• Announcing TypeScript 0.9 & TypeScript 0.9 Preview Release - Jonathan Turner and Somasegar announce the release of the Preview Release of TypeScript 0.9. This is a major step along the road the for the project, introducing a number of exciting new features including Generics support.
• SemVer 2.0 Released - Phil Haack announce the release of the SemVer 2.0.0 specification which details the correct formation of Semantic Version Numbers. This specification release adds a number of clarifications and details of versioning build metadata.
• FsCheck 0.9 Released and moved to GitHub - Kurt Schelfthout announces the release of version 0.9 of FsCheck, along with the news that the project has been migrated to GitHub, to help aid collaboration, although that seems to be working well already as most of the changes in this release are community sourced.

Information

• Strategies for isolating the database in tests - Jimmy Bogard discusses the importance of making tests independent of state, and looks at some strategies for working with the biggest form of state in tests, the database, from patterns such as database per developer, to the use of transactions to restore state to how it was.
• Deep Dive into NuGet Native (Part One) - Garrett Serack takes us under the covers to look at how NuGet supports C/C++ packages and explores the construction of packages and their constituent parts.
• NHibernate Conventions - Ricardo Peres takes a look at the use of conventions with NHibernate for the mapping of columns and tables and entities
• Five Essential Front-End Tools That Should be Used with Modern MVC Projects - Adam Tibi takes a look at some useful libraries you should probably seriously consider including in your web frontend projects to make working with CSS and HTML5 easier.
• Exclusive Sneak Peak: The AGENT Smart Watch Emulator and managed .NET code on my wrist! - Scott Hanselman gives us a glimpse of the AGENT smartwatch and the SDK that allows development of your own apps to run on the .NET Micro Framework based watch device.

Community

• UG Tour in UK this week and next - Iris Classon is on a UK Usergroup Tour this week and next, giving sessions at usergroups in Bristol and Gloucestershire already, with the Telerik Developer Seminar today (Weds) in London, Windows Phone UG London this evening, Dev South Coast in Southampton on Thursday evening and the Windows Store App developer group in London on Monday 24th.

• Log Parser Studio 2.0 now out (Log Parser GUI++) - Greg Duncan highlights the latest release of LogParser Studio, a GUI environment for working with the LogParser 2.2 which allows you to issue SQL like queries against a wide range of log file formats.

Information

• String concatenation behind the scenes, part one - Eric Lippert kicks off a new series of posts looking the art and science of string concatenation, looking at some of the optimisations he worked on that got included in the C# compiler.
• Don’t Write Code You Don’t Need - Erik Dietrich shares some sage advice about writing too much code and exposing too much of your code to the consumers of that code, along with the perils of Mutability.
• Hidden Code Mines - Phil Haack discusses a concept he is calling code mines, those bits of innocuous code which would get skipped over in a code review, but actually contain some subtle bug which will explode when you least expect.
• 3 Pillars of Pragmatic Agility - David Starr highlights his latest article for Visual Studio Magazine which proposes a new standard for agile software development which builds on the work of the last 12 years of being agile in a variety of forms.
• AGENT: The World’s Smartest Watch - Rob Chartier takes a look at AGENT, the smart watch which is based upon the .NET Micro Framework with an API allowing .NET developer to leverage the power of a small write mounted device.

Community

• DareDevs: TDD, where did it all go wrong - DareDevs (formerly Manchester / Warrington NxtGenUG) welcome Ian Cooper for a session on TDD, and how it has evolved since the original TDD rules, this Wednesday evening (19 June)
• Events | CraftyCoders - The Crafy Coders (Bromsgrove) have a sessions from Dan Kendall, Neil Barnwell and Jay McGuiness/James Morcom on Thursday 20th June 2013 where they will all be exploring Builds and Deployment. Crafty Coders are also running a whole day (Saturday) Code Retreat on Saturday 31st August.

• Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development - Scott Guthrie announces the latest batch of improvements to the Windows Azure Mobile Services, including a .NET API available via NuGet, Android push notifications, free database and websites and much more
• Glimpse 1.4.2 released - Anthony van der Hoorn announces another minor update to address some reported issues in Glimpse 1.4, with a handful of issues addressed in the Glimpse.Core module.
• Announcement: Employee Info Starter Kit (v6.0-ASP.NET MVC Edition) is Released - Ashraful Alam Joy highlights the release of the 6th version of the Employee Info Starter Kit, a fully formed application running on ASP.NET MVC4, Entity Framework 4.3 and SQL Compact, a great learning tool, and also a starting point for your own applications of this nature.

