• 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.

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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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)

Software

• Updated NUnit Plugin for VS11 Released - Peter Provost highlights the announcement from Charlie Poole of an updated NUnit Test runner adapter for Visual Studio 11 Beta, allowing you to successfully run tests written using NUnit from inside VS11
• Babel Obfuscator 5.5 Released - Alberto Ferrazzoli announces the release of Babel Obfuscator 5.5 with added support for Windows 8 Developer Preview and the Visual Studio 11 Beta, Silverlight 5, along with a stack of improvements to the Obfuscator implementation.
• API Improvements made in SignalR 0.5 - David Fowler highlights the 0.5 release of SignalR and discusses some of the API changes made since previous versions.
• Introducing Humanizer - Mehdi Khalili introduces his latest project, a library which takes strings, enums and dates and turns them into human readable strings, dealing with things such as the naming styles for BDD tests.
• Announcing YUI 3.5.1 - The Yahoo! YUI team announces the release of YUI 3.5.1, available as download or via the CDN, and providing a number of bugfixes over the previous 3.5 release.
• Sample Browser v5.1–a small refresh with support of Windows 8 Consumer Preview - Jialiang Ge announces the latest release of the All-In-One Code Framework Samples Browser which adds support for running it on Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Windows Server 8 Beta.

Information

• GUID guide, part three - Eric Lippert continues with his discussion of the Global Unique Identifier discussing the privacy concerns with using location and time as a factor in GUID generation, rounding off the series with a nice summary of key take aways about GUIDs.
• The perils of conditional mutability - Jon Skeet discusses some investigation into performance issues with the test for his Noda Time project discussing how some issues with invarient culture and mutability of types caused issues.
• A look at the CLR 4.5, Improved Large Object Heap Allocator, Server GC Background Mode and Auto NGen - Greg Duncan highlights a nice article on some of the improvements in .NET 4.5 for the Kernel - large object heap, and garbage collection, and which also discusses the automatic NGen performed on Windows 8 for assemblies in the GAC, helping to improve application performance.
• JavaScript for the C# Guy: The Global Object - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at JavaScript Development from the point of view of a C# .NET Developer, discussing the concept of the global object in JavaScript.
• Simple.Data and complex types: one to many & PetaPoco: Mapping related objects - Christiaan Baes and Eli Weinstock-Herman continues their respective series looking at the implementation of data access using the micro ORMs Simple.Data and PetaPoco.
• WCF Data Services, now with more releases! - The WCF Data Services Team discusses the recent changes to their development practices and methodology which has lead to more rapid releases, the adoption of semantic versioning, and distribution via Nuget.

Information

• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Enumerable.Repeat() Static Method - James Michael Hare continues his Little Wonders series looking at less well known parts of the .NET Framework and C# language. This part takes a look at the Enumerable.Repeat method to take single values and turn them into sequences.
• .Net Implementation of a Priority Queue (aka Heap) - Carl Nolan looks into implementing a priority queue data structure using a heap, sharing his implementation, and comparing it to types available in the .NET framework.
• Subterranean IL: The ThreadLocal type - Simon Cooper continues his Subterranean IL series looking at the internal implementation of certain types in the .NET Framework, exploring the ThreadLocal type in this part.
• Help! How Do I Detect When a Client Thread Exits? - Mike Hadlow is also making use of ThreadLocal and is looking at how he can clean up these resources when the thread ends. Be sure to check out the linked StackOverflow question in the comments for further discussion.
• Less Than Dot - Blog - Simple.Data and complex types: many to one - Christiaan Baes presses on with his series looking at the use of the Simple.Data MicroORM for working with data from VB.NET, digging into the Many to One relationship.
• Unit Test a project having external dependency(WCF Proxy) using Fakes & Visual Studio 11 Beta - Atul Verma works through using the new Visual Studio 11 Beta Fakes functionality to create unit tests for a project which takes an external dependency on a WCF Proxy.
• From Code-Behind to MVVM, a three part series… - Greg Duncan highlights a nice series of posts over on CodeProject from Shenwei Liu looking at how you can take your development of WPF and Silverlight applications to the next level by making the jump from Code-Behind to MVVM
• Coding guidelines for HTML and CSS - Jens O. Meiert shares Google’s latest public coding style guide for HTML and CSS, a useful and lightweight style guide for these often forgotten about types of ‘code’
• HTML5 Development For ASP.NET Developers - Burke Holland introduces a new series of posts and videos looking at development using HTML5 for ASP.NET based developers, with the first part being posted up today (giving you something to enjoy over the long weekend)

