The Morning Brew

Software

• WCF Data Services EULAs updated - The WCF Data Services Team announce a change to the EULA (End User License Agreement) for WCF Data Services 5.0.1 and later which allows the DLLs to be redistributed.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Select() and Where() with Indexes - James Michael Hare shares the latest part in his C# and .NET Little Wonders series, continuing his exploration of LINQ methods with a look at the Select and Where methods, looking at how you can work with the index of the elements in the series too.
• NuGet and Bin Deploy - The WCF Data Services Team discus their increasing use of NuGet as a distribution method for their new more frequent release strategy, looking at how you can use NuGet to get and keep up to date with the WCF Data Services.
• WCF Data Service - Dinesh Sabnani walks through the use of the WCF Data Services in creating and consuming a simple data service, and looking at some of the ways you can query the service using URIs.
• Essential Windows Azure (Microsoft Cloud) Knowledge : Part 1: Web roles, Worker Roles - Bruno Terkaly kicks off a new series looking at the essentials of Windows Azure. This first post looks at the concepts of Web and Worker Roles, answering common questions on the technology, and looking at how it all works.
• Awesome with Windows Phone: 13 ways to improve the performance of your app - Matt Lacey shares a simple list of 13 things you can do to help ensure that your Windows Phone 7 applications perform as well as possible on devices.
• "SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide" 454 page PDF on upgrading from SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2012 & [Limited time offer] Programming Windows 6th Edition Preview eBook is now available. Buy the CP edition today for $10 and get the RP/RTM book updates as they are released, free… - Greg Duncan highlights two Microsoft Press titles, one available for free looking at everything you need to know about upgrading to SQL 2012, and the other an update for Windows 8 of the legendary Charles Petzold book ‘Programming Windows’ available in early access form at a very reasonable price.

Community

• DevEvening goes to the movies - DevEvening, the Woking based .NET Usergroup are hosting a movie night, with a number of pre-recorded sessions on Clean Code (Uncle Bob Martin) and a session on WebAPI on the evening of Wednesday 30th May.
• NxtGenUG - Event - IIS8 Platform for the Future - The NxtGenUG in Hereford welcome Andy Westgarth for his session on IIS8 which will be released as a part of the Windows 8 and Windows 8 Server release. In the session Andy will give background on IIS7 and 7.5 before delving into what is new and exciting in IIS8.
• MEET Windows Azure on Twitter (+ Beer), 7th June 2012 - Windows Azure MVP Magnus Mårtensson is hosting an online Twitter event for the MEET Windows Azure event on 7th June - a great opportunity to discuss the exciting announcements that will be made.

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(For those who enquired yesterday, you will be glad to know that it was a sunny spring day for my fire drill yesterday)

Software

• Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Sample Updates in May, 2012 - Jialiang Ge discusses the latest update to the All-In-One Code Framework, highlighting the new samples included for Windows Azure, CLR, Windows SDK, Windows Forms, WPF, IIS, and TFS. If you are ever trying to do something and are not sure how its well worth checking if the All-In-One Code Framework has a sample for it!
• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK now available - Greg Duncan highlights the availability of the Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK, made available yesterday this is the support you need to write extensions, commands, shell projects, and much more for the latest Visual Studio IDE.
• Team Foundation Service Updates - 5/15 - Brian Harry discusses the work in the latest sprint of the online hosted TFS service, highlighting the new features and improvements which have made it into the latest update.

Information

• .NET 4.5 Improvements for Cloud and Server Applications - Somasegar discusses the improvements introduced in .NET 4.5 for developers working on the server side and on the cloud, looking at features in ASP.NET such as Web API, WCF, Workflow, Identity, and the Base Class Library, as well as talking about some of the .NET Runtime improvements included.
• Please Learn to Think about Abstractions - Scott Hanselman discusses the important role of abstraction, not just in code but in the real world, and how it is so important in making things understandable.
• Code to Interfaces. Right. What’s an Interface? - Bil Simser is also thinking about abstractions, although this time principally in code, and goes back to basics to look at interfaces and te role they play in supporting the ‘Code To Interfaces’ principle.
• C# Async: What is it, and how does it work? - Clive Tong takes a look at the async support in C#5, digging down into how it works, looking at the implementation of state machines and tasks, before ending up at the IL level.
• RabbitMQ for Windows: Fanout Exchanges - Derek Greer continues his series looking at the use of Rabbit MQ on Windows with a more detailed look at using Fanout Exchanges to facilitate publish subscribe and demonstrates this with an example.
• Post-increment Operator and Precedence - Chris Eargle discusses the role of operator precedence in C#, looking at how the rules work and illustrating why understanding these rules is important.