Information

• Overriding filters in ASP.NET Web API vNext - Filip W takes a look at the next release of Web API and explores how you can override filters, addressing one of the things which is currently very difficult to achieve.
• Logging: The Most Important Part of Any Application - NSProgrammer discusses the importance of good logging in your applications, looking the top 10 features that logging must provide to be useful
• Using Raygun for Logging in Windows Phone Applications - Tendulkar takes a look at integrating the Raygun.Io logging service/framework into a Windows Phone application to help gather information about your applications issues.
• Stop Doing Internet Wrong - Scott Hanselman discusses a bunch of things that we as web developers are still getting wrong when developing sites, ranging from bad linking to mobile sites to not marking up checkboxes correctly.

• Architecture Tools in ReSharper 8 - The JetBrains team show off some of their new Architecture related features for exploring inter project dependencies and relationships.
• !Exploitable crash analyzer version 1.6 - The Security Development Lifecycle - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Andy Renk of the Microsoft SDL Team highlights the release last month of the !Exploitable crash analyzer version 1.6, a WinDbg extension which provides crash analysis and security risk assessment

Information

• What’s the difference? sizeof and Marshal.SizeOf - Eric Lippert discusses why these two seemingly similar methods give different values, one dealing with the managed memory requirements of the type and the other dealing with the unmanaged memory size.
• System.BadImageFormatException: Bad IL Range - what it is going on! - Carmelo Pulvirent discusses an interesting problem as a result of a BadImageFormatException being thrown due to bad IL in an assembly
• Plan Operator Tuesday round-up - Rob Farley rounds up all the SQL Plan Operator related posts from Tuesday, linking to them all from a fake execution plan - nice idea, and some really geat content there too.
• SQL Injection: What’s That? - The Daily WTF reminds that not all developers are as enlightened as we would like regarding security concepts such as SQL Injection.
• How my company uses Windows Azure in development process - Gunnar Peipman discusses the why and how of his companies use of Windows Azure, the various benefits its gives them, and some of the impacts on their architecture from using Azure.

Community

• Upcoming Speaking events: Aberdeen and Edinburgh - Bill Wagner is visiting Scotland this summer, and as part of his golfing holiday will be giving two talks, one in Aberdeen on 4th July and one in Glasgow on 13th July where he will discuss C# and async.

• Announcing the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension BETA - Willy Peter Schaub highlights the beta release of the ALM Rangers Unit Test Generator Extension for Visual Studio. The team are very keen for people to try it out and to give feedback
• Glimpse 1.4.1 Released - Glimpse gets a minor update to address a couple of reported issues with Glimpse 1.4. There are updated packages for Glimpse.Core and Glimpse.MVC*
• Getting a Fix on Fixie - Sharon Cichelli highlights Fixie a new testing framework from Patrick Lioi, giving a brief overview of its use, and suggesting how you can get involved in the project.

Information

• NuGet Package Restore Issues - Immo Landwerth discusses some problems people are running into with the Microsoft.Bcl.Build and Microsoft.Bcl.Compression pacakges and the NuGet Package Restore caused by its custom build targets. This post discusses the issues in depth and shares some workarounds.
• Replacing jQuery.live() with jQuery.on() - Rick Strahl looks at one of the more significant changes between jQuery 1.9 and 1.10, the removal of the jQuery,live() function, and looks at migrating to the newer jQuery.on().
• SQL Is Hard - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses some of the difficulties people have in learning SQL properly, and highlights the launch of SQLisHard.com, a new learning resource to help people get up to speed.
• Painless management of a logging table in SQL Server - Hugo Kornelis discusses techniques for managing and removing records from logging tables, along the way discussing some best practices for design, and highlighting some of the difficulties encountered when working with tables with billions of rows.

• Glimpse Heads-Up Display released - The Glimpse Team announce the release of the Glimpse ‘Heads Up Display’ an significant new UI to their excellent profiling and debugging tool. I won’t say much more here, as Yesterday’s ‘Afternoon Tea’ had lots of information
• NuDoc: A .NET XML API Documentation Reader - Daniel Cazzulino shares NuDoc an NuGet package which reads the XML Documentation files generated by the build process which can form the basis of tooling to generate human readable documentation in any format you choose.
• June 2013 Internet Explorer Updates - The Internet Explorer Team highlight their latest updates package which addresses 19 privately reported vulnerabilities across Internet Explorer 6-10

Information

• All about promises (for Windows Store apps written in JavaScript) - Kraig Brockschmidt shares a detailed discussion on the use of Promises in Windows 8 Application Development in JavaScript which allow you to work correctly with asynchronous APIs, a critical part of Win8 application development.
• Simple Validation with MVVM for Windows Store apps - Jeremy Likness takes a look at validation in an MVVM setting and explores the creation of your own simple validation implementation.
• Understanding PowerShell’s Type Conversion Magic - Lee Holmes takes a look at the magic ‘it just works’ world of type conversion in PowerShell, looking at the hard work that PowerShell does behind the scenes to make it ‘just work’
• Doing the Time-Warp - Andy Harman takes a look at making code which makes repeated use of DateTime.Now behave as intended by creating time bubbles which freeze the time for that block of code.