Community

• WPUG presents WPBarCamp - The London based Windows Phone User Group are running a 6 hour all day Saturday Bar camp event on Saturday 19h May, aimed at the more experienced Windows Phone Application Developer. The event is running using the bar camp style, where attendees are encouraged to present, and the agenda will be decided on the day by the participants.
• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Phil Trelford: F# for Commodities Trading - Phil Trelford will be presenting an ‘in the brain of’ session at Skillsmatter on Monday 14th May, looking at the use fo F# in finance.
• NxtGenUG - Event: EF5 Preview - New Features - The NxtGenUG in Hereford welcome Geoff Lombardi for a session on the new features included in Entity Framework 5, in a session aimed at those who have previously used EF which will explore Enum Support, Code First Migrations, Spatial Data Types, and table valued functions.

• Task Parallel Library and Servers, Part 4: TaskHelpers - Brad Wilson presses on with his series looking at the use of the Task Parallel Library (TPL) from server based applications written particularly in ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API. In this part Brad discusses the use of the TaskHelpers class to help make the use of tasks easier in code.
• MSDN Magazine: May 2012 - The May edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, with articles integrating media in Windows Phone applications, HTML5 based Windows Phone apps using Apache Cordova, Web sockets, Mobile Development in ASP.NET MVC 4 and much much more.
• PragPub for May, 2012 - The Pragmatic Bookshelf announce the release of PragPub Magazine’s May 2012 edition, as usual available in a variety of electronic formats. This month sees articles on Scala, the storage of data structures, professionalism in email, command line applications, along with the usual columns.
• More PetaPoco: Id’s and Multi-POCO queries - Eli Weinstock-Herman digs deeper in his exploration of the PetaPoco micro ORM, following the themes laid out by Christiaan Baes is in his exploration of Simple.Data. In this article Eli takes a look at adding columns and tables and querying across multiple objects.
• Interested in the dirty depths of Windows 8? Check out this 83 page Windows 8 Forensic Guide - Greg Duncan highlights an 83 page guide to a variety of aspects of Windows 8 features from Amanda Thompson, looking under the hood at folder structures, registry values that underpin the functionality.
• Kata - The only way to learn TDD - Peter Provost discusses learning to develop in a Test Driven Development (TDD) way, discussing the role of the Kata exercises in getting a handle on doing TDD, and highlighting a number of Kata exercises in detail, and providing links to further ones.
• Connecting to WCF RIA Services in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using Upshot.js and Knockout.js - Dave Isbitski looks at creating a Metro stile application using Upshot.js and Knockout.js to present data retrieved from a WCF RIA Services based service
• Setting Up an Offline Production Debugging Environment - Sasha Goldshtein discusses creating a complete offline environment for debugging production issues, useful if you work in a restricted environment. In the article he looks at the tools and set up required to build a fully working debugging environment.
• From Zero to Proficient with MEF - Tim Corey gives an introduction to the Managed Extensibility Framework in this CodeProject article, looking at how you can create extensible applications and extend existing applications using MEF.
• More fun with DateTime - Jon Skeet discusses more fun and games with dates and times in your code, discussing the effect timezone changes, daylight savings, and conversions of time can result in.

