The Morning Brew

Software

• Durandal 2.1.0 Released! – Rob Eisenberg announces the release of Durandal 2.1.0, a bugfix and minor feature release, including support for BootStrap 3

Information

• Fresh Updates to Azure Mobile Services .NET – Henrik F Nielsen highlights the latest updates to the Azure Mobile Services for .NET platform, including improvements fo SQL Azure database initializers, service health detection and the use of local config settings.
• What are your options to host your web application with Microsoft Azure? – Rakki Muthukumar recaps the three ways you can host your websites on the Microsoft Azure platform, giving an overview of Virtual Machines and IIS, Web Roles and Azure Websites
• Final Thoughts on Nuget and Some Initial Impressions on the new KVM – Jeremy D Miller shares thoughts on DevOps topics, including a look at the new K runtime from the ASP.NET team and thoughts on NuGet.
• Draconian ASP.NET 4.5.2 Security Change: It Was the Right Thing to Do – Don Kiely shares thoughts on the recent security change surrounding EnableViewStateMac in .NET 4.5.2
• Heisenberg Developers – Mike Hadlow shares a tale from the trenches about developer management, and productivity – a worthy read.
• Modeling exercise: Flights & Travelers – Ayende discusses a real user’s question about how best to model a business problem in document database terms.
• Guide to Freeing up Disk Space under Windows 8.1 – Scott Hanselman shares a useful guide to freeing up disk space on Windows 8.1 machines
• and finally……Pragmatic people – ‘ctford’ shares an amusing development take on one of my favourite tracks of the ’90s

Community

• Conference Session Videos Online | nik codes – Nik Molnar highlights the session recordings of his recent sessions at Techorama and NDC, available online now. Be sure to checkout the extensive range of session recordings from both of these conferences.

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Software

• Visual Studio "14" CTP now available in the Virtual Machine Azure Gallery & Visual Studio "14" CTP available as an Azure VM – Charles Sterling and Brian Harry highlight the availability of Azure Virtual Machines for the Visual Studio 14 CTP release, providing the ideal way to try out the preview of the next Visual Studio in an isolated environment.
• Spelling is hard; let’s go parsing. [Simple command-line utilities to extract strings and comments from C# and JavaScript code] – David Anson shares two utilities with the same aim (but supporting different languages) which extract string content from source code. There are versions for JavaScript and C#, with the C# one making use of Roslyn for parsing

Information

• Closing over the loop variable is just as harmful in JavaScript as it is in C#, and more cumbersome to fix – Raymond chen discusses the dangers of closures over loop variables in JavaScript looking at how you can go about fixing the issue.
• Server Garbage Collection Mode in Microsoft Azure – Chris Clayton discusses the importance of getting the right Garbage collection mode, especially on the Azure platform where you are paying for the resources you use, and looks at the differences in operation of Server and Desktop modes of the Garbage collector, along with looking at how to set the mode.
• Code Quality and Automated Code Testing & I Don’t Have Time for Unit Testing! – Deborah Kurata discusses the use of Unit Testing in improving code quality, as well as looking at the reasons you should make use of Unit Testing
• Save Time, Money, and Your Sanity: Coded UI Testing for the Windows Phone – Test Methods – Lori Lalonde continues with the 4th part of a series looking at the use of Coded UI tests to help make your testing of Windows Phone applications more efficient.
• Roslyn code base – performance lessons (part 1) – Matt Warren kicks off a series discussing the performance of the Roslyn code base, initially discussing the project aims, what is available, and the performance considerations
• Native Memory Diagnostic Tools for Visual Studio "14" CTP – Adam Welch of the Visual C++ Team discusses and takes a look at the evolution of the memory diagnostic tools initially released with VS 2013 Update 2, and being significantly improved in VS 14

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Software

• Automatic optimization of images, CSS and JavaScript – Mads Kristensen discusses the pain of manually optimising images, CSS and JavaScript, and introduces an ever easier way on the Windows Azure Websites which will optimise all the things by simply installing a NuGet Package (or two)
• SQLitePCL.raw NuGet package, 0.2.0-alpha – Eric Sink announces the second alpha release of his SQLitePCL.raw NuGet Package with a number of improvements over the previous alpha, and with much more still to come.
• Releasing the new Sample Browser Phone app – Jialiang announces the release of the Sample Browser for Windows Phone, taking the number of platforms on which you can browse code to a huge number of common problems to 4.

Information

• Some enumerator bounds checks are omitted – Eric Lippert returns from holiday with a follow on instalment of ‘Ask the Bug Guys’ which takes a look at why the implementation of the Current property of struct based IEnumerator implementations does not include boundary checking.
• QueueBackgroundWorkItem to reliably schedule and run long background processes in ASP.NET – Rick Anderson reviews the three ways of implementing long running background tasks in ASP.NET applications, and looks in detail at the use for QueueBackgroundWorkItem to achieve his, sharing sample code to illustrate.
• The 2014 State of DevOps Report Is Here! – Jez Humble highlights and share a link to the ‘2014 State of DevOps’ report to which he contributed, available as a free (registration required) download.
• My ECMAScript 7 wishlist – Nicholas C. Zakas shares some of his hopes for the ECMAScript 7 standard, discussing the use of the various proposed features in some detail.
• Cordova Tools for Visual Studio: A first Look – Steven Edouard shares his first impressions of the Apache Cordova support included in Visual Studio 14’s CTP relaese.
• Notes on Debug mode versus Release Mode – Christopher T. Haun reminds us of the differences between Release and Debug builds of our code

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