Community

• F# London Meetup, Thursday: Machine Learning Hands On with F# - Don Syme highlights the F# London Meetup being held tomorrow (Thursday) at Skills Matter where Phil Trelford will be running a Hands On session on machine learning.

Glimpse

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

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

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

Get Your Head Up!

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

Install-Package Glimpse.MVC4

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

http://localhost:12345/glimpse.axd

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

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

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

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

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

Why Glimpse Works for me

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

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

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

Information

• Construction destruction - Eric Lippert takes a look at the birth and death of objects, and how these events can cause side effects, along with the usual twist to what you might expect to take place.
• When the Google beats on your SignalR - Jeff Putz highlights how he received a large number of exceptions from his SignalR endpoint caused by GoogleBot, and shares a robots.txt exclusion to make Google and other well behaved bots avoid the SignalR endpoint.
• Understanding the risk of mixed content warnings - Troy Hunt continues his discussion of website security with a look at the dangers of mixed content, where items on a ‘Secure’ page are loaded over a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS.
• JSON vs. XML: Some hard numbers about verbosity - We all know that XML is quite a bloated data transfer form, and the Json is more concise, and in this article ‘Pragmateek’ takes a look at this and provides some actual numbers, including a look at applying compression to the data.
• Download C# Language Specification 5.0 & Download Visual Basic Language Specification 11.0 - The official language specification documents for C#5 and VB11 are now available for download from the Microsoft Downloads site - these are a great reference, and actually make interesting reading too - what better way to learn about how your language of choice works than to look at the original specification.
• Do you really need API Versioning? - Andreas Krohn reviews the arguments for and against API versioning strategies discussing the problems it tries to solve, as well as looking at how to go about it, and questions if you really need to do it.
• Spooling in SQL execution plans - Rob Farley takes a look at the Spool operators in SQL execution plans, explaining what their purpose is and why certain statements include them. I really love database query performance tuning, and this is a nice article to explain a common operator.
• Get Your Map of the Microsoft Developer Platform World - Vitor Ciaramella has created a nice map outlining the various branches of the Microsoft Development eco-sphere - useful to see what is out there and how some bits related, especially if you are a specialist in a particular area.

• Introducing VsixCompres - a NuGet package to compress your Visual Studio Package - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi shares a NuGet package which manipulates the build process for your Visual Studio Extension projects to add in generation of a fully compressed VSIX build artefact.

Information

• Reactive benefits with commodity option barrier events - Wes McClure takes a look at refactoring some code to make use of the reactive extensions and along the way making the code clearer and simpler
• CSI: Visual Studio - Unable to translate Unicode character at index X to specified code page - Scott Hanselman discusses the tracking down of a bizarre build error caused by some invalid characters in the PATH environment variables.
• WintellectNOW FTW - Wintellect now providing on-demand learning for everyone (and there&#39;s even a few free sessions too) - Greg Duncan highlights some free and some paid for trainign content from Wintellect. The free modules available include jQuery, Azure and IntelliTrace content.
• Using Environment.FailFast - Richard Carr takes a look at how to get your application to bail out completely in the case that something very serious has gone wrong using Environment.FailFast.
• Agile software development methodologies and how to apply them. - Monjurul Habib shares a nice overview of all things Agile, looking at the guiding principles and the various skills , practices and techniques which under pin in this CodeProject article.

Community

• TechEd North America 2013 - Channel 9 now has all the session recordings from TechEd available online, giving you access to what appears to be over 700 sessions of content covering all aspects of the Microsoft world.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Making Windows Store Dance - The Birmingham NxtGenUG welcome Christopher Myhill for a session on building applications for the Windows Store, sharing key lessons learnt when crafting your application for the store. The event takes place the evening of Tuesday 18th June