• A New Look for CodePlex - Mark Groves discusses the work the CodePlex team have been doing, and announces the release of a new look site, styled in the new Metro Look and feel.
• Entity Framework 4.3.1 Migrations and non English locale - Simone Chiaretta discusses an issue he ran into working with Entity Framework Migrations when using a non-English locale, sharing a workaround for the issue.
• ASP.NET MVC3 Using Code First Entity Framework Without Database Generation - Phil Fresle discusses the use of Entity Framework Code First in situations where you are not generating the database from the model, and in the updates to the post discusses tooling which can help if you are working in this way.
• Introducing Workspace Reloader - A Visual Studio AddIn to save your open files across project reloads - Scott Hanselman creates his first Visual Studio Add-in to scratch an itch the StackOverflow guys were having with project file edits outside the environment (from Version control) causing the project to reload and lose all their open windows.
• Query Optimizer Deep Dive - Part 4 - Paul White wraps up an interesting series of posts looking at the SQL Server Query Optimizer, and based around his presentation on the subject. This is well worth reading if you deal with SQL Server.
• F# for game development: Portable Class Libraries: Are they worth the trouble? - Joh discusses the Portable Class Libraries discussing some of the difficulties he’s having getting his code to work as a portable library, and wondering if it is worth the effort.
• More Simple.Data with VB.Net: adding fields and tables - Christiaan Baes continues digging into the Simple.Data MicroORM library looking at further columns and tables, and creating relationships between objects.
• Persisting enumeration classes with NHibernate - Jimmy Bogard discusses the use of Enumeration classes in C# and looks at how NHibernate provides hooks to allow persisting them to the database, and how the convention can be applied across your code base.
• ASP.NET MVC: Adding aria-required attribute for required fields - Stuart Leeks - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Stuart Leeks discusses how you can extend ASP.NET MVC to provide additional helpers which customize the markup generated further, looking at how you can apply the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) attributes to inputs.

Community

• Event Exclusive: DDD Reading Announced - Sara Allison shares an announcement from Dave Sussman that the next DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper event to be held at Microsoft’s Reading campus will be held on Saturday 1st September.

Information

• GUID guide, part two - Eric Lippert continues his latest series of posts exploring the magical world of the GUID (Global Unique Identifier), in this post diving deeper into the make up of a GUID and some of the factors which make them unique.
• Modern Web Development - Part 9 - Shawn Wildermuth continues is Modern Web Development series taking a look at the current face of web development. This post takes a look at making your web pages mobile friendly, looking at the three ways of making pages for mobile use.
• Using Shims in Visual Studio 11 to test untestable code. - Ricci Gian Maria takes a look at using Shims one of the new features of Visual Studio 11 to hepl test code which previously was difficult / impossible to test.
• An introduction to ASP.Net MVC 4.0 - Nikolaos Kantzelis walks through the creation of a small ASP.NET MVC 4 application, discussing how the framework allows ou to build clean HTML and URL structures.
• Need get a GW-Basic fix? Here’s GW-Basic running in Silverlight - Greg Duncan highlights a fine retro port bringing GW-BASIC to Silverlight, allowing you to reminisce of the simpler days of programming.
• Multi Threading Insanity - (Humour) Ayende highlights a famous Einstein quote, and suggests that Einstein didn’t do enough multi threaded programming!
• Introducing the jQuery Mobile Metro Theme - Colin Eberhardt discusses the new jQuery Mobile Metro Theme which brings allows you to style your jQuery mobile based applications in a Metro look and feel. In the article Colin looks at how you can detect the device being used and serve the suitable styleing to make the application feel native.

