WintellectNOW FTW – Wintellect now providing on-demand learning for everyone (and there's even a few free sessions too) – Greg Duncan highlights some free and some paid for trainign content from Wintellect. The free modules available include jQuery, Azure and IntelliTrace content.
• Using Environment.FailFast – Richard Carr takes a look at how to get your application to bail out completely in the case that something very serious has gone wrong using Environment.FailFast.
• Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them. – Monjurul Habib shares a nice overview of all things Agile, looking at the guiding principles and the various skills , practices and techniques which under pin in this CodeProject article.

Community

• TechEd North America 2013 – Channel 9 now has all the session recordings from TechEd available online, giving you access to what appears to be over 700 sessions of content covering all aspects of the Microsoft world.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Making Windows Store Dance – The Birmingham NxtGenUG welcome Christopher Myhill for a session on building applications for the Windows Store, sharing key lessons learnt when crafting your application for the store. The event takes place the evening of Tuesday 18th June

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Software

• Web Developer Checklist – the Chrome extension – Mads Kristensen announces the release of a Web Developer Check List Chrome Extension which also automates a large part of the check list as it is able to review the loaded page content. The extension is available via the Chrome webstore, and as its open source you can also get the source code from GitHub
• IIS Express GUI and Visual Studio 2010 integration – Matteo Tontini discusses the use of IIS Express and shares a nice simple utility for managing the sites configured in IISExpress, available from the projects CodePlex site.
• Portable Compression and HttpClient Working Together – .NET Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Immo Landwerth announces the release of two new beta NuGet packages for the HttpClient implementation which add in compressions support to this portable library

Information

• Knockout.js Troubleshooting Strategies – Ryan Niemeyer shares some great debugging and troubleshooting techniques when working with Knockout.js, discussing logging, the use of the console, catching and working with exceptions and also a number of common problems.
• How to delete Open or Insecure Wi-Fi HotSpots from Windows 8: Wifi.exe Command Line Utility with Source – Scott Hanselman follows on from his recent Hanselminutes podcast with Troy Hunt where wireless security was one of the topics they covered, with a look at how you can remove the remembered networks from your Windows 8 installation.
• T4 – The Insource Code Monkey – Nick Harrison discusses one of the more unsung heroes in the Development, the code generation possible using T4 Templates, discussing how you probably are using them without even knowing, looking at motivations for uses in your own applications, and exploring how to go about it.
• ACID 2.0 in action – Jimmy Bogard continues his discussion of getting rid of two phase commit in messaging applications, and takes a look at ACID 2.0, a new version of the ACID acronym which aims to provide guidelines to allow a data model to provide high throughput without traditional locking.
• LINQ for JavaScript – Kamyar Nazeri takes a look at implementing LINQ functionality in the JavaScript language, sharing implementations for 30 LINQ operations in JavaScript – great if you need this kind of functionality in JavaScript or are curious about the implementation of such functions.

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I had a really nice evening presenting at the ChesterDevs Usergroup last night – thanks to the organiser and attendees for being so welcoming and also for asking some really good pertinent questions. If you are anywhere nearby I encourage you to check the group out, and what better way to do so than at their next meeting on 3rd July where ‘Friend of the Brew’ Mark Rendle will be giving a session on TypeScript.

Software

• First look at Windows 8.1 (Video) – Rob Margel shares the video from Jensen Harris’ TechEd session which demonstrates some of the new features and improvements coming in Windows 8.1

Information

• Clean Code Cheat Sheet – Urs Enzler shares an updated and enhanced Clean Code Cheat Sheet. Available in PDF form, this 4 page cheat sheet details all the key concepts which back the Clean Code idea
• VS 2013 round tripping – Brian Harry shares some more Visual Studio 2013 news, this time relating to the very important round tripping support which allows 2013 to work with 2010 and 2012 solutions and projects without conversion.
• PragPub with Elixir; Updated Raspberry Pi – The Pragmatic Programmers highlight their latest edition of PragPub magazine which features articles on a variety of development platforms and languages. This month includes Rails, Elixir and Knockout.
• See the Intermediate Language for C# Code – Dave Kerr shares an article on Codeplex which details the creation of a Visual Studio addin which allows you to highlight code, and see the IL that represents the code. The extension is available to download, so can also be added to your tool belt easily.
• Unity – Part 4: Extensions – Development With A Dot – Ricardo Peres continues discussion of the Unity Framework, with a 4th part which looks at extending the functionality of Unity, looking at the registration and configuration of extensions.
• Celebrating an Energy Efficient Browser on World Environment Day – The Microsoft Green Blog celebrate the news that Internet Explorer 10 is the most eco-friendly browser in terms of its energy efficiency, meaning both good things for your battery life and for the planet.

Community

• DareDevs: TDD, where did it all go wrong – DareDevs, formerly the Manchester NxtGenUG group, welcome Ian Cooper for a session on Test Driven Development on the evening of Wednesday 19th June.
• NxtGenUG – Event: Cross platform apps and games. – The Coventry NxtGenUG welcome Simon Jackson for a session on creating games and applications which work across multiple platforms, inculding a look at MonoGame and Xamarin Studio on the evening of Monday 17th June.

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