• Web Developer Checklist - the Chrome extension - Mads Kristensen announces the release of a Web Developer Check List Chrome Extension which also automates a large part of the check list as it is able to review the loaded page content. The extension is available via the Chrome webstore, and as its open source you can also get the source code from GitHub
• IIS Express GUI and Visual Studio 2010 integration - Matteo Tontini discusses the use of IIS Express and shares a nice simple utility for managing the sites configured in IISExpress, available from the projects CodePlex site.
• Portable Compression and HttpClient Working Together - .NET Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs - Immo Landwerth announces the release of two new beta NuGet packages for the HttpClient implementation which add in compressions support to this portable library

Information

• Knockout.js Troubleshooting Strategies - Ryan Niemeyer shares some great debugging and troubleshooting techniques when working with Knockout.js, discussing logging, the use of the console, catching and working with exceptions and also a number of common problems.
• How to delete Open or Insecure Wi-Fi HotSpots from Windows 8: Wifi.exe Command Line Utility with Source - Scott Hanselman follows on from his recent Hanselminutes podcast with Troy Hunt where wireless security was one of the topics they covered, with a look at how you can remove the remembered networks from your Windows 8 installation.
• T4 - The Insource Code Monkey - Nick Harrison discusses one of the more unsung heroes in the Development, the code generation possible using T4 Templates, discussing how you probably are using them without even knowing, looking at motivations for uses in your own applications, and exploring how to go about it.
• ACID 2.0 in action - Jimmy Bogard continues his discussion of getting rid of two phase commit in messaging applications, and takes a look at ACID 2.0, a new version of the ACID acronym which aims to provide guidelines to allow a data model to provide high throughput without traditional locking.
• LINQ for JavaScript - Kamyar Nazeri takes a look at implementing LINQ functionality in the JavaScript language, sharing implementations for 30 LINQ operations in JavaScript - great if you need this kind of functionality in JavaScript or are curious about the implementation of such functions.

Software

• First look at Windows 8.1 (Video) - Rob Margel shares the video from Jensen Harris’ TechEd session which demonstrates some of the new features and improvements coming in Windows 8.1

Information

• Clean Code Cheat Sheet - Urs Enzler shares an updated and enhanced Clean Code Cheat Sheet. Available in PDF form, this 4 page cheat sheet details all the key concepts which back the Clean Code idea
• VS 2013 round tripping - Brian Harry shares some more Visual Studio 2013 news, this time relating to the very important round tripping support which allows 2013 to work with 2010 and 2012 solutions and projects without conversion.
• PragPub with Elixir; Updated Raspberry Pi - The Pragmatic Programmers highlight their latest edition of PragPub magazine which features articles on a variety of development platforms and languages. This month includes Rails, Elixir and Knockout.
• See the Intermediate Language for C# Code - Dave Kerr shares an article on Codeplex which details the creation of a Visual Studio addin which allows you to highlight code, and see the IL that represents the code. The extension is available to download, so can also be added to your tool belt easily.
• Unity – Part 4: Extensions - Development With A Dot - Ricardo Peres continues discussion of the Unity Framework, with a 4th part which looks at extending the functionality of Unity, looking at the registration and configuration of extensions.
• Celebrating an Energy Efficient Browser on World Environment Day - The Microsoft Green Blog celebrate the news that Internet Explorer 10 is the most eco-friendly browser in terms of its energy efficiency, meaning both good things for your battery life and for the planet.

Community

• DareDevs: TDD, where did it all go wrong - DareDevs, formerly the Manchester NxtGenUG group, welcome Ian Cooper for a session on Test Driven Development on the evening of Wednesday 19th June.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Cross platform apps and games. - The Coventry NxtGenUG welcome Simon Jackson for a session on creating games and applications which work across multiple platforms, inculding a look at MonoGame and Xamarin Studio on the evening of Monday 17th June.

Update2: Yes, I broke the HTML, and everything went bold, should all be back to normal now

Software

• SQL Server 2014 - Another of the TechEd announcements this week was the announcement of the next version of SQL Server. SQL Server 2014 will include improved performance and availability over 2012 and will add in memory database capabilities along with improved backup and disaster recovery features
• dotTrace 5.5 EAP: Introducing Subsystems - The team over at JetBrains announce another Early Access Preview programme, this time for dotTrace 5.5. This new version includes subsystem analysis, bookmarking functionality, improved hotspot identification and integration with ReSharper 8 EAP. Check it out, and give feedback to the team.
• What’s New in Fiddler 2.4.4.5 - Eric Lawrence has been working away on Fiddler and announces the release of version 2.4.4.5 which contains some significant performance improvements, some useful improvements to the session list and timeline tab, Web Sockets support and much more.

