• How to setup a Load Balanced Web Farm of Virtual Machines (Linux or otherwise) on Windows Azure (command line) - Scott Hanselman gives a detailed walkthrough of setting up load balanced server farms on the Windows Azure platform, showing the process principally for Linux VM’s, but with notes for Windows VMs too.
• C# Performance Benchmark Mistakes, Part Two - The second part of Eric Lippert’s TechPro article series on benchmarking mistakes is now available, in this post exploring the measurement of time and some of the anti-patterns
• Web Performance APIs Rapidly Become W3C Recommendations - Jatinder Mann of the Internet Explorer team gives an update on the status of the W3C standardization process for the various performance related W3C standards-to-be
• RavenDB, Victory - Ayende responds to a couple of the points raised in Jeremy Miller’s recent post on his experiences of working with RavenDB on a recent project
• The Design of Code: Organizing JavaScript - Anthony Colangelo discusses the use of the module pattern, jQuery Plugins and options objects to help keep order in your JavaScript code
• Writing Testable JavaScript - Rebecca Murphey also has a nice A List Apart article on JavaScript, looking at writing client-side interactions which are easier to test, sharing some practices she uses to help ensure you can easily wrap code in tests.
• Cool Kid Training from Pluralsight, that’s free too! Because coding kids are cool kids, right? - Greg Duncan highlights a free series of courses from Pluralsight aimed at teaching kids to code, all made available completely free.

• Knockout-ES5: a plugin to simplify your syntax - Steve Sanderson shares Knockout-ES5, a plugin for Knockout which takes advantage of modern browser’s support for ECMAScript 5 to simplify and give a more natural syntax for the model and binding code.
• ripple: Fubu-inspired dependency management - Josh Arnold highlights the Ripple Project which aims to provide an alternative to the standard NuGet Package Manager client whcih deals with Continuous Integration scenarios better, while using the standard NuGet feed and package format.
• 64 bits ought to be enough for everybody [TextAnalysisTool.NET update for .NET 2.0 and 64-bit enables the analysis of larger files!] - David Anson provides an update to his TextAnalysisTool.NET tool for reading, searching and navigating large files efficiently. This update brings it onto .NET 2.0 and adds 64-bit support allowing you even more memory space for loading and working with large text files.

Information

• What is lexical scoping? - Eric Lippert discusses the use of the word ‘Scope’ in development, and looks at the two different styles of scoping, dynamic scoping and lexical scoping
• Traversing the GC Heap with ClrMd - Sasha Goldshtein takes a look at working with the ClrMd library to programatically work with the CLR debugging API, exploring how you can walk across the Garbage Collection Heap and explore its contents.
• Some "Laws" of Software Development - Al Noel takes a look at some of the ‘enduring truths’ of software development encapsulated in a variety of named ‘laws’ including Ziv’s, Conway’s and Humphrey’s Laws, before sharing his own software development ‘law’
• Play with Packages, programmatically! - The NuGet Team give a taste of the API available for the NuGet package Manager allowing your code to easily interact with NuGet.
• Modern Art - Phil Trelford proves that F# isn’t just for scientists and financiers, turning his hand to recreating works of art using the F# Language

Community

• Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon at DevTeach - Bill Wagner highlights the Humanitarian Toolbox Hackathon event being held at the DevTeach conference at the end of the month, and is a great opportunity to turn your development skills for the power of good.
• Windows 8 for Developers Online Camp - Joe Mayo highlights a Windows 8 Developer Camp Online event, with three hours of content on developing applications for Windows 8 from Joe and Greg Levenhagen on the 21st May.

• YUICompressor 2.4.8 Released - Joey Smith announces the latest release of the YUICompressor, and the first since they shifted to a contributor model. As a result this release contains contributions from over 10 individuals, and includes updates to both CSS and JavaScript minification
• Just released - Prism for Windows Runtime - Blaine Wastell of the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft announces the release of Prism for the Windows Runtime, previously codenamed ‘Kona’ targeting the development of Windows 8 applications. The release is amde along with an AdventureWorks based reference implementation, three quickstarts and associated documentation.

