The Morning Brew

Software

• Semantic Logging Application Block 1.1 Pre-release – Grigori Melnik announces the preview release of Version 1.1 of the Semantic Logging Application Block from the Patterns and Practices team
• Announcing: Updated Visual Studio 2013 RTM ALM Virtual Machine + Hands-on-Labs & Demo Scripts – Charles Sterling highlights the release of updated Visual Studio 2013 ALM Virtual Machines and Lab exercises

Information

• Acceptance of Media Source Extensions as W3C Candidate Recommendation will accelerate adoption of dash.js – Ross Gardler gives an update on the Media Source Extensions which has now been adopted as a W3C Recommendation, marking an important step in video play back on the web
• Pointer Event W3C Specification
  – Kevin Logan discusses how the W3C Pointer Events Specification (along with a polyfil for browsers who don’t yet support it) can make handling pointer related events with clicks and touches much easier.
• Customization Options With ASP.NET Identity – K Scott Allen continues his series looking at the ASP.NET Identity Framework with a look at what can be customised to make implementation easier
• Using Lua within .NET programs – Francesco Bertolaccini discusses the Lua language, and shares an implementation of Lua on the .NET Platform giving all the benefits of the CLR, garbage collection, etc.
• When is it a Good Idea to write Bad Code? – Brad Carleton discusses technical debt, why it exists, and the different types of technical debt that can be introduced into our projects, both knowingly and unknowingly.
• Speaking of ducks… The Rubber Duck edition of the Yellow Book (That learning to program with c# book), a 2014 refresh, Kindle version and a new cover – Greg Duncan highlights the latest update to Rob Miles’ Yellow Book of C#, now available as a 99 cent Kindle edition too.

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Information

• Visual Studio Survey: How do you develop for multiple form factors? – The Visual Studio Blog – Site Home – MSDN Blogs – Jessica Rich and the Visual Studio Team want your feedback on how you perform development for multiple platforms – so if this is something you have experience of, share the benefit of your experience, and you stand a chance of winning a prize.
• Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes – eBook update v1.2 posted – Willy-Peter Schaub highlights the latest updates to the ‘Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes’ ebook, from the Visual Studio ALM Rangers. This update fixes a number of small reported issues, along with adding a new section on Working with Code Contracts.
• Workflows of Refactoring – Martin Fowler shares a slide deck discussing the workflow behind refactoring, and how it can be both a thing to do after you’ve written code, and also (and equally) something to do before you add code for a new feature.
• Limiting Variables to Ease Learning – Jesse Taber discusses how the friction of learning a new platform/editor/supporting tooling can be a significant drag on learning a new programming language, and how the Visual Studio tooling for Python and Node.JS make adoption of these languages much easier.
• Techniques to Debug Applications in Windows Part 2: Debugging Windows Application – CodeProject – ‘shailesh91082’ takes a look at debugging practices for Windows applications, exploring the use of DebugDiag and Application Verifier.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Event : Mocking Bird !! , Hands On: Mocking Practice and Theory –
  CraftyCoders (Bromsgrove, England) & .NET Developer Network – "The good, the bad and the ugly of mocking" with Ian Russell – Ian Russell is taking to the road this January with a session on Mocking, one of the least understood, most poorly executed and contentious activities that we can undertake in .Net. The session will help resolve any misunderstandings and help you to determine if mocking will help you to add value to your software projects by delving deeply into the practices and philosophy of mocking. You can catch Ian’s session on the evenngs of Tuesday 14th Jan at NxtGenUG Brimingham, Thursday 16th Jan at Crafty Coders in Bromsgrove, and Tuesday 28th Jan at .NET Developer Network in Bristol.

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Software

• AliaSQL – the new name in automated database change management – Jeffrey Palermo highlights AliaSQL a new database change management library in the same vain as Tarantino. This library is available via NuGet and can be used as a relatively straight forward drop in for Tarantino
• CSLA 4 version 4.5.500 released – Rockford Lhotka announces the release of his CSLA 4 application framework version 4.5.500. This release includes Windows 8.1, Entity Framework 6, ASP.NET MVC 5 support, along with improved IoC features.
• Last Chance to Back Durandal – Rob Eisenberg gives an update on the KickStarter project for Durandal, looking at crowd sourcing funds to allow for future development of this JavaScript library.

Information

• REST WCF vs. WebAPI (throughput performance) – Kaduk Frantisek takes a look at the performance of WebAPI against WCF for an identical REST service implementation, testing the performance in a couple of different ways.
• Hosting a .NET DLL as an Out-Of-Process COM Server – Sasha Goldshtein discusses the reasons you might want to consider hosting a .NET DLL as a COM Server out of process, and looks at how to go about achieving this.
• Minty: Wrapping It Up – Rob Conery rounds out his series looking at the construction of a blog application in Node.JS
• Testing Asynchronous Javascript w/ Jasmine 2.0.0 – Eli Weinstock-Herman takes a look at testing Asynchronous JavaScript code usin the new features of Jasmine 2.0 which make this easier. This is particularly useful if you make use of libraries like RequireJS to load modules, or are testing against an remote API.
• BranchByAbstraction – Martin Fowler looks at a technique to support making large scale changes to a system whilst still being able to release the system regularly during the change work.
• Configure the IIS Application Initialization module – Benjamin Perkins walks through the setup of the IIS Application Initialization Module which provides a way of ensuring that your ASP.NET applications in IIS are alway up and running meaning your users shouldn’t encounter the dreaded application startup delay.

Community

• January 27-31 is Windows Azure Week! – The Microsoft Press blog highlights a week full of free all day (US PST times) Windows Azure related events, taking place week commencing 27th January

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