• April 27th What’s Happening Around Visual Studio - Jason Zander gives another of his updates on what is going on in the Visual Studio World, highlighting the Async Targeting Pack for VS11, a number of great blog articles, and highlighting the availability of session recordings from the STAREAST testing conference.
• Using Nightly ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet Packages - Henrik F Nielsen discusses how you can now get the latest and greatest ASP.NET Web Stack NuGet packages which are generated from nightly builds of the Open Source project, showing how you can configure your system to use these cutting edge packages.
• A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 1 of ?) - Michael Crump kicks off a new series of posts taking a look at ASP.NET MVC4 from the point of view of a XAML Silverlight / Windows Phone / WPF developer. This first post gets you up and running and introduces some of the ASP.NET MVC fundamentals.
• Using Razor V2 in ASP.NET MVC 3 - Imran Baloch takes a look at how you can make use of the Razor V2 engine, which ships with ASP.NET MVC 4 and web Pages 2, from within your ASP.NET MVC 3 applications.
• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC - Rick Strahl revisits GZip compression of web page output, looking at the best way of adding this capability in a controllable fashion to your ASP.NET MVC applications via ActionFilters.
• Learn MVC (Model view controller) Step by Step in 7days - Day 3 - Shivprasad koirala picks up this series of posts again posting day 3 of the series to CodeProject , taking a look at the use of partial views, the Razor View Engine, Data Annotation validation, and the use of Windows Authentication in your applications.
• The Present and Future of Using JSON in WebForms - Carl Bergenhem of the Telerik ASP.NET AJAX Team discusses the use of JSON data in your ASP.NET Web Forms applications, looking at the current WebService approach, and discussing some of the new features coming in ASP.NET 4.5
• The Case of The Unquoted Command Line: Process Monitor and MPGO.EXE - Sasha Goldshtein highlights MPGO.EXE, a tool which is included in the ,NET Framework which provides improved optimization managed assemblies. In this post Sasha takes a look at using process monitor to investigate an issue he was having with its use.
• Simple.Data and VB.Net the beginning & Seeing the sql Simple.Data generates - Christiaan Baes kicks off a series of posts looking at the use of the Simple.Data Micro ORM library from VB.NET, taking you through the setup and simple use of Simple.Data, and looking at the generated SQL it produces.
• Playing with PetaPoco - Eli Weinstock-Herman follows suit and takes a look at the use of PetaPoco (in C#), again exploring the getting started story, and looking at some simple examples.
• JSIL - The IL to JS transformation project (Yes it takes .Net IL assemblies and generates JavaScript from them) - Greg Duncan highlights JSIL, a compiler which takes .NET applications and libraries and ‘compiles ‘them into cross browser JavaScript, outputting code which is surprisingly well written, making it easier to debug.
• Celebration! 120′000 downloads for #mvvmlight, 2 copies of Expression Studio to win - Laurent Bugnion celebrates 120000 downloads of his MVVMLight framework, with a give away of two copies of Expression Studio, along with a discussion of some of the history of MVVM Light.

Community

• Event: Free UK Windows Azure Bootcamp: Online - Planky highlights plans to run a version of the Windows Azure Bootcamp (which will be running in person in London and Liverpool in May) as a Lync online session to make it available to a wider range of people.
• Upcoming developer events in Edinburgh - So what is a developer experience anyway? - ’stephencl123456789′ highlights two developer events being held up in Edinburgh, the first an all day event looking at Windows 8 for developers tomorrow (1st May), and the second a half day exploring Visual Studio 11 ALM features on 13th June.

• Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 - The BCL team announce the release of the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 which addresses an incompatibility between the Compiler in VS11 and the Async CTP release, allowing you to target .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 5.
• MS Open Tech JQuery Mobile’s Metro - Greg Duncan highlights the release of a Windows Phone Metro theme for jQuery Mobile from Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. and Sergei Grebnov