Information

• Express names in code: Bad vs Clean - Mateusz Roszczak discusses guidelines and recommendations to help with naming in your code, one of the trickiest skills to master in programming
• Creating a Basic CRUD Application with Backbone.js Starter Kit - Kazi Manzur Rashid kicks off a new series of posts looking at building a Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) style application using his Backbone.js based application starter kit
• Working with TypeScript in Visual Studio 2012 - Gaston Hillar gives a nice introduction to TypeScript development in Visual Studio in this Dr Dobbs article
• Overwhelmed by JavaScript Dependencies - Martijn Faassen discusses dependency management in JavaScript based applications, and shares how he has automated some of the processes. Be sure to check out his followup post JS Dependency Tools Redux for more discussion about the various dependency management libraries also available
• The CORRECT Way to Code a Custom Exception Class - Doug Seelinger shares a templates for implementing exception classes which includes all the best practice techniques, along with support for correct serialisation of the data within the exception.
• Getting Started With Glimpse In ASP.NET MVC - John Sonmez shares an introductory tutorial on working with Glimpse with ASP,NET to see what is going on at the server end from right within your browser

• Spot the defect: rounding, part two - Eric Lippert returns with the second half of his look at rounding, and looks into the detail behind the subtle bug in the previous post and the exciting (and troublesome) world of double precision decimals represented as binary fractions.
• .NET Security Part 3 - Simon Cooper continues his series looking at the security features of the .NET Framework, exploring running full trust code in its own sandboxed appdomain yet still allowing partially trusted code call it.
• Step-by-Step creating an app to find the nearest - Susan Ibach walks through the process of building a ‘Find the nearest’ type application for Windows 8 based upon an application template provided by Mark Arteaga.
• Looking at Kotlin - a few notes made - Rob Ashton shares some thoughts and notes made during a Kotlin workshop given by Hadi Hariri, giving a useful introduction to what Kotlin is and some getting started pointers.
• Game Development Using JavaScript - Shai Raiten shares a passion for building games with JavaScript in this CodeProject article, discussing some of the game development concepts, and looking at how they apply in JavaSCript and HTML5 development.
• How to customize Twitter Bootstrap to fit your web design - Sojaner takes a look at how you can go about customising the styling of Twitter Bootstrap to have it reflect your purposes, showing how browser developer tools can help you understand what is going on, and how the LESS CSS processor allows you to easily customise the styling.
• Where Is .NET Headed? - K. Scott Allen shares some thoughts on the future direction of the .NET Framework and associated platforms,. Well worth reading through the numerous comments on this one too.
• New Windows Dev Center release - Brian Harry highlights the new and improved Windows Dev Center website (something which his team is responsible for) which includes a new navigation structure based on the development lifecycle, new section landing pages, and a Windows look and feel.
• Red Gate Is Looking For Feedback On Its ASP.NET MVC Web Development Education Website - While on the subject of Websites, RedGate have a nice ASP.NET MVC resource site which they are looking for feedback on as Paulo Morgado highlights in this post.

Community

• What has The Next Generation User Group ever done for us? - Guy Smith Ferrier highlights the sterling work done by Richard Costall, Dave McMahon and John Price over the years running the NxtGenUG, and the evolution of some of the NxtGenUG chapters into fresh new Usergroups. I couldn’t agree more with Guy, the community owes them all a debt of gratitude for their efforts.

• WCF Data Services 5.5.0 Prerelease - The WCF Data Services team announce the Release Candidate of their 5.5.0 release, which will be made via NuGet only. The major new features in this release are public data source providers and enhancements to their URL parsing support

Information

• OSS from the trenches - 7 Tips for Maintainers & Contributors - Anthony van der Hoorn continues the Open Source .NET discussions sharing 7 tips to help foster a good Open Source community around projects which you are a contributor or maintainer
• Saga patterns: wrap up & Eventual consistency in REST APIs - Jimmy Bogard wraps up his interesting post series looking at the implementation of the various saga related patterns. Jimmy then moves on to discuss some of the concerns around eventual consistency, and the construction of REST based APIs around systems which are eventually consistent.
• Announcing some new capabilities in Azure Active Directory Graph Service - Windows Azure Active Directory Graph Team announce some of the new features added to the Azure Active Directory Graph service in the release a few days ago
• Creating plugins for dotPeek - Maarten Balliauw digs into the creation of plugins for ReSharper’s dotPeek assembly browser tool, looking at obtaining and working with the framework provided by a NuGet package, and how you go about deploying/distributing a plugin.
• Hack yourself first - how to go on the offence before online attackers do - Troy Hunt discusses how ‘friendly’ hacking of your own systems is a great idea in learning about your weaknesses before actual ‘hackers’ do, discussing a number of attack vectors to consider.