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Today’s edition was cut short due to a fire drill at my office ….

Software

• EF5 Release Candidate Available on NuGet - The Entity Framework team announce the release of a Release Candidate of Entity Framework 5 on NuGet. This release candidate builds on the feedback from EF5 Beta 2 and introduces timeout support for Code First Migrations, creation of tables in pre-existing databases, along with a number of bugfixes from Beta 2.
• 1.39b Changes - NCrunch - The NCrunch Team announce the release of 1.39b of NCrunch, a tool which adds continuous testing support to Visual Studio running your tests as you write code. This release brings improvements to the test window, exports of coverage and other metrics, updates NUnit to 2.6, along with much more.

Information

• Mixing async and sync in distributed systems - Jimmy Bogard discusses user expectations of how systems work, and how this can make having parts of your system work in a more async way difficult, taking a look at how you can go about making operations async in a CQRS environment.
• Ten Features I Like About CoffeeScript - Karl Seguin discusses 10 features he particularly likes about the CoffeeScript language, a language which allows you to write code and have it compiled into JavaScript for running in a browser.
• The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World - Jeremy Likness takes a look at the differences between working with tasks in .NET and Tasks on the Windows Runtime.
• Let’s MEET Windows Azure - Shaun Xu highlights a new Windows Azure website from Microsoft for an event on 7th June. The event will be streamed live via the site

Community

• Scott Hanselman doing user group tour of Scotland - Gary Ewan Park highlights the Scott Hanselman’s visit to Scotland in July where Scott will be tracing back his family’s history along with giving a series of usergroup talks on ASP.NET, Mobile Web and personal productivity. The events take place July 9-13 in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, and Glasgow. Scott is an excellent and entertaining speaker, so be sure to register early as these sessions are sure to fill up quickly

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Software

• SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2 CTP is available - Aaron Bertrand highlights the release of the CTP release of the SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 2. Aaron outlines the version numbers of SQL Server which this service pack CTP applies to, so you can be sure that you are not undoing any hotfixes you’ve applied.

Information

• CQRS Journey - first pseudo-production release - Grigori Melnik highlights the release of the first pseudo release of the Contoso Conference Management System, a sample application to demonstrate CQRS style application development. The team behind the project are going to be making a number of these ‘pseudo releases’ to help them better understand and demonstrate the versioning of an application which uses CQRS practices.
• Simplify Syntax with Extension Methods - Anders Abel takes a look at how adding extension methods to classes and interfaces can help increase the readability of your code.
• Introducing Testing Domain - localtest.me - Scott Forsyth shares a useful domain which is set up with all subdomains resolving to 127.0.0.1 (localhost aka your machine) which can be used for testing applications in situations where you need a domain name.
• Additional Considerations When Using ASP.Net MVC Cross-site Request Forgery Prevention - Ed Hintz discusses two situations which require more careful consideration when you are making use of the Cross Site Scripting and Cross Site Request Forgery protection in ASP.NET MVC
• Implementing CORS support in WCF - Carlos Figueira takes a look at implementing a service which caters for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing when using WCF, a useful comparison to his earlier piece looking at the same in Web API
• CI Deployments To IIS VIA MS Web Deploy 2.0 - Scott Kirkland discusses integrating deployment into your continuous integration environment, looking at configuring Web Deploy 2.0 witihin your build process using MSBuild and Team City.

Community

• Event: Scott Guthrie speaking at UK Windows Azure conference 22nd June - Sara Allison reveals that Scott Guthrie will be visiting London and speaking at the UK Windows Azure conference on the 22nd June. At the time of writing there are still 50 free tickets available (available until 25th May, but going quick), and 250 paid for tickets (£25) which will be available after the free tickets go.
• Can’t make it to a Windows 8 Dev Camp? - Jim Blizzard highlights a series of web cast on the topics being covered in the Windows 8 Dev Camp events. The first of the series was yesterday (sorry, only saw the post this morning), bu the next event is Wednesday 8:30am PST, with a further 5 over the next few weeks.

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Software

• NUnitLite 0.7 Release - Charlie Poole announces a new release of NunitLite, a trimmed back version of the NUnit framework designed for use on resource restricted platforms. This 0.7 release responds to the news taht MonoTouch are using NUnitLite as their testing framework, and sees the framework getting some more polish and an increased feature set.
• Array Visualizer - VS 2010 Debugging array visualizer and WinForm/WPF control you can use too… - Greg Duncan highlights a rather neat looking Visual Studio Debugger Display Extension which gives you visualization of 2D, 3D and 4D arrays in the IDE.
• Azure SDK for node 0.5.4 is out! More secure and now with less angle brackets - Glenn Block highlights the release of the Windows Azure SDK for node 0.5.4. This release is both a feature release and a security release, and sees the version of node increased to node 0.6.17 to address a recent security vulnerability. This release also brings more YAML to the configuration of IISNode reducing the XML required to get your applications running.

