The Morning Brew

Software

• New release – Tx (LINQ to Logs and Traces) – Ross Gardler announces the release of a new open source project from Microsoft which provides events from logs and traces as a source for the use of Reactive Extensions and LINQ.
• WorldWide Telescope celebrates new release – Jonathan Fay announces the version 5 release of the Microsoft Research WorldWide Telescope, which is also celebrating its 5th year. This is a fun and interesting educational tool and well worth checking out.

Information

• But does it quack like a duck? – Phil Haack adds some more to the recent discussion around duck typing
• Implementing custom password policy using ASP.NET Identity – ‘suhasbj’ walks through implementing a custom password policy with the new ASP.NET Identity library
• JavaScript JSON Date Parsing and real Dates – Rick Strahl discusses the adoption of JSON as the main serialization format in development today and looks at the main pain point, the support for dates.
• Small Basic Compiler – Phil Trelford continues with his discussion of the implementation of a Small Basic parser, interpreter, and now explores compilation.
• Separating Concerns -Part 2: Services & CRUD is Not a Service – Chris Patterson shares two articles, one following on from a previous looking at separating concerns in service implementations, and the other discussing the implementation of Create Read Update Delete logic, and how Command Query Separation acts as a better structure.
• MSDN Magazine – The January edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online with its usual selection of articles covering all aspects of .NET development and further afield as well.

Community

• Sheffield .NET User Group – The Sheffield .NET Usergroup are meeting tonight (7th Jan) at Tribal in Sheffield for sessions on Testing in F# (from Daley Chetwynd) and Immutable Collections (from John Stovin)
• Shropshire Dev Net | 16 Jan 2014 – TDD Code Dojo – Shropshire Dev Net’s first meeting of the year is a hands on coding dojo event on Thursday 16th January 2014

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Software

• Just released Prism for the Windows Runtime on Windows 8.1 – Blaine Wastell announces the release of Prism for the Windows Runtime on Windows 8.1, the patterns and practices library and guidance for building MVVM applications for WinRT. This updated release also includes numerous new pieces of guidance and reference material.

Information

• Duck Typing Is More Than Quackery – Eric Lippert kicked off some good discussion of Duck Typing last week, and in this post Phil Haack responds with further discussion of definition and how duck typing works in some dynamic languages.
• On Duck Typing & Is Duck Typing a Type System, or a Way of Thinking? – Glenn Block and John Atten also share their thoughts on Duck Typing.
• SkyLog: My first end-to-end example on programming by composition – Li Chen shares SkyLog, a log parsing library which Li Chen has used as an example of programming by composition which allows the parsing of logs from a variety of sources.
• ASP.NET Identity with the Entity Framework – K Scott Allen takes a look at how ASP.NET Identity makes use of Entity Framework to persist its information
• Semantics, Modules And Testing: Why (And How) I Test Internal Components, Not Private Methods – Derick Bailey discusses the principles of testing, sharing his approach of testing internal components of libraries rather than getting intimate with private methods.
• Small Basic Interpreter & Small Basic Parser – Phil Trelford takes a look at creating programming language parsers and intepreters using F#, exploring the implementation a Small Basic parser and Interpreter.
• Browser Downloads Suck – Paul Hammant discusses browser download capabilities and some of the new HTML5 improvements which may improve this area.

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Software

• ResX-Aggregator extension – A rather useful looking Visual Studio Extension for working with RESX resource files in multiple languages from Jeffery Tian

Information

• What is "duck typing"? – Eric Lippert starts the year with a fabulous adventure discussing the definition of Duck Typing, looking at type systems, and how C# does actually do some ‘duck typing’ under the covers.
• Log4net Azure Service Bus Appender – Michael Stephenson looks at the implementation of a custom Log4Net Appender which will record log events to the Windows Azure Service bus, providing a nice way to combine and process logging messages from a number of applications.
• Simple.Web and ServiceStack Templates – Daniel Mohl shares another two project templates for projects in F#, this time providing templates for the Simple.Web framework and Service Stack framework.
• Windows Phone 8 Blank Project Template for Visual Studio 2013 – Michael Crump shares a version of his Visual Studio 2012 Blank Windows Phone 8 project template for Visual Studio 2013
• Portable Class Libraries: Papering Over Platform Differences – Gordon Watts discusses the somewhat viral nature of Portable Class Libraries, and looks at a work around which allows you to call platform specific functionality from Portable Class Libraries.
• Code rant: The Geek Christmas Quiz 2013 &The Geek Christmas Quiz 2013: The Answers! – In case you missed Mike Hadlow’s annual Geek Christmas Quiz this year (which is possible since I forgot to include it in an edition of the Brew before Christmas) here is a little something to soften the ‘back to work’ blues – now with answers too.

Community

• Free spaces available at Visual Studio ALM, Test and Project Management Events in January and February – Colin Beales highlights the availability of some free places on Visual Studio / ALM events in January and February being held in London, Edinburgh and Reading.

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