Community

• F# UK ton of Meetups - Phil Trelford highlights the impressive array of F# related Usergroup sessions taking place in the UK, and a few further afield. One of the events is tonight in London, so if you are at a loose end in the city it might be worth checking out.
• NxtGenUG - Event: What is Devops anyway - Another event which is taking place tonight is NxtGenUG Coventry Usergroup, who will be entertained by Alex Papadimoulis of ‘The Daily WTF’ fame, discussing the DevOps revolution.

• TouchDevelop v3.0 beta for Windows Phone 8 - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of TouchDevelop 3.0 Beta, targeting Windows Phone 8, and includes its new execution engine based on TypeScript. Its a closed beta release which you can get hold of by emailing the team
• May 2013 Internet Explorer Updates - Ceri Gallacher highlights the latest security fixes for Internet Explorer released yesterday as a part of the regular Patch Tuesday
• Windows Keeps Getting Better - Brandon LeBlanc shares more news on the forthcoming Windows Blue (8.1) release which will be made available free of charge via the Windows Store.

Information

• Scripting ease with Script Packs - Glenn Block discusses the nature of Script Packs in scriptcs, discussing how they are intended to make the experience of working with scriptcs better and provide a neat way of extending.
• Deeper dive into ScriptCS - Scott Smith follows on from his introductory post on ScriptCS with a more in-depth look at ScriptCS and the use and creation of Script Packs.
• CLR Diagnostics with ClrMD and ScriptCS REPL - ScriptCS.ClrDiagnostics - Piotr Walat takes a look at using the CLR Diagnostics and ClrMD with ScriptCS, sharig a script pack which combines the two.
• Benchmarking mistakes, part one - Eric Lippert highlights an article he has written for TechPro looking at the common mistakes people make when attempting to benchmark their code, discussing first the concept of benchmarking, and looking in detail at the first 4 key common mistakes.
• Using Web Workers to Improve Performance of Image Manipulation - David Catuhe takes a look at the use of Web Workers to provide improved performance in HTML5 based applications, exploring their use in processing and manipulating images

Software

• SignalR/ReleaseNotes - The SignalR Team announce the release of SignalR 1.1, a release which includes significant improvements to the scale-out story, along with a healthy number of other bugfixes and improvements.
• Introducing Backbone.js StarterKit - Kazi Manzur Rashid shares three NuGet packages which provide a basis for Knockout based Single Page Applications, with code written in JavaScript, CoffeeScript or TypeScript.

Information

• Applying Conway’s Law - Phil Haack discusses Conway’s Law on software reflecting the organisational structure which created it, discussing his experiences at Microsoft and also how GitHub organise themselves.
• Spot the defect: rounding - Eric Lippert shares a seemingly very simple piece of code, with a subtle but significant bug, and challenges his readers to find the bug - the answer is in the comments, and will be the focus of a later blog post too.
• Troy Hunt: Clickjack attack - the hidden threat right in front of you - Troy Hunt discusses in detail the anatomy and security risks exposed by Clickjacking exploits, and looking at what you can do to protect your ASP.NET applications from such attacks.
• SQL Server Performance Crib Sheet - Grant Fritchey has an updated version of his SQL Server Performance Crib Sheet, detailing a goodly number of things that are well worth knowing if you have to manage SQL Server at any level.
• Knowing More Programming Languages Will Make You Smarter - Rob Conery discusses the benefits with learning new languages, both spoken and more specifically programming.
• Would I use RavenDb again? - Jeremy D Miller shares his thoughts and experiences of using RavenDB as a backend database for an application, discussing some of the benefits and some of the limitations that his team ran into during implementation
• New Contributor? Jump In! - Nik Molnar shares thoughts on Open source projects having a ‘Jump In’ list of easier issues ideal for someone looking to get involved with an Open Source project but unsure of what to start work with - a great idea, and certainly well worth maintaining from a project lead point of view - the OSS world can only be better off from more contributors.

• ReSharper 8 EAP: NuGet based Extension Manager - Matt Ellis takes a deeper look at the new NuGet enabled Extension Manager in ReSharper 8 Early Access Preview, providing a neat way to obtain and update Extensions to ReSharper.

