The Morning Brew

Disaster struck this morning – I pressed post, waited until the page reloaded and shut my laptop as usual, but for reasons unexplained the post never made it onto the site – So here is today’s edition, a little later than planned – at least its still morning *somewhere* in the world!

Thanks to Libor or letting me know something was wrong

Update: In my haste to resurect today’s post a ‘smart quote’ snook into some HTML merging Sankarsan & Jon Skeets links together – fixed now – thanks to EF for letting me know

Software

• Simple.Data for Mono – Mark Rendle has got his Simple.Data Dynamic Data Access library up and running under Mono, with most of the tests passing. The Mono release is available as a tgz download from the project’s GitHub Site.

Information

• New Bundling and Minification Support (ASP.NET 4.5 Series) – Scott Guthrie continues his series of posts looking at the new features of ASP.NET 4.5, currently available in the Developer Preview Release. In this post Scott discusses the new support for bundling and minification of CSS and JavaScript Resources.
• Inside ASP.NET 4.5 Bundling and Minification – Sankarsan discusses some of the details behind the Bundling and minification, looking at how the functionality is implemented in the framework, discussing how the functionality is called and the interactions between the parts.
• Eduasync part 17: unit testing – Jon Skeet continues his exploration of the Async / Await functionality of C#5 discussing how it is possible to unit test async code (sometimes), illustrating by showing and discussing some of the tests for his Majority Voting implementation.
• Razor Donut Caching – Phil Haack discusses the possible look and feel for the re-introduction of donut caching in ASP.NET MVC4, highlighting a package available for MVC3 which adds the functionality and discussing some of the limitations and possible changes to Razor to make creating donut holes easy.
• REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011 – Chris Sells discusses the Roslyn CTP release and the Read Evaluate Print Loop (REPL) environment, looking into creating a console based REPL environment using Roslyn, showing how easy executing lines of code becomes with Roslyn.
• Reflection, performance and runtime code generation – Ivan Towlson discusses the use of reflection and code generation with regard to the performance of code where you need to work with types you don’t know at compile time.
• Building F# Solutions in Visual Studio 11 &
  Traffic Cop – Fresh Brewed Code, a new blogging community site for developers kicks off with posts from Dan Mohl highlighting resources for working with F# in Visual Studio 11, and Jim Cowart sharing an implementation he calls Traffic Cop for situations where he needed to avoid multiple jQuery Ajax requests for the same resources.
• Method Stubs – Phil Trelford discusses Test Driven Development in F#, focusing particularly on how you don’t need frameworks to implement stubs and spies in F#.
• 31 Days of Mango | Day #26: Background File Transfer , Day #27: Microphone API &amp Day #28: Media Library – Jeff Blankenburg’s series of posts on Windows Phone Mango continues with three more guest posts, first another from Gary Johnson discussing background file transfer. Next Parag Joshi discusses the Microphone API and the recording of audio, and finally Jeff Fansler takes a look at the Media Library.
• 10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10) – Michael Crump continues his Silverlight 5 series with part 7 exploring operating system integration with a look at power awareness, 64 bit browser support and Save Dialogs.

Community

• NxtGenUG – Santa Westley – Liam Westley joins the NxtGenUG in Coventry of their User Group meeting on Monday 12th December. There are no details of the session to be delivered, but Liam is an excelent speaker, and will nodoubt be brings some swat and probably some tasty treats too!

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OK, the time has come to unveil my Hack for Yahoo Hack Day.  Face Ball is the ‘Crazy new game at Flickr HQ‘, and images have been popping up all over flickr as other join in.  Well now, you too can join in the fun, and just like Thom Shannon, make your own Face Ball images without risk of injury or special equipment.

Flickr Face Ball is a .NET 2 Windows Forms application that allows you to select images from you Flickr photo stream by tagging them as ‘ToFaceBall’, and add one of three different face ball images to the original photo, uploading the results to your Flickr account.

So, how do you get involved in this craze:

1. Ensure you are running Windows with the .NET 2 framework – sorry Mac guys – this one probably isn’t for you.
2. Download the Zip File
3. Tag a few suitable images on your Flickr photo stream with the tag ‘ToFaceBall’
4. Extract the .zip and run FlickrFaceBall.exe
5. Enter your Flickr user account name into the box provided and click ‘Fetch From Flickr’
6. Wait patiently while it loads the images.
7. Choose an Image from the thumbnail strip at the bottom of the screen, choose a ball from the pallet on the left, and click on the image to position it.
   
8. When you have achieved the look you want, click save, enter a title and description, followed by Authenticate.
9. When prompted in your browser, please allow the application to upload the images.
10. Finally, click upload, and (hopefully) your creation will be be uploaded to your flickr stream.
     

Credits:

FlickrFaceBall uses the Flickr.NET API Implementation – I have only good things to say about this library – it just works 😉

Thom Shannon for providing the inspiration for the Hack, and also providing the PSD of face ball images.

Finally, to the original source of the Face Ball images – photo1 and photo2

Please Note: This program is hack quality code – It’s not been tested much, and if it breaks your computer, flickr account, or anything else, its your own responsibility.

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I’ve recently returned from a long roadtrip holidays in the states, and along with a large number of souvenirs, I also returned with rather a lot of photos.  Whilst on the road, I had been able to copy the photos from memory card to a laptop, and I was reviewing the photos using Picassa.  Prior to leaving on my Holidays I had change camera, and my new camera had the ability to shoot in Canon CR2 RAW format.  I had hardly used the new camera before leaving, and imagine my disappointment when, after the first full day of shooting I return to the hotel room and review the photos, only to find that the RAW files I have a being rendered in Picasa with a rather strange rose tint.  Now I knew that while I may have been viewing San Francisco with ‘Rose tinted spectacles’ , my camera certainly did not have any such filter on it.

It turned out that this was a bug in Picasa, which had been about for a while, with no sign of a solution.  For the rest of the holiday, I made sure that the camera was shooting both RAW and JPEG so I could at least review the photos each day.

Upon returning to the UK I gave Picasa another chance, and checked that I had the latest version of the product using the Check for Updates option. Nothing happened, so I (wrongly) assumed that I had the latest version.  A little more reading about the problem revealed that the issue had been fixed in the latest version of Picasa, and upon checking the version number of my Picasa installation, the one mentioned in the Google Groups message, and the one for the latest version on the Picasa website, I discovered a discrepancy. 

One final Check for Update followed, to no avail, and I resorted to manually downloading the installer and installing over the top of my current install. 

The update resolved my problem, and I could see the fantastic difference between the RAW versions and the in camera JPEG versions.  It also taught me two lessions:

1. Always Always Always take photos in RAW format – even without any post processing the image quality blows the in camera JPEG images away  .
2. When Implementing update checks in applications, don’t ever let them lie to the user.
Technorati Tags: picasa, photos, update, software

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