The Morning Brew

Information

• Signs you’re veering from good API design – Phil Jackson shares a short list of warning ‘smells’ that your RESTful API might not be as RESTful as it should be
• Azure Mobile Services – Custom APIs and URI Paths – Mike Taulty continues his series looking at creating custom APIs using the Windows Azure Mobiles Services and Node.js, taking a look at the URI path structure for his services in this post.
• Lock vs. Mutex – Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at the behaviour of some smiple sample code generating prime numbers, looking the choice of synchronisation primitive to use wehn synchronising access to the results collection.
• How to choose a No SQL Database – Manu Cohen-Yashar gives s short roundup of the different types of NoSQL database, and explores some of the pros and cons of each type, giving useful information when it comes to choosing the type to use for a project.
• Are You Serving Files Insecurely in ASP.NET – Filip Ekberg discusses common coding mistakes which allow access to files that should remain inaccessible in sites (and servers).
• Creating a simple Tab – Your code, your plugins, part 1 – Anthony Van Der Hoorn kicks off a series of posts looking at building monitoring for your own application into Glimpse by way of an extension to Glimpse which adds a tab to the UI for the information

Community

• Northwest Cadence is giving a number of great (and free) Dev/ALM webcasts in the coming days, weeks and months… – Greg Duncan highlights Northwest Cadence’s series of events, many of which are being webcast for free – visit the site for the full list, and for registration links.

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Software

• NServiceBus 4.0 Released! – Udi Dahan announces the release of NServiceBus 4.0. This release brings RabbitMQ and ActiveMQ support in addition to the usual MSMQ, as well as support for using database tables as queues, and lots more. Udi also highlights the Hands on Labs which give you access to a virtual environment with NServiceBus set up, and allows you to evaluate and learn about it interactively.
• Introducing Storage Client Library 2.1 RC for .NET and Windows Phone 8 – The Windows Azure Storage Team announces the release candidate release of the Windows Azure Storage Client Library 2.1 for .NET and Windows Phone, supporting async task based API methods, IQueryable support against table service, buffering and performance improvements, new blob APIs and much more.
• New open source releases: Reactive Extensions (Rx) libraries for Python and Ruby – Brian Benz announces the latest open source releases from Microsoft Open Technologies, Reactive Extensions for Python and Ruby, allowing these languages to make use of the reactive programming style which started out as a Microsoft Research project.

Information

• Scaling Up and Scaling Out in Windows Azure Web Sites – Byron Tardif discusses in some detail the options available to you to scale your Windows Azure Websites hosted applications, looking at the various restrictions and SLAs, along with the new auto scale features
• Unit testing is out, Vertical Slice Testing is in – Sebastien Lambla discusses his current feelings on testing applications, and how he has moved to testing vertical slices of an application (VEST) to ensure applications actually work from a more user focused point of view.
• Seven nuances when working with X.509 certificates in .NET – Paul Stovell shares his experiences working with X.509 certificates to enable secure communication between the components of Octopus Deploy, with a number of useful lessons to learn when dealing with anything certificate related.
• A little Hadoop, HDInsight, Mahout, some .Net and a little StackOverflow and you have… – Greg Duncan highlights an article from Anoop Madhusudanan which explores end to end big data analysis using HDInsight, Hadoop and Mahout to dig into users Stack Exhange use, and suggest questions they might be able to answer.
• Building remote control service for Spotify with ASP.NET Web API and SignalR – Filip W looks at combining ASP.NET Web API with SignalR to remotely control a spotify instance in this Tech.Pro article.
• What’s New in IIS 8.5? – Robert McMurray highlights some of the new features included in Internet Information Services 8.5, sharing links to more detailed information on each feature
• Steve Ballmer On a Big Vision – To Help People Realize Their Full Potential – J.D. Meier reflects on yesterday’s news of a significant shake up to the organisational structure of Microsoft.

Special1

• If Kerouac wrote JavaScript (and Dr Johnson wrote CoffeeScript) – Angus Croll takes a look at what simple programmes for factorial and Fibonacci sequence generation would be like if some of the world’s most famous authors wrote them

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Software

• HttpClient 2.2 is now RC – Immo Landwerth announces the Release Candidate Release of the HttpClient Portable Class Library. This release includes the automatic decompression feature, and assuming there are no problems with the release candidate it will shortly become an RTM release.
• Chutzpah – Chutzpah 2.4.2 – Matthew Manela announces the release of Chutzpah 2.4.2. This update includes a few bug fixes and also updates the dependency on TypeScript to 0.9.0.1, as well as introducing a feature to allow the injection of HTML templates into the generated test harness.
• InRelease Acquisition is complete & Team Foundation Service Update – July 9 – Brian Harry announces the completion of the Microsoft acquisition of InRelease, a release management product which runs against Team Foundation Server, and announce the availability of the first Microsoft iteration of the product. Brian also highlights the latest update to the hosted Team Foundation Server, including a number of new features for agaile project management.

Information

• Visual Studio 2013 Preview: Peek Definition aka Go To Definition (Peek) & Visual Studio 2013 Preview: CodeLens aka Code Information Indicators – Zain Naboulsi takes a look at two new Visual Studio 2013 features. The Peek Definition feature allows easier viewing of the definition of functions from call sites, and CodeLens combines data from the IDE with that in TFS for improved find references.
• Your test suite is trying to tell you something – John Graham-Cumming urges you to investigate that occasionally failing test in your test suite as it may uncover something interesting about your code base, and some of your assumptions
• Building Out a Clean, REST-ful WebApi Service with a Minimal WebApi Project – Trimming down the standard projects templates seems to be all the rage, and John Atten shares a clean ASP.NET Web API project, and in this article looks at using that clean start to implement a minimal REST API using WebAPI
• Monitoring performance of SignalR Applications – Suprotim Agarwal takes a look at monitoring SignalR applications, using the SignalR performance testing tools to generate load, and looking at the various Web Server and SignalR specific performance counters to monitor.

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