Information

• ASP.NET Web API Updates - April 27 - Henrik F Nielsen highlights some of the changes to the ASP.NET Web API which are now available in the source code, and will eventually become part of the official release. The changes surround the wiring up of Message Handlers, access to progress notification for upload and download, and further support for Multipart messages.
• Back to Basics: Moving beyond for, if and switch - Scott Hanselman resumes his Back To Basics series looking at how modern languages allow you to move beyond the standard for, if and switch statements allowing you to write more expressive and shorter code.
• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Enumerable.Range() Static Method - James Michael Hare also continues his series on the little wonders available in the C# language and .NET Framework with a look at the use of the Enumerable.Range() method in a couple of scenarios.
• "Virtual method call from constructor" What Could Go Wrong? - Peter Ritchie discusses a common code analysis warning about calling overridable methods in constructors which while syntactically correct can result in unexpected behaviour.
• ASP.NET MVC: Resolve or Inject? That’s the Issue - Dino Esposito discusses the difference between dependency resolving using a service locator and dependency injection in ASP.NET MVC web applications.
• Auto-scaling Azure with WASABi - From the Ground Up - Greg Oliver discusses the process of setting up WASABi to provide auto scaling of Windows Azure, looking at how you can test the setup using the compute emulator

• Json.NET - Download: Json.NET 4.5 Release 4 - The Json.NET team announce the release of Json.NET 4.5 Release 4. This release adds a Portable Class Library build, further customization of the JsonConverter, improved error messages in Json Reader and Serializer, along with some new attributes for controlling serialization and the usual fixes.

Information

• Visual Studio Fakes Part 2 - Shims - Peter Provost continues his series looking at the Visual Studio 11 support for Fakes, in this part discussing the use of Shims to allow you to control code your code under test relies on but which cannot be injected, looking at how Shims allow you to create tests of this type of code, allowing you to eventually refactor the dependency out into something manageable.
• Bringing CLR’s Power to non .NET languages - Part 1 - Dorian Corompt kicks off what looks to be an interesting series of posts looking at consuming .NET CLR based code in non .NET languages like C++, Java, PHP, etc, looking at the use of C++ to create a bridge between the non .NET language and the CLR.
• Obsoleted Types, Methods and Migration Guide and more for .Net 4.5 (Beta) - Greg Duncan highlights s selection of resources (with some help from Wriju) which discuss the many changes in .NET 4.5, the types and members which have been marked as obsolete, migration documentation, and discussion of dependencies of the different .NET versions.
• Windows Azure Storage for the ASP.NET Developer - Adam Hoffman shares his latest installment of s series of posts from Adam, Rachel Appel, and Peter Laudati looking at Azure for Web Developers. In this post Adam discusses the different storage options available on Windows Azure, ranging from relational SQL Server data stores to blots and queues.
• Top 7 Concerns of Migrating an ASP.NET Application to Windows Azure - Peter Laudati’s latest part of the series is also available, where he discusses the 7 most common concerns and decisions you need to make when moving an existing ASP.NET application to the cloud.
• Get Started Building Data Driven Apps with Windows Azure and SQL Axure - Rachel Appel also has her latest article in the series available, looking at the use of SQL Azure to create a data driven application.
• ‘Task List’ and comments - Amar Nityananda reminds us of the ability to customize the tokens that the Visual Studio Task List uses to identify tasks in code, allowing you to identify custom markers in code via the task list.
• 6. Sequences - Being lazy is allowed - Dorian Corompt continues this series on F#, discussing the concept of laziness in sequences, their role in programming and dealing with infinite sequences, and how you can use them in F#.

• NHibernate 3.3.0.GA released - Oskar Berggren announces the release of version 3.3.0GA of NHibernate. This release includes improvements to the LINQ provider, additional ‘enhanced’ identity providers, and additional capabilities for mapping in code.