Information

• ASP.NET Web API Updates - May 14 - Henrik F Nielsen gives his weekly round up of the goings on on the ASP.NET WebAPI codebase, with discussion of some content negotiation improvements, Improved error messages for Content Negotiation, and Per controller type configuration.
• Per-controller configuration in WebAPI - Mike Stall digs a bit deeper into the per controller configuration, looking at how this allows each controller to have a ’shadow copy’ of the global configuration with bits overridden.
• My First Experience with ASP.NET Web API 101 - Sam Gentile shares his initial opinions of the ASP.NET Web API, comparing it to his previous experiences working with WCF
• ASP.NET Web API: Introducing IApiExplorer/ApiExplorer - Yao gives an introduction to the IApiExplorer interface and its default implementation, discussing how it is used to get at the structure of your Web APIs to produce service information, metadata, documentation of test clients.
• Using TPL to access Async WCF Endpoints in ASP.net MVC - Derik Whittaker takes a look at calling Asynchronous WCF services from ASP.NET MVC using Async Controllers
• Introducing Fog: A Library for Interacting with Azure from F# - Dan Mohl introduces his latest project which provides an easy way to interact with the Windows Azure SDK from within F#, giving easy access to blob and table storage, along with working with the Azure Message Bus.
• Pre-Processing Directives for Multi-Platform Support - Joe Mayo discusses the use of conditional compilation pre-processor directives when targeting multiple platforms, looking at Silverlight, Windows Phone and Windows 8

Community

• Event: Announcing the UK Windows Azure conference - Sara Allison highlights the first full day multi-track UK Windows Azure Conference supported by the London Windows Azure User Group and Microsoft. The event, on Friday 22nd June, will feature all things Azure, and the best bit, tickets are free until 25th May, after wich they can be had for £25.

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Software

• dotPeek 1.0 is Released - The Team over at JetBrains announce the release of dotPeek 1.0, their .net decompiler which will take .NET libraries and executables from .NET 1.0-.4.5 to the equivalent C# code, work with symbol and servers, and provides Resharper like navigation through the code. Well worth checking out if you haven’t already.
• ReSharper 7 EAP now available for all VS versions - Hadi Hariri also announces that the latest Early Access Preview of ReSharper 7 will now operate in all versions of Visual Studio (2005-VS11 Beta)

Information

• WebAPI Parameter binding under the hood - Mike Stall continues his discussions of the binding support in ASP.NET Web API, diving under the hood to look at how Parameter Binding works, and is configured
• Trending forum topics: Answering your questions - Windows 8 app developer blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Aaron Wroblewski picks up on some common Windows 8 Development Questions, discussing App Settings and Data, Consistent styling, multiple languages and culture support, and animation.
• Designing a Windows 8 Metro style app starting from an existing Windows Phone app - Design Case Study Part 1 - The Telerik Windows Phone Team discuss some of the design considerations to take into account when moving from a Windows Phone application to creating a Windows 8 Metro application
• Diagnosing JavaScript Errors Faster with Error.stack - Rob Paveza of the Internet Explorer Team who is involved in the Chakra Runtime discusses some of the improved debugging and diagnostic functionality included for debugging JavaScript errors in IE10.
• My Favorite Features: Improved Tooling in Visual Studio 11 for JavaScript Developers - Jason Zander discusses the improvements being made to JavaScript support in the Visual Studio IDE in VS11, looking at Debugging, Intellisense, documentation, and associated features

Community

• UK Tech.Days Visual Studio 11 Beta & Team Foundation Server 11 Beta Videos - Giles Davies highlights the availability of some videos recorded at the UK Teach Days events which look at various features of Visual Studio 11 and Team Foundation Server.
• Visual Studio 11 Event in Yorkshire, 31st May - Giles also highlights an event being held at Black Marble’s Yorkshire offices on 31st May which will take a look at the ALM features of Visual Studio 11 Beta. This is a morning session, and registration is required.

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Software

• Announcing Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual Studio 2010 - The BCL Team announce the release of Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual Studio 2010. This update to the portable library tooling originally released in June 2011 adds further API features support and an improved UI.
• Silverlight 5.1.10411.0 Released Today - Pete Brown highlights an update to Silverlight 5 which most significantly addresses a security issue regarding true type fonts. Pete gives the full details in his post.
• Json.NET - Download: Json.NET 4.5 Release 5 - The JSON.NET team announce their latest release of what is fast becoming the most popular .NET JSON library. Release 5 brings a couple of new features particularly in handling loops in object graphs, along with some bugfixes and other improvements.