Information

• An integer division identity - Eric Lippert takes a look at an algebraic identity, which is true in mathematics, and explores if that is the case in performing the same with integer arithmetic in C#, discussing some of the immediate possible failure cases, before looking at a specific case.
• The Top 10 Things to Know When Running SQL Server Workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Roger Doherty discusses the use of the Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks for running SQL Server instances, sharing a number of important things to be aware of when planning and working with SQL Server in such an environment.
• Building an HTML5 Web Sockets Server with Node.js - Dan Wahlin shares a look at the Node.js Web Sockets server capabilities, constructing a sample which sees a webpage calling to a node based Web Sockets server to retrieve images from Flickr.
• Barbarian Meets Knockout: Knockout.js Observables - Jaime González is on part 2 of a 13 part series looking at the various aspects of using the Knockout client side MVVM framework. This part digs into the use of the Observable type within knockout.
• Scripting .NET Applications with IronPython - Jerome Terry explores adding scripting capabilities to your applications using IronPython as the scripting language, looking at hosting the script engine and running scripts inside an application in this CodeProject article.
• Bing it on, Reactive Extensions! &#8211; story, code and slides - Andrei Rinea walks through the creation of the demo app from his recent talk on using the Reactive Extensions, providing a nice introductory sample, along with sharing the completed code and slides from his session.
• Keeping sensitive config settings secret with Azure Websites and GitHub - Phil Lee shares a technique for keeping configuration settings secret when working with GitHib hosted projects which are deployed to Windows Azure Websites

Community

• Skills Matter : Progressive .NET Tutorials May 2013 29-05-13 - All the session recordings from the Progressive .NET Tutorials are now available online, giving you access to some excellent sessions from some great speakers covering all aspect of the cutting edge development technologies, with a focus on single page applications.
• Build and Deployment - CraftyCoders - The CraftyCoders usergroup based in Bromsgrove are hosting an event on the evening of Thursday 20th June, where there will be three mini-sessions from group members sharing how they go about the build and deployment process.

• Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps & Visual Studio 2013, ALM, and DevOps - Somaseagar and Brian Harry announced Visual Studio 2013 at TechEd yesterday. This new relaese will be available as a preview at the //build conference, and will be shipping late this year. There is a significant focus on agile, TFS and DevOps in this new version
• dotCover 2.5 EAP is Open: Now with Hot Spots View` - JetBrains announce the openign of the Early Access Programme for dotCover 2.5, their code coverage tooling. This is a great opportunity to get hold of the newest features, and try them out, while being able to give feedback to the team.
• Windows Azure: Announcing New Dev/Test Offering, BizTalk Services, SSL Support with Web Sites, AD Improvements, Per Minute Billing & Windows Azure: Announcing Major Improvements for Dev/Test in the Cloud - Scott Guthrie serves up a double helping of new Windows Azure goodness, with a bunch of new features such as SSL on Websites, Active Directory improvements, along with account related things like per minute billing for running Virtual Servers and and improved free trial offer, and significantly a reduced rate to allow testing with MSDN licensed software in the cloud.

Information

• Why unhandled exceptions are useful - Simon Cooper discusses the up side of an unhandled exception in one of your applications, as an opportunity to improve your understanding of the problem, and address an assumption you have made in your code.
• (Un) Reliability in messaging: idempotency and de-duplication - Jimmy Bogard follows on from his discussions on ditching 2 phase commit with a look at some of the common strategies for dealing with unreliable messaging to ensure your application can cope in instances where what you send may not always get processed.
• Pushing ETW events through SignalR - Pablo M. Cibraro shares some code which works with the Event Tracing for Windows OS functionality, and allows you to hook messages and transmit them to a client using SignalR
• Loupe Agent for Entity Framework (Beta) - Also on the subject of logging, Kendall Miller discusses how the new logging hooks in Entity Framework have allowed them to create a nice integration for their Loupe product which can capture entity framework events.
• Using Web Platform Installer on a server without internet access - Benjamin Perkins takes a look at how you can still use the Web Platform Installer when your server does not have internet access.
• Supporting only JSON in ASP.NET Web API - the right way - Filip W. takes a look at two different techniques for creating JSON only services in ASP.NET Web API

Software

• jQuery 1.10.1 and 2.0.2 released - Dave Methvin announces the release of jQuery 1.10.1 and 2.0.2 which are bugfix releases which address issues with relative animations in the previous release
• A Sneak Peek at Internet Explorer 11 - Infragistics DevToolsGuy highlights some of the things which may be forthcoming in Internet Explorer 11, including improved touch support in desktop Internet Exploer and possible changes to the User Agent.
• Now on IE and Firefox: Debug your mobile HTML5 page remotely with weinre (WEb INspector REmote) - Olivier Bloch highlights the work carried out by the community to add support for Web Inspector Remote for Internet Explorer and Firefox