Information

• GUID Guide, part one - Eric Lippert kicks off another series of posts looking at the interesting and slightly magical world of the GUID - globally unique identifiers.
• Petzold Book Blog - 2-4-6-8-10 - Charles Petzold shares a unique offer which will get you early access copies and a final e-book edition of his updated ‘Programming Windows’ book. This book is one of the most well known and revered in the space, and the updated edition will be adding content regarding Metro Style Applications development for Windows 8 using C#
  and XAML.
• Announcing ReactiveUI 3.1 at Thursday Night - Paul Betts announces a new release of ReactiveUI. This library is a MVVM framework which is tightly integrated with the reactive extensions for .NET, providing a simple way of writing complex stateful interactions and async operations.
• Compilify - Fast and Simple Online Compiler For .Net Code on a Browser - Jiby John highlights Compilify, a Roslyn based online compiler for .NET code accessible through your web browser. The implementation is open source, with source code available on GitHub, and there is a hosted version available running on AppHarbor.
• WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues) - Colin Eberhardt takes a look at the performance of various WPF based charting solutions, looking at their performance refreshing and animating with different sized data sets.
• Diving deep with WinRT and await - Windows 8 app developer blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Stephen Toub is a guest author over on the Windows 8 App Developer Blog discussing the implementation and use of asynyc/await in Windows 8 WinRT applications, discussing the basics and how the compiler transforms the code.
• Be Mindful With Your Code - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses code quality, and the reasons you should care about the code you write.
• Concurrency, Performance, Arrays and when Dirty Writes are OK - Ben Watson discusses multiple threads accessing a single shared resource (Array), discussing synchronization, and how you can improve performance by accepting some loss in accuracy.

• Windows 8 Release Preview Coming June 2012 - Doug Holland highlights yesterday’s announcement by Steven Sinofsky at the Japan Windows 8 Dev Days event that the Release Preview of Windows 8 will be made available in the first week of June.
• F#, MSTest, and FsUnit 1.1.0.0 - Dan Mohl gives an update on his recent work with a new project template for UnitTesting in F# using MSTest and Visual Studio 11, and also discusses the latest update for FsUnit which brings additional asserts and support for VS11

Information

• How to create a custom value provider in WebAPI - Mike Stall continues his series on WebAPI extensibility and Model / parameter Binding with a look at implementing a custom value provider
• ASP.NET Web API: Query string based content formatting - Gunnar Peipman also presses on with his series looking at the other end of the process, formatting the output from WebAPI calls, continuing an example formatting data into a VCard format.
• Developing Windows Azure, Cloud-Based Applications With Windows 8-What you need and how to get there - Bruno Terkaly discusses his new development environment in Windows 8, and walks through getting the required bits for Azure application development set up on Windows 8.
• How to avoid creating real tasks when unit testing async - Peter Provost discusses the use of async / await in unit tests in MSTest and xUnit.net and looks at how you can fake tasks using the VS11 Fakes functionality
• Create a great mobile experience for your website today. Please - Scott Hanselman discusses the various options for making your websites more mobile friendly, looking at how you can utilize frameworks and helper libraries to give a more native application look and feel to your site across a range of devices.
• Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 5 - Basic Animation - G. Andrew Duthie resumes his series diving into the functionality offered by the HTML 5 Canvas element, allowing you to draw and manipulate image content directly on your web page. This part explores simple animation, and if you haven’t seen them before be sure to check out the previous 4 parts.
• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week - Day 2 - David Catuhe is on day 2 of a series of a 5 day blog post series looking at building a simple yet complete Windows 8 application using HTML5, CSS and JavaScript. Today’s post explores the internationalization of the application, offline mode, and more application functionality.

Community

• Hands-On Windows 8 Camps in May - Mike Taulty highlights a series of ‘Windows 8 Camp’ events running though out May with three events in London, and one in Birmingham, and the possibility of Manchester and Edinburgh events too - a great opportunity to immerse yourself in the Windows 8 development labs with help on hand from experts.