Information

• scriptcs and accessing Azure Mobile Services like a pro - Filip W highlights the 0.4 release of scriptcs and takes a look at using it to consume Windows Azure Mobile Services
• Redirecting ASP.NET Legacy URLs to Extensionless with the IIS Rewrite Module - Scott Hanselman takes a look at how you can use the IIS Rewrite module to provide redirection for your legacy URLs (those ones with file extensions!) and map them to the new extensionless URLs
• Super simple SPA sample - Daniel Wertheim shares a simple template Single Page Application which makes use of PathJs, KnockoutJs and Headjs, walking through wiring up the required components.
• Using Cross Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in ASP.NET Web API - Bipin Joshi takes a look at the Cross Orign Resource Sharing support which is now included in ASP.NET Web API, discussing how you get granular control of the CORS support in Web API and looking at it in use.
• Ready to learn XAML? - Jerry Nixon highlights the 1 day Microsoft Virtual Academy course for Windows8 XAML development which he taught with Daren May, which is now available to view online.

Community

• Open Source Podcast #2 - Nick Berardi highligts the second edition of the Open Source Podcast, now know as ‘Seriously Open’. This episode features the first half of an interview with Nik Molnar and Anthony van der Horn, the two chaps who head up the Glimpse project

Software

• jQuery Migrate 1.2.1 Released - Dave Methvin announces the release of jQuery Migrate 1.2.1 which addresses a regression defect in version 1.2 regarding rejection of valid HTML strings. The release is already available on the jQuery CDN in both minified and non-minified forms.
• Toastr 1.3.0 Now Available - John Papa announces the release of Toastr 1.3.0 the latest update to this nice simple JavaScript based Toast Notification library

Information

• Entity Framework Code First Validation & Entity Framework Code First Fluent Validation - Ricardo Peres takes a look at performing validation with Enfity Framework Code First entities exploring the various approaches to validation available in the box, and also explores constructing validation using a Fluent Interface
• Getting started with ScriptCS - Scott Smith shares an introductory look at ScriptCS, giving a nice getting started overview looking at installation, running samples, and starting writing your own scripts .
• Consistent error handling with Nancy - Paul Stovell is setting about moving his Octopus Deploy portal to run under NancyFX and in this post shares some of his experiences working with and handling errors in a Nancy based application
• W3C Transitions Pointer Events to Candidate Recommendation - Jacob Rossi highlights the change in status of the W3C Pointer Events to become a Candidate Recommendation. This specification is a concerted effort by browser vendors to standardise the various mouse and touch events to allow better more efficient development for application developers.
• When To Comment Your Code - Steve Smith discusses the art and science of commenting your code, drawing on various points of view in well know software development related books

Community

• Skills Matter : In The Brain of Luke Hoban: TypeScript - Skills Matter welcome Luke Holban of the Microsoft TypeScript Team for an ‘In the Brain of’ session on the evening of Monday 20th May 2013 at the Skills Matter eXchange in London.

Humour

• Developer humor - Jason Jarrett highlights a couple of amusing developer related collections of animated gifs covering everything from Git to Project Management

• TFS 2012.2 Power Tools update available - Brian Harry announces the release of the update for the TFS Power Tools which adds support for the Visual Studio 2012.2 Update
• Visualizing TFS source history now with source - Greg Duncan highlights a rather pretty visualisation of your source code in TFS, with code for both the library and Extension now available

Information

• Some thoughts on a comment about VS 2012.3 - Brian Harry shares a fascenating insight into the process of releasing something like the VS 2012.3 Update in response to a comment on his CTP release post - well worth reading to better understand how Microsoft think about software release and updates.
• Putting the Dynamic back into TypeScript - Derik Whittaker takes a look at how you can recapture some of the Dynamic nature of JavaScript when using TypeScript to give you a mostly static typed environment.
• Ditching two-phased commits - Jimmy Bogard discusses the 2 phase commit pattern, and also discusses how with a bit of thought and consideration the requirement for 2 phase commit can often be removed
• NancyFX - Revisiting Content Negotiation & APIs (Part 2) - Phillip Haydon further explores the content negotiation features of NancyFX, looking at the use of Negotiate in controlling which content types are serviced.
• Using Fluent Validation with ASP.NET MVC – Part 1: The Basics - Jerrie Pelser takes a look at swapping the standard Data Annotations validation commonly used in ASP.NET MVC to provide model validation, and replacing it with the Fluent Validation library.
• Cutting-edge web development with jsRazor: tiny JavaScript that replaces ASP.NET (PHP, MVC, JSP, etc.) rendering! - rgubarenko takes a look at the possibilities of Client Side Rendering using jsRazor as an alternative to rendering on the server side in this CodeProject article.