Information

• Taking Baby Steps with ScriptCS - Jan Van Ryswyck discusses his desire for a simpler .NET development story and looks at how ScriptCS may provide just that, showing how easily you can get up and running with the ScriptCS environment, and looking at spinning up NancyFx within it.
• MSDN Magazine June Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives a taste of what is to come in this month’s MSDN Magazine, with publication to occur today (3rd June) at some point.
• Semantic Tracing For .NET 4.0 - Alois Kraus highlights the semantic logging support which has been made available in Entity Framework 6 Enterprise Library, looking at working with the Event Tracing for Windows functionality to get an understanding of what your application is doing under the hood.
• Hijacking the Visual Studio Build Process - Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi takes a look at how you can replace out the standard build process in Visual Studio with a custom MSBuild, sharing an example from some recent work on a Chrome extension
• Creating a Basic CRUD Application with Backbone.js Starter Kit (part 2) - Kazi Manzur follows on from his earlier post with more exploration of buildin a basic application using his Backbone.js starter template
• Thoughts on Queue Centric Workflow Design - Jason Short shares a collection of thoughts and experiences from working with enterprise customers on queue centric workflow pattern based systems
• How to troubleshoot Windows Azure Mobile Services - Jeff Sanders shares a number of useful tips to help in debugging issues with Windows Azure Mobile Services

Community

• Windows Phone Events - Mike Taulty highlights an event taking place this Saturday (8th June) in Shoreditch which will provide support in porting existing Windows Phone 7 applications to Windows Phone 8, and a second event on Saturday 15th June at Nokia, Paddington, London whcih focuses on getting new developers working with the Windows 8 platform.

Software

• WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Release - The WCF Data Services team announce the offical release of the WCF Data Services 5.5.0, released via NuGet. The release includes a major re-enhancements of the URL Parser, and implementation of Public Data Providers, as well as over 40 bugfixes
• ReSharper 8 EAP Build: JIT Edition - With just days to spare on the expiry of the last EAP the JetBrains team announce their latest EAP edition of ReSharper, featuring more refactorings, XAML Grid inspection and refactorings and much more.
• EF6 Beta 1 Available - Rowen Miller announces the availability of the first beta release of Entity Framework 6, with runtime available via NuGet and tooling as a download from the Download Center, and a significant number of enhancements and changes since the early alpha releases.

Information

• Getting up to speed with Katana - Jon Galloway discusses the basics of OWIN and Katana before diving into why these are significant and exciting things for Web Developers, highlighting resources to learn more including whitepapers Channel 9 content.
• What the meaning of is is - Eric Lippert explores the is operator in C#, discussing some of the slightly stranger aspects of its behaviour with nulls, and looking at what the operator actually means.
• A typical effect of setting CopyLocal = true - Patrick Smacchia discusses the default CopyLocal=true on assembly references in the Visual Studio project structure, looking at why he considers it to be somewhat evil
• Code Review Checklist and Guidelines for C# Developers - Mohammed Hameed shares a good list of things we as developers should be checking in our code reviews. I would argue that a many of these should probably be checked by the developer working on te code prior to code review too.
• How to debug silent crashes in .Net - Samual Jack takes a look at how you can go about debugging and diagnosing serious crashes in .NET applications where your application level error handling is not able to catch the error

• Download Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 RC 2 - Microsoft Downloads have the second release candidate of the Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 available for download now. This RC is a ‘go-live’ release and includes improved agile planning tooling for TFS along with a number of bugfixes across the whole product.
• Get /httpclient/rtm - 200 OK - Immo Landwerth announces the RTM release of HttpClient 2,1 available as a stable NuGet package and for production use. This release’s main feature is the ability to use HttpClient in Portable Class Libraries

Information

• Edge.js - Running Node.js and .NET in One Process - Shiju Varghese takes a look at the exciting world of Edge.js which brings together Node.js and .NET code, providing a powerful bridge between the two environments and allowing hybrid applications to be created
• The State of Entity Framework and NHibernate - Ricardo Peres discusses two of the main competitors for ORM functionality on the .NET Framework, looking at how they differ as projects, and possible advantages for Entity Framework by being backed as a part of the framework, with a dedicated team.
• NancyFX - Hosting with OWIN - Phillip Haydon takes us on a walkthrough of getting NancyFX up and running on a OWIN host
• Understanding XSS - input sanitisation semantics and output encoding contexts - Troy Hunt takes a look at Cross Site Scripting, one of the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilities discussing some of the techniques which can help you to protect your applications (and yourself) from such attacks.
• Flight Mode - Libraries - Aaron Powell continues this interesting series looking at the options for offline storage in web applications, exploring some of the wrapper libraries which put a wrapped API on top of the different storage APIs.
• NuPattern is a tool that helps you build tools… Don’t repeat manual, automate! - Over on the Coding For Fun blog, Greg Duncan takes a look at NuPattern, exploring how it can help you to build tooling for inside Visual Studio, exploring some of the resources for getting you up and running with NuPattern
• Planning the Next Rhino Mock - Mike Meisinger starts to outline the plans for Rhino Mocks now that he has taken over as project lead

