The Morning Brew

A couple of weeks ago I watched the dotNetConf Open Source .NET Panel’ discussion which brought together a number of people from the .NET Open Source communities to discuss the state of Open Source in our community. The discussion was a good one, well worth watching and made me start to think about some of the Open Source projects I like – one of which features in this post.

Glimpse

Glimpse provides the answer for server side code that the likes of Firebug and Chrome Developer Tools provide for the client side developer. The project was originally conceived by Anthony van der Hoorn and Nik Molnar back in early 2011, and launched at Mix11’s Open Source Fest.

Glimpse did the usual Open Source project dance through many <1.0 releases, and mid last year became a project supported by Red Gate. Since then things have rapidly accelerated, and the community team have blasted beyond the 1.0 release threshold.

Today sees the announcement of Glimpse 1.4, along with a significant new look and feel introducing a Heads Up Display to make the most significant and useful information always available when Glimpse is enabled. Check out the announcement post over on the Glimpse Blog for the full lowdown, including a short video which gives a real impression of how the new Heads Up Display actually works.

Get Your Head Up!

I love that adding Glimpse to a project while working is as simple as adding a NuGet package

Install-Package Glimpse.MVC4

Once installed, build and run your solution, and then hit up the Glimpse Handler to see what’s installed and to enable the tool

http://localhost:12345/glimpse.axd

So far all as expected. Now head back to your web application, and you will be greeted by the new look Heads Up Display at the bottom of the page, in all its Metro’esque glory.

The Heads Up Display appears across the bottom of all pages when enabled, providing at a glance key metrics about the page:

• Key Overall Timing Metrics
  • Overall Time
  • Time spent network communicating
  • Time Spent processing Server Side Code
  • Time until DOM Ready
• Server Side Processing Breakdown
  • In the MVC case identifying the Controller
  • The Action processing time
  • The View processing time
  • The Time taken by Database queries triggered by the page
• Realtime updating view of the Ajax Requests

Hovering the mouse over each of these sections gives further information about the metrics in a concise and clear, yet information dense way:

More new UI awaits you on clicking the ‘g’ logo in the corner, the traditional way to summon Glimpse’s detailed FireBug like UI to the foreground, which has also had the Metro style make over. If you’ve ever used Glimpse before you will be familiar with the range of information available in here, including the very useful (and even prettier now) Timeline view:

Why Glimpse Works for me

1. Very, very easy to get up and running
   The ‘Pit Of Success’ is easy to get into, install the package, enable via a URL, and you are reaping the rewards.
2. Tells me useful information
   Glimpse has the useful metrics, configuration and information readily available – other than enabling it there is nothing more that needs to be done
3. Friendly and far reaching community
   Nik and Anthony are nice chaps and have fostered a good community round Glimpse, and care about engagement in the open source community. The community is growing with with ever increasing numbers of contributors and extensions for all kinds of things ranging from pure ADO to SignalR – I’ve found the SignalR one useful on a number of occasions
4. Easy Extension
   It’s pretty simple to start adding your monitoring for your own functionality to a custom Glimpse tab (so easy I’ve managed it!)

I’ve found having the metrics Glimpse provides to be invaluable on a countless occasions, and I encourage you to try it out, or even better, get involved with the project itself.

Full Disclosure – Anthony & Nik gave me a preview of the new Head Up Display functionality a few days ago, which prompted me to tell you how much I’ve liked Glimpse for quite some time – No money exchanged hands, but I might let them buy me a drink when I finally get to meet them both 😉

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DDD North 2 took place last weekend, and brought together a great bunch of speakers and attendees for a fantastic event up in Bradford. Many many thanks to all those who attended, the sponsors, and especially the organisers for making the day (and surrounding days) excellent fun.

A great number of people posted slides, reviews, photos and code online as a result of the event, and I’ve tried to collect together those that I’ve seen via RSS and Twitter. It’s almost certain that I’ve missed an number of posts out, so feel free to chuck links to anything I’ve missed in the comments (and I’ll approve them as they come in).

Speakers / Sessions

• Raspberry Pi at DDDNorth – Gary Short shares slides from his session looking at the Raspberry Pi
• NuGet-PackageNPublish/Documentation – Joel Hammond-Turner shares slides and a crib sheet for his talk on Using your NuGet for Fun and Profit
• The Side Project Startup reading list – Richard Garside shares a further reading list of books related to his session
• What is spatial sql? – Peter "Shawty" Shaw shares slides from his session
• DDDNorth2 Bradford, 13th October 2012 – Async Patterns presentation and source code – Liam Westley shares slides and code from his session on Async
• Resources – Guy Smith-Ferrier shares slides and source code for his session on ‘Riting Roslyn Refactorings’ on his talk resources page
• Selenium a UI testing paradigm – DDD North 2 & NathanGloyn/Selenium-UI-Testing – Nathan Gloyn shares slides and code from his session on testing using Selenium
• Web Sockets and SignalR My slides are proving difficult to make small enough to put online (too many big photos) but for the time being you can find the slides, notes and code from an earlier incarnation of my session here.
• DDD North 2 Resources – Niall Merrigan shares a collection resources relating to his session on Defensive Programming

