The Morning Brew

Whoops, closed the laptop lid too quickly again this morning….sorry today’s is late foks.

Software

• Windows Azure: General Availability of SQL Server Always On Support and Notification Hubs, AutoScale Improvements + More – Scott Guthrie announces the latest batch of improvements and new features added to the Windows Azure platform. This update includes support for SQL Server’s always on functionality on Azure Virtual Machines as a General Availability release, along with the General Availability of Azure Notification Hubs and further improvements on Auto Scale, load balancer and a batch of improvements to the management portal too.
• Over 400 Virtual Machine Images of open source software stacks in the VM Depot Azure Gallery – Scott Hanselman shares a look at the 400+ pre-configured virtual machine images available for easy deployment in the cloud from the Azure VM Depot Gallery.

Information

• Conventional HTML in ASP.NET MVC: Building tags – Jimmy Bogard takes a look at the use of the HtmlTag type in ASP.NET MVC HtmlHelper methods to provide a good way of building HTML Tag output and also to provide a good way of testing such methods.
• Attribute Routes and Hierarchical Routing – K Scott Allen discusses attribute based routing which is a feature which will be coming to the ASP.NET Platform as part of the next release, and how he feels that there are some downsides to performing routing scattered througout the controllers.
• ASP.NET Release Checklist – Dean Hume shares a checklist he uses when ever he deploys code update to ASP.NET based projects – all good things to think about before you push the button on your latest relaese.
• How to Build a RSS Feed Reader using Windows Phone App Studio? – Kunal Chowdhury takes a look at the newly launched Windows Phone App Studio, a web based application builder tool which allows you to create a variety of types of Windows Phone application directly from your browser.
• Obscure WinDbg Commands, Part 1 – Sasha Goldshtein shares the first part of what will certainly be an interesting series on less known but very useful WinDbg commands, starting with !uniqstack and !findstack, both commands I would have found useful in past debugging sessions.
• PowerShell 4.0 – What’s new? – Oliver Kohl D.Sc takes us on a tour of the new aspects of PowerShell 4, including discussion of where to get it for your operating system, looking at the various components and some of the new command capabilities.

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Software

• Announcing the EventSource NuGet Package – Write to the Windows Event Log – Cosmin Radu announces the release of a new NuGet package from the .NET Framework Team which provides easy event tracing to the Windows Event Logs using strongly typed event classes.

Information

• Why does the CLR report a NullReferenceException even if the referenced access is not exactly the null pointer? – Raymond Chen continues with his series of .NET related posts with a look at some interesting behaviour involving null references and exceptions
• Need LINQ but Writing JavaScript? – Shawn Wildermuth takes a look at underscore.js and how it provides some LINQ like features in JavaScript making working with collections of items much easier.
• LINQ Style Append and Prepend Operators – Richard Carr takes a look at how adding simple Prepend and Append LINQ extension methods can really help improve the readaility of your code
• Reactive JavaScript – Alex Young highlights the Reactive Extensions for JavaScript, which bring the goodness of reactive programming to JavaScript allowing for data flow oriented programming.
• Message handlers scoped per route in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W takes a look at implementing message handlers in ASP.NET Web API which respond to specific routes to take their action allowing, for example, you to log calls to specific routes.
• Saving and Retrieving Browser (and other) Passwords – Scott Hanselman discusses the balance between security and convenience and highlight how easily saved passwords in many applications can be accessed
• Open Source Project Advice – Jim Cowart response to a call for help tweet with his thoughts and advice for Open Source Project owners

Community

• Aortic update – Rockford Lhotka shares news of his recent illness and a reminder that our health is very important – I like to take this opportunity to wish Rocky a speedy recovery

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Software

• Glimpse 1.6.0 released – Anthony van der Hoorn announces the latest release of Glimpse, taking the version number to 1.6. This release includes a number of improvements and new features including improved NuGet package information, server time, along with updates to Glimpse.ASP.NET, Glimpse.MVC and Glimpse.ADO packages.
• dotPeek 1.1 is Released – JetBrains announce the release of dotPeek 1.1, available as 32 and 64 bit releases this new version includes features to export an assembly to a project, XAML WPF decompilation support and much more.
• Humanizer V0.4 – Mehdi Khalili announces the 0.4 release of Humanizer a library which takes .NET types and converts them into human readable names. This ranges from taking Pascal Case strings to Sentence case (with spaces), extracting enum names, common date terminology (yesterday, etc) along with support for Pluralisation and Adding Ordinals to numbers – useful stuff.

Information

• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: When do Azure Websites make sense? – Scott Hanselman answers a series of common questions about the practical use of Azure Websites for small sites, looking at what you need to achieve common hosting scenarios, how much it costs and how to minimise your costs.
• Step-by-step: Getting setup on Azure with your MSDN benefits – Colin Beales also has a related piece which looks at setting up your Windows Azure MSDN Benefits which give you considerable free credit on the Azure platform as a part of your MSDN Subscription providing a great way to experiment and learn without incurring costs.
• Background Thread? Let me count the ways…. – Rob Philpott takes a look at the variety of different ways in which you can kick off work on a background thread, complete with amusing names for each technique.
• Building apps with the .NET Framework 4.5.1 Preview in Visual Studio 2012 – Rich Lander discusses a common question about being able to target to the .NET 4.5.1 preview release of the framework in Visual Studio 2012, highlighting the two ways to get the required targeting installed.
• Implementing User Confirmation and Password Reset with One ASP.NET Identity – Pain or Pleasure – Kazi Manzur Rashid takes a look at re-implementing the old membership provider’s features for sign up confirmation and password reset in the new ASP.NET Identity membership system
• On partially-constructed objects, additional remarks, not as interesting – Continuing CLR week, Raymond Chen builds on a piece from Joe Duffy regarding partially constructed objects

Community

• 10 Years… My blogging is now in the double digits! (wow) & [Humor] One-liners that only DBA’s and T-SQL’ers will get… – Congratulations to Greg Duncan on his 10 Year Blog’aversary….and thanks for sharing this Friday’s piece of humour.

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