The Morning Brew

Software

• Expected Objects Custom Comparisons – Derek Greer shares the 1.1.0 version of is Expected Objects library which provides an easy means of using the Expected Objects pattern. This version adds in support for custom comparisons.
• Nokia Imaging SDK v1.0 RTW now available, officially a "boatload of new features and functionality" – Greg Duncan highlights the release of the 1.0 of the Nokia Imaging SDK which provides Windows Phone developers with a number (boat load!) of useful image processing related features.

Information

• 30 Days of TDD – Day 22 – When is a Test Not a Unit Test? – James Bender presses on with his series looking at Test Driven Development from first principles, and in this part casts the net a little wider and looks at some of the other forms of tests tjeat we should have in our test suites.
• Using IDisposable to scope dangerous behaviour
  – Elton Stoneman takes a look at using the IDisposable interface as a way of applying scope to configuration changes where there may be a danger of a setting being left set (or unset).
• Model binding with Headers in ASP.NET WebAPI – Benny Michielsen takes a look at reading parameters from HTTP headers and binding them into objects using Model Binding in ASP.NET WebAPI
• Enterprise Library 6: Developer’s Guide Released – Grigori Melnik highlights the Patterns and Practices Team’s Developer Guide for Entity Framework 6, available as PDF and EPUB for free download, and also Kindle and Paperback formats.
• "Community [e]Book of PowerShell Practices" September 2013 edition – Greg Duncan highlights this 25 page eBook which focuses on best practices for writing PowerShell scropts
• 10 ways to get more productive in Visual Studio – Johan Ohlin shares some simple productivity tips for Visual Studio. I suspect many will be familiar to you already, however it never hurts to be reminded of some of the useful ones again.

Community

• Legacy Code Retreat Tickets, Bromsgrove – The Crafty Coders are running an all day Code Retreat on Saturday 14th December in Bromsgrove. The topic of the event is Legacy code and the event is being run as a part of the Global Day of Code Retreat.

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Information

• A practical use of multiplicative inverses – Eric Lippert takes a post out of his series on Mathematics from scratch to look at another useful use of Multiplicative Inverses to solve some common real world problems.
• Portable Class Libraries just got REALLY useful with new licensing changes – Scott Hanselman discusses the process of changing the direction of the ship, and reports on the recent progress on improving the portable class library functionality and licensing
• An Introduction to Windows Azure Table Storage – Mike Wood takes a detailed look at the use of Windows Azure Table Storage, walking through the process with an example application, from setting up the table storage service to a running sample, discussing the concepts along the way.
• Routes, Extensionless Paths and UrlEncoding in ASP.NET – Rick Strahl discusses the pain of URL Encoding, and takes a look at using Routing with WebForms to provide better URLs to access pages
• Frameworkless JS – but we *really* want to use Knockout for that bit – Rob Ashton continues his series looking at Frameworkless JavaScript Web Applications, exploring the thoughts on using libraries like Knockout as just a library (where you use it) rather than a framework which forces you to do things a certain way.
• Load testing with Visual Studio Online – Launching Commercial Preview – Manas Maheshwari highlights another of the new offerings released yesterday, the preview release of the ability to perform load testing with Visual Studio Online
• Azure Web Site now supports WebSockets – Gustavo Armenta Valdez takes a look at utilising the Web Sockets support on Windows Azure websites which was released earlier this month, walking through the setup and looking at the use of it with SignalR
• Introduction to WebSockets on Windows Azure Web Sites – Mark Brown also takes a more detailed look at the use of Web Sockets on Windows Azure, exploring their native use.

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Visual Studio Launch and Related

• Missed Today’s Visual Studio 2013 Launch (and there were some pretty cool things released)? The Channel 9 Visual Studio 2013 Launch event has all the videos and more (92+ to be exact!) – Greg Duncan highlights the on demand replays of all the sessions from the Visual Studio 2013 Launch event yesterday
• Visual Studio 2013 Launch: Announcing Visual Studio Online – Somasegar shares his view of the Visual Studio 2013 product launch, and announcements
• Launching Visual Studio 2013 – Brian Harry gives his take on the official launch of VS 2013 and the VS2012.4 Update
• Visual Studio 2013 Launched! – The Visual Studio Team highlight their favourite sessions from the launch event
• Announcing Application Insights Preview – Charles Sterling highlights the launch of Application Insights as a limited preview at yesterday’s Visual Studio 2013 launch, a service which provides information on the use, performance and monitoring of your applications.
• A look at the new Visual Studio Online "Monaco" code editor – Jon Galloway takes the newly launched ‘Monaco’ Visual Studio Online editor which is available via Azure Websites out for a spin, walking through its use from his initial experimentation.
• First look at Visual Studio Online ‘Monaco’ – Gunnar Peipman similarly walks through the getting started with ‘Monaco’
• PCL and .NET NuGet Libraries are now enabled for Xamarin – The .NET Framework team discuss the new collaboration partnership with Xamarin and the new license which is now applied to the various Framework NuGet packages (HttpClient, SignalR, Async, Immutable Collections, Compression, Entity Framework, etc) which allows them to be used on other platforms
• Productivity Power Tools 2013 extension – Another release as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Launch was the Productivity Power Tools 2013, bringing a variety of additional features to Visual Studio including HTML Copy improvements, Structure Visualizer, Power Commands, and Help improvements.
• Download Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 (RTM) – Web, Offline Installer – Kunal-Chowdhury takes a look at the Visual Studio 2012 Update 4, discussing where to get it from, and how to construct and offline installer for it.
• New and improved EULA! – WCF Data Services Team – The The OData Team announce their migration to the new End User License Agreement (EULA) which permits use on other platforms.

Software

• EF6.0.2 Nightly Builds Available – The Entity Framework team announce the availability of Nightly Builds of Entity Framework 6.0.2, allowing you to get hold of this patch release ahead of release, and also to allow you to feedback on the improvements it contains.
• Announcing Deedle – Data Frame and Time Series Package for Exploratory Data Programming with F# and C# – Don Syme highlights the release of Deedle, a library for F# and C# whcih provides to Data Frame and Time Series programming

Information

• Cross Platform .NET Just A Lot Got Better – A happy Phil Haack reflects on the news of the new EULA for .NET Framework (and related) NuGet packages allowing use across platforms.
• 30 Days of TDD – Day 21 – A Tale of Two Defects – James Bender continues his series looking at Test Driven Development and the associated processes, with a look in this part a how Test Driven Development can support working with correcting defects in code.
• Shimming and Wrapping OWIN Middleware (Katana Part 5) – K.Scott Allen continues his series looking at OWIN Middleware, with a look at creating middleware wrappers for every piece of registered middleware allowing debugging and diagnostics to be applied to each component.
• JavaScript is not C# – Mark Rendle discusses how the C# and JavaScript languages differ in their handling of Closures.

Community

• "F# in Finance" – London – Monday, 25 Nov 2013 – The London F# Finance programming community have an all day event in London (with one in New York to follow shortly) on November 25th in conjunction with Microsoft Developer Platform Evangelism (DPE) and Fountainhead Events

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