The Morning Brew

Update: Corrected attribution for ‘Technical Debt 101’ below – thanks to James Gregory for letting me know.

Software

• VS & TFS 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 is available – Brian Harry announces the first Community Technology Preview release of Visual Studio and TFS 2013 Update 4, highlighting a number of great application lifecycle management improvements.
• Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 CTP 1 Ready to Download – John Montgomery shares the news of the CTP release, highlighting the release notes and mechanisms for feedback
• Application Insights SDK (0.10.0-prerelease) – Joshua Weber announces the pre-release version of the Application Insights SDK, and outlines how it can be used to add monitoring to your applications

Information

• Technical debt 101 – Nils Putniņš shares and article from Maiz Lulkin (orignial of which can be found here) which discusses the concepts of technical debt, drawing on definitions from around the development world, as well as discussing getting out of technical debt.
• ATBG: Ontogeny, phylogeny and virtual methods – Eric Lippert returns from holiday and highlights his latest ‘Ask the Bug Guys’ post looking at the use of virtual methods calls in constructors.
• Data Points – Git: It’s Just Data! – Julie Lerman takes a look at Git from the point of view of considering it a form of database.
• What kind of problems you’ll find only when you are dog fooding – Ayende continues his discussion of the practice of dogfooding your software, discussing the classes of issues you encounter when doing this level of testing.
• Minimum Credible Release (MCR) and Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – JD Meier discusses the principles behind the lean concepts of Minimal Viable Product, and the Minimum Credible Release.
• TypeScript Mario – Phil Trelford takes a look at the TypeScript language, and implements a Mario sample which he has previously implemented in a number of other languages.
• Azure Event Hubs, Queues and Workers – Jeff Levinson takes a look at a number fo Azure event notification technologies giving an overview of each
• Centering in CSS: A Complete Guide – Chris Coyier shares a nice guide to something which is always a lot more tricky than it should be

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Update: Fixed broken HTML on Ayende’s second link – thanks to @philpursglove for letting me know

Software

• Introducing Gulp, Grunt, Bower, and npm support for Visual Studio – Scott Hanselman announces the release of a preview of Task Runner Explorer, a VSIX extension which adds in support for running Gulp, Bower, Grunt and NPM tasks as part of the build process.
• ReSharper 8.2.2 with JetBrains Account Support is Here – JetBrains announce the release of their latest maintenance release of ReSharper 8 which addresses a number of reported issues, along with introducing the JetBrains Account for managing software licenses of JetBrains software.
• Alas YUI, I knew you… Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI) is officially dead in the water – Greg Duncan highlights the end of development of the Yahoo! User Interface library (YUI) after over 8 years of development.

Information

• MSDN Magazine: September 2014 – The September Edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online with articles on cloud enabling hardware, Windows Store application development, Universal App Development, Unity Game Development, and much much more.
• ZeroMQ #6 : Divide And Conquer – Sacha Barber continues his series looking at ZeroMQ, having covered the basics now looking at a variety of common patterns used with ZeroMQ from a .NET perspective.
• Features Of ES6 Part 5: The Spread – K. Scott Allen continues his series looking at the new features of ECMAScript 6 with a look at another of the new operators introduced which allows for an array to be expanded into individual parameters.
• RavenDB 3.0 – Production dog fooding & Dogfood sometimes doesn’t taste so good – Ayende shares his recent experiences of DogFooding RavenDB 3.0 in a production environment explaining why this form of testing is so important for your own software.
• ASP.NET vNext: Custom Project Loaders and Language Support – Roopesh Shenoy discusses the ASP.NET vNext, highlighting some of the key features, as well as looking at the language support for F# – highlighting some excellent resources on these topics along the way.
• Azure Caching: All that we need to know – Ganesh Shankaran discusses the types of caching available on the Azure Platform, and looks at some of the uses and best practices.
• Be Sure With Azure (.NET): Blob Storage – Max R McCarty takes a look at Blob Storage, giving a good overview for developers to understand this aspect of the Azure Platform.

Special1

• Introducing Event Starter Kit – Ugo Lattanzi announces an open source project called the Event Starter Kit which aims to provide a resource for anyone organising a conference or community event

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Information

• Playing with Roslyn – Ayende discusses some of the use of CodeDOM in RavenDB, and takes a look at the performance of similar code created using the Roslyn APIs
• Single Page Applications? Bah Humbug! – Shawn Wildermuth discusses the rise of the term ‘Single Page Application’, looking at its origins, and discussing how despite its name you don’t actually have to (and probably shouldn’t) build your whole application in a single page.
• Stack Overflow – performance lessons (part 1) – Matt Warren takes a look at StackOverflow’s approach to performance from the outside of the organisation, highlighting some of the published projects and articles which hint at their approach.
• Reusing ViewModels in a Universal App – Part 4 – Nathan Nesbit continues his series looking at how to structure an application such that you can share ViewModels between applications on different platforms.
• The webpage cannot be found (404) when accessing a file on Azure Websites, Configuring Application Request Routing (ARR) to use a port other than port 80 & Using a Site Extension on Azure Web Sites to automatically Bundle and Minify your content – Benjamin Perkins takes a look at the very prevalent 404 errors you encounter with IIS when first setting things up, explores configuring slightly unusual setups for ARR, and takes a look at bundling and minification on Azure Websites.
• Intro to Git and GitHub Part 3: Branching – Tobiah Marks continues his series looking at the use of Git and GitHub, taking a look at Branching in this post.
• Let your code speak for itself – Thorsten Bruning discusses code readability and looks at a number of techniques to improve comprehension of your code.

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