Reviews of the day

• DDDNorth 2 Roundup – Steve Bate
• #DDDnorth 2 write up – October 2012 – Bradford – Terry Brown
• Dispatches from DDDNorth 2 – Sam Hogarth
• DDD North 2012 – Post event – Peter "Shawty’ Shaw
• My impressions of DDD North 2 – Gary Ewan Park
• Developer Developer Developer North – Tell Them User StoriesDaley Chetwynd
• Much chin stroking at ddd north – Johnno Nolan
• DDDNorth2 – quick review – Ismail Mayat
• DDD North 2012 – Phil Hale
• DDD North 2 – 13/10/2012 – Photos from the event from Craig Murphy
• DDD North 2 – Photos from the event from Colin Angus Mackay
• DDDNorth – Photos from the event from Hermit Dave

Future Events

• DunDDD – Dundee on Saturday 17th November – Registration and session submission open now
• DDD Brisbane – DDD is an international affair, with the next overseas event taking place in Brisbane on the 1st December. Session submission is open until 4th November

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It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

• Introducing jQuery++ – Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery
• Bundler.NET – Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.
• bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy – Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.
• #mvvmlight V4 for Windows 8 RP is available – Laurent Bugnion announces the release of version 4 of his MVVMLight framework for Windows 8 Release Preview
• Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 – Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010
• Tree Surgeon – Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? – Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.
• Introducing RabbitBus – Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

Information

• Performance consideration for Async/Await and MarshalByRefObject – Stephen Toub discusses in detail the story behind the performance improvements in the Release Candidate implementation of StreamReader.ReadLineAsync over that of the beta release.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages with VS 2012 RC & ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages RC NuGet Packages – Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can use the latest nightly builds of the ASP.NET Web Stack, made available as NuGet packages, with the Visual Studio 2012 RC release, and also provides details of the offical packages for the RC release.
• AspectMap – Part 2 – An Exception Handling Helper – Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.
• 5 things you should know about developing Windows 8 Apps with HTML5] – Martin Beeby highlights 5 key concepts which you should explore when implementing your Windows 8 Metro Style applications in JavaScript and HTML5
• My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods – Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.
• Setup Improvements for Visual Studio – David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release
• Getting Started on Line-of-Business HTML5 App – Part 6 Selecting HTML with JQuery, Part 7 Local Storage, Part 8 Building a Better Form, Part 9 Show-Hide Wizard Using jQuery & Part 10 Validate, Validate, Validate – Bruce Kyle continues his series looking at using HTML5 and JavaScript to construct a Line of Business application, looking at using jQuery to work with HTML, exploring the use of Local Storage, and examining how you can use HTML5 to create better user input forms and validate the input.
• Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service – Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections
• Extending your ASP.NET Web API responses with useful metadata &Control the execution order of your filters in ASP.NET Web API – Filip W continues his series looking at the use of WebAPI with a look adding additional metadata such as the number of results found and the number returned, and look at how you can add in the ability to control the order of filters being applied to requests.
• Analyzing some "˜Big" Data Using C#, Azure And Apache Hadoop – Analyzing Stack Overflow Data Dumps – Anoop Madhusudanan takes a look at some of the concepts of ‘Big Data’ analysis on the Azure platform making use of MapReduce via Apache Hadoop, digging into a set of data from StackOverflow in this CodeProject article.
• Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express – Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.
• Anders Hejlsberg Is Right: You Cannot Maintain Large Programs In JavaScript – In a recent Channel 9 discussion Anders Hejlsberg suggested that maintaining large programs in JavaScript was very difficult. In this short post Derek Bailey shares his thoughts. Be sure to have a read of the comments on this one for some further discussion.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

• DDD Southwest – Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)
  • Session Notes 1 : Performance & Scalability
  • Session Notes 2 : Web Sockets & SignalR
  • Session Notes 3 : Defensive Programming 101
  • Session Notes 4 : Redis Is the New Black
• DDDSouthWest 4.0 26th May 2012 – Async 20/20 presentation – Liam Westley shares the audio recording along side the slides from his 20/20 lunch time presentation at DDD SW looking at Async in .NET 4.5
• My impressions of dddsw 4, DDDSW 4 – StyleCop: Breaking down the barriers to entry & Feedback from StyleCop presentation at DDDSW – Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of DDD South west, along with the details of his presentation on StyleCop, and the feedback received.
• My DDDSW AppHarbor 20/20 talk – Phil Jones shares the slides from his hastily compiled but well received 20/20 presentation on the use of AppHarbor for hosting your .NET applications.
• Is your code solid &< Is-your-code-SOLID – GitHub – Nathan Gloyn shares the slides and code from his DDD SW session on the application of the SOLID Principles of object oriented programming.
• NuGet-PackageNPublish – Joel Hammond-Turner shares the code for the NuGet Package and Publish tooling that he presented in his DDD SW session on NuGet in the enterprise,
• Developer Developer Developer South West 2012 – Jackie Pollock shares her experiences as an attendee at DDDSW, giving a summary of each of the talks she attended.
• Agenda – The DDDSW agenda has been updated with links to the various slides and downloads for many of the sessions presented.

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