The Morning Brew

Software

• Knockout v2.3.0 released; v3.0.0 beta available – Steve Sanderson announces the release of Knockout 2.3.0, along with the beta release of Knockout 3.0.0. The 2.x release brings performance and compatibility improvements along with bugfixes, and a couple of new features, and the 3.0 beta gives a taste of what is to come including substantial new binding features.
• Spec Explorer 2010 Release 3.5.3146.0 now available! – The Spec Explorer team announce the release of Spec Explorer (2010) 3.5.3146.0 which brings with it support for Visual Studio 2012 in addition to 2010, multi-machine processing, model change detection and a new context menu.

Information

• C# Performance Benchmark Mistakes, Part Three – The 3rd part of Eric Lippert’s series of Performance Benchmarking common mistakes is available now on Tech.pro. In this post Eric discusses the significant difference in the first run of some code due to effects such as JIT compilation, and how performance in one environment does not equal performance in another.
• Cross-Platform Portable Class Libraries with .NET are Happening – Scott Hanselman highlights recent developments for Portable Class Libraries, discussing how they are useful, looking at a number of the best portable libraries, and discussing how portable class libraries can go cross platform.
• The Lawyers Won’t Let Us – Phil Haack shares some thoughts on legal departments preventing alternative licensing of products, takes a look at the problem from a legal teams point of view (no change = no risk) and suggests that a good legal team should aim to make things possible.
• Getting Started With OWIN, Katana, and VS2013 – K. Scott Allen takes a short introductory look at OWIN (Open Web Interface in ,NET) and shows how and why its present in the new ASP.NET templates in Visual Studio 2013, illustrating with a simple example to serve web content from a console application.
• 30 Years of Hello, World – Jeremy Likness takes a look at the last 30 years of programming languages via the humble ‘Hello World’ program
• Building The New Financial Times Web App (A Case Study) – Wilson Page discusses some of the web development challenges they encountered while building the Financial Times web application, discussing how demanding briefs for the behaviour and appearance gave some opportunities to innovate on web standards.
• Essential Knockout.js – Kelly Adams & Mark Michaelis gives a nice introduction to the key concepts and practices for development using Knockout.js in this Visual Studio Magazine article.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event: Functional Programming with F# – The Birmingham NxtGenUG welcome Ian Russell for a session exploring functional programming using the F# language, giving an introduction to functional programming and setting you on course to enjoy the ability to solve complex problems with simple maintainable code.
• Brighton ALT NET @ Brighton Digital Festival – Mike Hadlow highlights the special Brighton Alt.NET event taking place as a part of the Brighton Digital Festival during September 2013.

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Software

• RIA Services is Getting Open-Sourced – Jeff Handley announces Microsoft’s plans to open source RIA Services, via the OuterCurve Foundation, as ‘Open RIA Services’ with code hand over occurring this summer

Information

• What’s in a Good Commit? & What’s in a Good Commit? – Timo Mihaljov and Jaco Pretorius discuss best practices for what should go in a commit when developing, with Timo giving the initial list of 5 best practices and Jaco responding to these sharing his opinions
• How to integrate a Mobile Service with a SOAP Service Bus Relay Service – Paolo Salvatori takes us on a detailed exploration of combining cloud based Azure Mobile Services with on premise applications, and bridging the gap between the systems usng the Service Bus
• Practical Azure #24: Windows Azure Mobile Services – Jim O’Neil shares a session recording looking at the Windows Azure Mobile Services – this one is from before //build 2013 so there have been a few new announcements, and Jim shares links to the relevant sessions from Build to extend your knowledge
• Is there more to using SQL in Azure than redirecting your connection string? – Greg Low discusses some of the other things you should think about before moving your application databases to the (Azure) cloud as SQL Azure
• Think virtualizing SQL Server is evil? Here’s a 94 page PDF from the SQL Server team that might have you thinking otherwise… "Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server 2012" – Greg Duncan highlights a new whitepaper discussing the best practices for running SQL Server 2012 in virtual environments, something which is ever more important as infrastructure teams continue adopting virtualisation.
• API diff report for Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 Preview – Jim Galasyn highlights some work by Koen Zwikstra at First Floor Software who has looked at the differences between the APIs exposed in Windows 8.1 compared to those in Windows 8.
• Web Page Performance – Profiling paint times – Dean Hume discusses the performance of web pages, specifically looking at the support in Chrome ‘Canary’ to help identiy the paint time of the page.
• Looking Back: My First C# Program – K Scott Allen takes us on a trip down memory lane, sharing one of his oldest .NET programs, from the early .NET 1.0 beta days

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Information

• The answer to the string concatenation puzzle – Eric Lippert shares the less than obvious answers to last weeks string concatenation puzzle, looking at several cases where ‘addition’ of strings produces results you might not expect
• Two week sprints; twelve month releases – Paul Stovell discusses the importance of actually releasing software to end users as a part of an agile software development process, and the important role of taking that user feedback to improve the product.
• Introducing $select and $expand support in Web API OData – Javier Calvarro Nelson discusses the inclusion of $select and $exapnd support in the latest version of Web API’s OData implementation, looking at their purpose, use and implementation.
• Web Essentials 2013: Where is the TypeScript support? – Mads Kristensen discusses the removal of TypeScript support (amongst other features removed) when Web Essentials was ported to Visual Studio 2013, discussing how removal now paves the way for core Visual Studio support to be added without conflicts.
• Azure Mobile Services Update – Custom APIs – Mike Taulty takes a look at the support for adding custom APIs to Windows Azure Mobile Services via code in Node.js (with .NET support coming soon), walking through a sample implementation.
• What is claims-based authentication? – Gunnar Peipman prepares the ground for a number of future posts with an explanation of the key concepts of Claims Based Authentication
• WP8 Speech – Exploring the MVVM pattern – Rob Chambers discusses his experiences implementing a Windows Phone 8 application using the MVVM, sharing parts of the code for the application and discussing the implementation of a number of features
• Hack Proof Your ASP.NET Application From Cross Site Scripting (XSS) – Sarvesh Kushwaha shares a useful reminder of the different classes of Cross Site Scripting attack possible in web applications, and explores how to protect your applications for exploit
• A simple jQuery Qunit-based JavaScript Unit Test Project Template – John V Petersen takes a look at testing JavaScript with QUnit based tests using the Chutzpah JavaScript Unit Test Runner and sharing a project template to make it easier to get started writing tests.

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