The Morning Brew

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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Software

• TouchToolkit – Get your multi-touch, multi-device, multi-environment dev on! – Greg Duncan highlights Touch Toolkit, a project ‘shahed’ which aims to simplify the construction of Multi-touch applications in WPF and Silverlight, and provide support for easing the pain of testing such behaviours.
• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework New Samples Updated on 2010-10-10 – ‘Jialiang’ highlights the latest update to the All In One Code Framework which includes new samples for shell integration (drag and drop and info tips), ASP.NET, Office, WPF and Windows

Information

• Running Open Source In A Distributed World – Phil Haack discusses distributed Open Source projects, drawing on the wisdom of Karl Fogel’s book ‘Producing Open Source Software – How to Run a Successful Free Software Project’ and discussing the processes to become a core committer on a project, illustrating with the NuPack Project
• Adopt an Open Source Project – Rob Conery attempts to convince Microsoft (and other large .NET Dependent organisations) to allow their Developer Platform Evangelists to work part time on Open Source Projects
• All-In-One Code Framework Coding Standards – Sasha Goldshtein highlights the All-In-One Code Framework project’s Coding Standards document – an 80+ page guide to writing code to their standards in C#, C++ and VB.NET written in ‘Framework Design Guidelines’ format (Do / Do not)
• Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 6b – Simple Navigation with Conductors – Rob Eisenberg continues his series of posts on using Caliburn.Micro looking at the use of Conductors for navigation between screens, illustrating with a simple sample of them in use
• .NET Formatting Reference Sheet – Richard Carr of BlackWasp Software shares a Reference Sheet for the multitude of string format specifiers, showing each with a description and a sample of its output.
• Dependency Injection for Filters in MVC3 – Javier G. Lozano looks at using the improvements in ASP.NET MVC 3 for Dependency Injection, and how this helps make using Dependency Injection with Filter Attributes much easier.
• A Simple Wrapper To Make Things More Fluent – John Sonmez continues looking at using wrapping methods with logging (or other cross cutting concerns) and explores creating a fluent-like interface for adding this functionality.
• When Intel’s Hyper Threading goes bad – Paulo Reichert discusses an instance where having a Hyper-threaded CPU may not make as much difference to your performance as you might thing, looking at what hyper-threading actually means, and how it trick the operating system into running more threads than might be optimal.
• 7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects – ‘nikosangr’ shares links to 7 really good resources for .NET Developers. I think all of these have been mentioned here before, however all are so good they deserve at least another mention.
  UPDATE: Turns out this link was to a complete copy of another bloggers article. The original (which was included in The Morning Brew previously) can be found here

Community

• PDC UK – do you fancy a night in with the Microsoft evangelists? – Rachel Collier highlights an event with a difference to be held at Microsoft’s Reading Offices during PDC. On the evening of the 28th and 29th of October you can gather at Microsoft’s Reading HQ to join UK Evangelists to watch live streams of the PDC sessions. Registration is required
• PDC10 at a university near you. – Phil Cross highlights a similar opportunity for UK Students at a number of Universities around the UK where you can see the Keynotes live, and participate in local Q&A

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Software

• ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 – Phil Haack announces the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. New additions in this preview release include jQuery Validation support for client side validation, Areas allowing you to divide up your project more easily, model validation providers and metadata providers allowing you to support validation and metadata based on something other than the default of Data Annotations. This release is for VS2008 / .NET 3.5 Sp1 only.
• CruiseControl.NET 1.5.0 CTP Released – CruiseControl.NET – Confluence – The Cruise Control Team announce the release of the Cruise Control 1.5 CTP. This release contains a number of bug fixes, a new range of security settings to allow you to lock down control of the build server, support for a number of new source code control tools such as Git, Mercurial, etc and a number of new tasks.publishers. Looks good, but as its a CTP not recommended for production use

Information

• New features in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview – ‘Shaans’ explores a number of the new features of the latest preview release of ASP.NET MVC 2, including some sneak peeks at the VS2010 beta 2 version. UPDATE: This appears to be an extract from the MVC release notes available in full here in MSWord Format
• Code Contracts Preview: PostConditions – Dino Esposito continues his series over at DotNetSlackers looking at the Code Contracts Functionality, and in this article looks at PostConditions, looking at how they are implemented and how they work, along with comparing them to the use of asserts
• Why does char convert implicitly to ushort but not vice versa? – Eric Lippert dives back into the past to discover why it is that you can convert from a char to a ushort but not the other way round, explaining how and why such a decision was made
• Lazy<T>: On Demand Construction in .NET 4.0 – Bill Wagner talks about one of the less publicised features of .NET 4, the ability to make object construction an on demand process by the use of Lazy<T>
• An Engineer’s Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Carlos Bueno, a software engineer on the Yahoo Mail project has written a good article looking at network bandwidth with a particular slant for developers. I always feel it is important to understand the process between your code and yor users, and this article seems to fill in a number of those gaps
• Mike Chaliy: Code-generation DSL with T4 (Text Templates) – Mike Chaliy takes a look at T4 Template generation using a DSL and T4 Templates to easily build configuration section reading code. A nice short understandable example of these sometimes confusing concepts
• Generically Constraining F# – Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Generic Constraints in F#. This part continues on from the previous looking at the remaining constraints that exists, including Constructor, Delegate and Reference constraints.
• Perspective camera animation on a cube in WPF 3D – Razan Paul Blog – Razan Paul has a number of posts on interesting animations created in WPF with full sample code provided. This one is the spinning cube, and others include roll down, wheel and circle animations, so be sure to take a look at them too.
• Strive for Functional Cohesion – Chris Eargle talks about Functional Cohesion, and the important decision developers are making all the time about where to place certain functionality in your object mode.

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