• .NET Security Part 4 - Simon Cooper rounds out his series on .NET Security with a look at a number of security issues which can cause problems when working with sandboxed application domains
• Monitor don’t log - Peter Gillard-Moss discusses the difference between implementing logging in your application and making your application able to be monitored, and why monitoring is probably the more important.
• Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes Guide a la mobi and epub - Willy-P. Schaub highlights the availability of mobi and epub editions of the ‘Better Unit Testing with Microsoft Fakes’ ALM Rangers guide, available along with the PDF edition.
• Is the Windows user ready for apt-get? - Scott Hanselman asks if Windows users are ready for application package management in the style of apt-get, taking a look a the closest thing available in the form of Chocolatey
• The responsibility of public disclosure - Troy Hunt continues his discussion of vulnerabilities in other peopels production sites, discussing the ethics and efforts he has gone to in order to report issues to site owners before disclosing publically
• A comparison of various JS frameworks using cold hard data - Rob Ashton mines some data to explore the popularity and other factors relating to the various JavaScript Framework, highlighting some interesting trends along the way
• Flight Mode - FileSystem API - Aaron Powell continues his series looking at the possibilities for offine / local data storage with web applications, exploring file system access in this post.
• Understanding .NET Just-In-Time Compilation - Tsvetomir Y. Todorov discusses the .NET JIT compilation, looking at the various stages, and processes involved, before briefly discussing how frameworks like JustMock get involved in the compilation process

Community

• F# London Meetup this Thursday: F# on iPad and iPhone in Xamarin Studio with Neil Danson - Don Syme highlights the next F#unctional Londoners meeting, being held this Thursday (30th May) at Skills Matter London, where Neil Danson will be looking at using F# to create iPad and iPhone applications

• Talk to, hear, touch and see your code - Mads Kristensen introduces two recent Visual Studio Extensions he has worked on - Voice Commands and Farticus. Voice Commands adds some voice control for Visual Studio Commands via Windows Speech Recognition, and Farticus is an amusing extension which will notify you of build failures.
• Zudio - Founders Subscriptions - Friend of the Brew Mark Rendle has been working away on a startup, Zudio, providing tooling for working with Windows Azure Cloud Storage, and is about to go live, and is looking to generate some initial capital with an offer of Founder subscriptions - a limited lifetime subscription for the price of a 2 year subscription. Get in quick, these are bound to go fast.

Information

• Faster and Offline Browsing using Application Cache in HTML5 - Kunal Chowdhury takes a look at the use of the Application Cache in HTML 5 based applications to provide performance boosts and take your application offline
• Flight Mode - IndexedDB - Aaron Powell is also continuing with his series looking at the various techniques for offline Web based applications with a look at the now discontinued IndexDB specification.
• TDD I Learned - Brendan Tompkins highlights the freely available online recording of Roy Osherove’s TDD course kicking off a series sharing his notes from the various recorded lessons.
• Know Thy .NET Dictionaries - Rob Philpott takes a look a the various dictionary like implementations provided in the ,NET Framework discussing the use and performance of the different types.
• What is Katana and OWIN for ASP.NET? - Kalyan Bandarupalli shares some notes on the Katana project and OWIN for providing a hosting basis for ASP.NET applications to run on top of
• Cargo-Culting in JavaScript - James Padolsey enlightens on the term ‘Cargo Cult’ and looks at some of the common ‘Cargo Cult’ programming in JavaScript
• Why Can’t I Update an Event? - Greg Young discusses the notion of updating an event in an event sourcing context, looking at how generally you shouldn’t ever need to, and discussing how to go about handling the fringe case of actually needing to
• Why so fabulous? - Eric Lippert provides an amusing anecdote on why his blog is named ‘Fabulous Adventures In Coding’

Monday is a Public Holiday here in the UK, so in keeping with tradition there will be no Morning Brew on Monday, and I shall return on Tuesday 28th AprilMay. Enjoy the Weekend.