Information

• The best multi-threading debugging tool is Microsoft Excel - Ayende discusses attempting to debug and fix issues which are multithreaded, and race condition like, discussing how he makes use of logging and uses Excel to help process the output.
• What JavaScript taught me about C# - Understanding "Access to modified closure" - Sean Blakemore discusses what the Resharper warning "Access to modified closure" in your C# code actually means, by way of understanding the issue in JavaScript, illustrating the issue with examples.
• Inversion of Control: Overview with Examples - Himanshu Manjarawala gives a nice overview and introduction to the concepts behind inversion of control in this CodeProject article
• Help Me Improve The Marionette Wiki - Derick Bailey appeals to the community making use of his Marionette project, which has featured in The Morning Brew on a number of occasions, to help improve the documentation for the project over on the Wiki by helping out answering questions and contributing content.
• Cross-Browser Debugging CSS - Nicole Sullivan shares a number of great tips for helping to debug issues with CSS styling of pages across browsers, sharing her process for getting to the bottom of such issues.
• Using DebugDiag to capture a dump on First Chance Exception - Kaushal Kumar Panday discusses the use of DebugDiag as an easy way of capturing dumps of code when first chance exceptions occur, walking through the use of the tooling.
• MSDN Magazine on your Kindle - Liam Westley shares a tip for getting the online MSDN Magazine content onto your Kindle to facilitate offline reading - a useful tip, and one I’ll probably be making use of.
• The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don’t make sense anymore - Scott Hanselman takes a look at a number of common icons used in applications and the world in general which are now somewhat dated.

Community

• Speaking at SQLRelay. Will you be there? - Jamie Thomson highlights the SQL Relay event taking place at the end fo the month in Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and London over 5 days, featuring some of the best and brightest SQL Server speakers in the UK

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Software

• Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC - Monty Hammontree, Director of User Experience, Microsoft Developer Tools Division discusses the changes that are being made to Visual Studio 11’s UI since the beta release, showing what has changed in response to feedback in the forthcoming RC release.
• SharpDevelop 4.2 - Christoph Wille announces the release of the SharpDevelop 4.2 IDE. This release brings .NET 4.5 targeting support, an updated UI, support for ASP.NET MVC 3, WCF Service References, Improved JavaScript editing capabilities and much more.
• Knockout 2.1.0 released - Steve Sanderson highlights the release of Knockout JS 2.1.0, the latest version of this MVVM JavaScript implementation. This new release includes support for CommonJS and Asynchronous Module Definition, a bunch of new features, and the usual bugfixes and improvements.

Information

• ConcurrentQueue<T> holding on to a few dequeued elements - Stephen Toub discusses the behaviour of the ConcurrentQueue data structure when removing elements from it, and how it keeps references to the dequeued items due to how it is intended to operate.
• OrmHate - Martin Fowler discusses a current theme in the development space, Object Relational Mapper ‘bashing’, looking at some of the charges leveled against the ORM and looking at the alternatives both in terms of rolling your own, and changing the way in which we structure data in applications.
• Simple.Data and VB.Net The final queries - Christiaan Baes rounds out his mini-series on the use of the Simple.Data Micro ORM with a look at some more complex queries comparing the VB.NET and SQL created.
• Your WebAPP’s Worst Performance Bottleneck Maybe in the Stylesheet - Peter Qian discusses how end user performance of Web Applications can actually have quite a lot to do with the implementation of your applications style sheets, discussing the use of CSS selector profiler tooling to help identify performance problems in complex selectors.
• Say goodbye to Azure (The name only… all the services live on). Removing &quot;Azure&quot; from Windows Azure Service names usage records - Greg Duncan highlights the news that Microsoft are dropping the Azure name from the product line, making the names of the services somewhat shorter and simpler. The email actuality talks about the ‘usage record downloads’ so I’m not too sure how far the removal of ‘Azure’ actually runs,
• A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 2 of ?) - Michael Crump continues his series looking at the world of ASP.NET MVC 4 from the point of view of a XAML developer, looking at mobile web application development, and adding some more features to his sample application.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Event: Poking around EF5 - Geff Lombardi is visiting the Southampton NxtGenUG on Thursday 24th May for a session looking at Entity Framework 5, looking at the new features of the latest version including enum, table value function, spatial and code first migrations.
• DDD10 - September 1st 2012 - Conference Home - The DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper conference in Reading is returning for its 10th outing on Saturday 1st September, and the call for speakers has opened already, so if you are interested in speaking at the conference get your session proposals in (Note: Site seems to be missing lots of content this morning, so might be worth hanging back on submitting until it gets sorted)

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