• WCF Data Services 5.1.0-rc Prerelease - With Version 5.0 released, the WCF Data Services Team are pressing on with their first release candidate pre-release of version 5.1, addressing a number of reported bugs. The release is available as a pre-release package on NuGet.
• #mvvmlight V4RC available on #nuget - Laurent Bugnion announces the preview release of MVVMLight version 4, available as packages for Silverlight 3,4,5, .NET 3.5SP1, 4.0, WP7 & 7.1, and adding support for Windows 8 WinRT Development

Information

• How to bind to custom objects in action signatures in MVC/WebAPI - Mike Stall continues his series looking at binding of parameters in WebAPI, taking a look at 3 different ways of binding values to custom object types, using manual parse, TypeConverters and custom model binders.
• ASP.NET Web API Content Negotiation and Accept-Charset - Henrik F Nielsen also continues his discussion of content negotiation with a look at how character sets and encoding come into play, and the role of the Accept-Charset HTTP header.
• ASP.NET Web API: Extending content negotiation with new formats - Gunnar Peipman is also exploring topics relating to content negotiation, looking at how you can use the extensibility of the WebAPI Framework to present data in different formats, specifically illustrating with an implementation of VCard.
• jQuery Documentation Resources to Speed Up Your Development - Dan Wahlin highlights a number of jQuery related resources available online which provide easy access to documentation for this very popular JavaScript library.
• Guidelines for Building Touch-friendly Sites - Jacob Rossi, a Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team discusses some best practice guidelines for creating sites for use on touch devices, discussing accessing content, and the size of fingers and how this should relate to the positioning of elements on the page.
• Getting Rid of the “Plug-in Not Responding” Message when Debugging Silverlight Applications in Chrome - Michael Crump shares a useful tip for anyone debugging Silverlight Applications inside Google’s Chrome browser, showing how disabling the hang detection features make the debugging experience better.

Community

• First meeting Thurs May 3rd -
  Sheffield .NET User Group - The very first meeting of a new .NET Usergroup is happening next Thursday (3rd May) in Sheffield, hosted at GIST Lab. The first meeting is a planning session looking at what the local .NET community would like from the UserGroup.
• patterns & practices Global Online Symposium 2012 - Grigori Melnik highlights the Patterns & Practices Global Online Symposium, being held tomorrow, streaming live, and featuring a number of well known speakers, along with cloud, phone and web development related sessions.

• dotPeek 1.0 Beta Available - JetBrains announce the beta release of dotPeek 1.0, their free .NET decompiler product. This release is shipped with an installer, supports assembly lists, can open assemblies from folder and zip format archives (including NuGet Packages), and have finder control over the generated decompilation code.
• SQL Server 2012 Best Practices Analyzer - Jack Richins highlights the latest release of SQL Server 2012 Best Practices Analyzer, a tool which will monitor and observe your SQL Server instances and give recommendations on things to change to make your setup conform to best practices.

Information

• null is not false, part three - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of null as a Boolean value looking at operator overloading of & | && and || and some of the complexities of creating them and passing parameters with eager evaluation.
• Arrays and Memory, Part 2 - Karl Seguin continues on from a previous post looking at the use of memory in array structures, going back to basics and exploring how C deals with arrays and memory allocation, as well as direct access to raw memory
• ASP.NET Web API: How content negotiation works? - Gunnar Peipman gives a brief overview of content negotiation in the ASP.NET Web API, discussing the HTTP principles before discussing and illustrating the implementation in Web API.
• Great Free Course on Building ASP.NET MVC Apps With EF Code First, HTML5 and jQuery - Scott Guthrie highlights the 1 month free access offer giving access to the ‘Building ASP.NET MVC applications with Entity Framework Code First, HTML5 and jQuery’ course from Pluralsight, created and presented by Dan Wahlin.
• A Match Made in Http Heaven - ASP.NET Web Forms and WebAPI - Joshua Holt kicks off a series of posts looking at the use of the ASP.NET Web API which shipped with the ASP.NET MVC 4 beta, showing how it can be combined with the more established ASP.NET Web Forms in the same project to provide powerful solutions.
• "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants&quot; [An alternate implementation of HTTP gzip decompression for Windows Phone] - David Anson shares an alternative implementation of HTTP gzip decompression for use in Windows Phone applications, sharing his dependency free implementation which allows for compressed content to be passed over the network into your applications.