Software

• Portable HttpClient is now available as RC - Immo Landwerth announces the Release Candidate release of the Portable HttpClient implementation for the .NET Stack. This release, available via NuGet includes all the fixes since the preview release as well as adding a couple of new features. This post also outlines future features planned, and the roadmap for delivery.
• Announcing the release of AMQP support with Windows Azure Service Bus - Scott Guthrie announces the release of Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) support on the Windows Azure Service Bus as a General Availability Feature. The implementation conforms to AMQP 1.0 and provides interoperable messaging between the service bus and a variety of clients.

Information

• The mystery of the inserted method - Eric Lippert looks at an interesting case of unexpected behaviour of in C#, exploring how the compiler implements methods for you, when implementing interfaces, and the role of the virtual keyword.
• Roslyn development environment setup and ramp-up plan - Nitish Jain shares a collection of links to Roslyn related resources, a useful one stop shop to get all the latest Roslyn bits to give a good development experience when working with Roslyn.
• JavaScript is Web Assembly Language and that’s OK - Scott Hanselman continues his discussion of the use of JavaScript as the Assembly Language of the web looking at some of the impressive things people are achieving in the browser by compiling down to JavaScript.
• Retrieving the client’s IP address in ASP.NET Web API - Filip W. takes a look at how you can get hold of the clients IP address in different ASP.NET Web API hosting scenarios, and looks at a combined approach to use in general projects.
• Flight Mode - local and session storage - LINQ to Fail - Aaron Powell continues his series looking at offline storage possibilities for web applications, exploring local storage and session storage for keeping application state.
• Edward Farley and the Fantastic Library Part 1 - Charles L Flatt takes us on a journey though the various types of Entity Framework 5 Code First. Charles uses a story telling format and draws examples from a library in this 12 part series (all online now).

Community

• TechDays Online On Demand Content is Now Available - Sarah Lamb highlights the availability of all the content from the recent TechDays online event, now available for your on demand viewing pleasure.

• Glimpse 1.3.2 released - The Glimpse Team announce the release of Glimpse 1.3.2, a minor update which makes some improvements to the client side of Glimpse including better rendering of recursive data structures
• Rhino Mocks New Home - Mike Meisinger takes on the project lead role for Rhino Mocks, and outlines a little of what is planned for the (now bright) future of Rhino Mocks.
• Solution Load Manager for Visual Studio 2010/2012 - Pavlo Iarovyi shares a Visual Studio Extension for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 which adds some User Interface for controlling the Project Load Priority, allowing you to control which projects ina solution load and when.

Information

• A first look at SignalR - Rick Strahl gives a nice introduction to the wonderful world of SignalR, discussing what the library aims to achieve, some applicable use cases for it use, and a look at some of the features of the library.
• Technology Radar May 2013 - The May 2013 edition of the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar is now available online. This regular report looks at the ever changing landscape of software development technologies and practices, and their relative maturity and readiness for adoption
• IP Throttling in ASP.NET Web API - Pablo M. Cibraro shares an implementation of a MessageHandler for ASP.NET WebAPI which provides IP based throttling capailities, useful in situations where you need to provide a publicly consumable API but want to control how much traffic you receive from individual clients.
• Validating composite models with knockout validation - Jef Claes explores the validation capabilities of KnockOut Validation, and looks at how to go about extending it to support validation of composite models, illustrating with examples along the way
• AngularJS and TypeScript - Dave Iffland takes a look at getting up and running with AngularJS with JavaScript code written using TypeScript, sharing some lessons learnt about combining these two technologies and working around encountered issues.
• Dynamically Loading Controllers and Views with AngularJS and RequireJS - Dan Wahlin is also exploring AngularJS, and in this post highlights his introductory video on AnugularJS, before exploring the use of RequireJS with Angular to provide dynamic loading of the controllers and views required.
• Compiling to JavaScript, and Debugging with Source Maps - Nick Fitzgerald and Robert Nyman share an interesting article which explores the creation of a language compiler which compiles down to JavaScript, looking at the compiler concepts required, and exploring adding debugging support by way of SourceMaps.
• Modern.IE and BrowserStack: The tools we should have had 10 years ago. - Chris Maunder takes a look at the browser compatibility checking and testing features provided by the Modern.IE website and BrowserStack tooling
• Flight Mode - Introduction & Cookies - Aaron Powell kicks off a series looking at the various options for supporting offline web application use, with an initial look at the oldest options, cookies.
• Dealing with Windows Azure Storage transient faults - Grigori Melnik takes a look at dealing with the Transient Faults which can occur when connecting to Windows Azure Services, and how the client libraries provide support for retries.