Community

• Live blogging at OuterConf2013 - Paula Hunter shares links to the presentations from OuterConf 2013, the OuterCurve foundation’s conference for open source development

• Visual Studio 2012.3 (Update 3) “go-live” CTP is now available & Release Candidate of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 now available - Brian Harry and Charles Sterling highlight the availability of the release candidate / CTP of Visual Studio 2012 Update 3. This CTP release has a go-live license so enables supported use in a real world production environment, helping the team find issues before the RTM release.
• Glimpse 1.3.1 released - Anthony van der Hoorn announces the latest release from th Glimpse team with some major fixes to the Glimpse core as well as enhancements to ASP.NET and ADO features, with an ever growing team of contributors

Information

• scriptcs gets a REPL! - Glenn Block announces the release of a REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop) for ScriptCS which gives an interactive ScriptCS experience affording easy experimentation and many other powerful scenarios.
• .NET Security Part 2 - Simon Cooper continues his series looking at Security in .NET with a look at creating appdomains with different trust levels giving sandboxes for code to play in without exposing the whole application to it.
• 10 Years (of the CSS Zen Garden) - Dave Shea announces a refresh of the CSS Zen Garden, now 10 years old, and opens up to submissions using the best of CSS3 and Responsive Design. The original Zen Garden was a great resource in in early days of selling people on the concept of CSS based layouts, and I hope the new Zen Garden reaches these heights.
• .NET Crash Dump and Live Process Inspection - Lee Culver shares a look at a new managed library from the .NET Runtime Team which allows you to automate debugging inspection and capture more information about your crashes. The library, Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime or ClrMD) provides a code interface to working with a processes state, and is certainly something I’ll be having a play with in the future.
• Handling IE 9 & 10’s and Chrome’s clear button with Knockout binding
  - Kevin Logan takes a look at an interesting problem when working with Knockout.js in modern browsers which have additional functionality in the input text box
• An Editor Pattern for Knckout.js Using TypeScript Inheritance - Steve Michelotti shares a look at an editor pattern for Knockout based code which provides for the accept / cancel of user changes

Community

• Free Visual Studio Lifecycle Tools Events - Mike Taulty highlights the latest series of events from the team at Microsoft UK, which will be taking a look at the Application Lifecycle Management features of Visual Studio / TFS in Cardiff, Nottingham, Reading, London and Glasgow during May and June

• Announcing availability of ISOs for Visual Studio Updates - The Visual Studio Team announce the availability of ISO image of the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, making it easier to obtain an offline version of the update.
• Announcing PostSharp 3 RTM - Gael Fraiteur announces the RTM release of PostSharp 3, now available from the Visual Studio Gallery and NuGet, replacing the PostSharp 2.1 package
• Free ModernUI Charts for WPF, Windows Store Apps und Silverlight published - SharePoint Software Quality, .NET and ModernUI apps - Torsten Mandelkow announces the availability of a free charting library for WPF Windows Store and Silverlight applications which has the Modern UI look and feel

Information

• Producing permutations, part seven - Eric Lippert returns for another instalment of his series looking at the production of permutations, digging into the answer to the poser in the last post about random permutations of a deck of cards
• The future is now - OWIN and multi-hosting ASP.NET web applications - Filip W takes us to the bleeding edge exploring the capabilities of the nightly builds from the ASP.NET team of Katana and ASP.NET Web API, looking at the support for multi-hosting in self host scenarios
• One ASP.NET: Nancy.Templates for Visual Studio - Scott Hanselman shares a look at the NancyFX Visual Studio templates showing how they provide valuable starting points for Nancy development, and take advantage of the extensibility in Visual Studio, which is still sadly more complicated than folk would like it to be,
• The Benefits of a Reverse Proxy - Mike Hadlow takes a few moments to consider the architectural benefits of running web infrastructure behind a reverse proxy, allowing it to shield your infrastructure and provide valuable services on top of a multi-server setup.
• Resources for Learning CoffeeScript & 10 CoffeeScript Features You Might Not Know - Jaco Pretorius highlights some nice resources for getting up and running and deepening your understanding of the CoffeeScript language, as well as highlighting 10 useful and interesting aspects of the language.

Information

• Producing permutations, part six - Eric Lippert continues his series looking at generation of permutations, with a discussion on the potential for bias in the random elements of generating random permutations, along with setting a challenge to predict the next cards picked by a sample program.
• .NET Security Part 1 - Simon Cooper takes a look at the built in Code Access Security included in the .NET Framework exploring partial and full trust assemblies, the testing of permissions and the different security modes/levels.
• C#/.NET Fundamentals: Three Tech.Pro Tutorials - James Michael Hare shares three tutorial articles he wrote for Tech.Pro exploring Linq, Tuples and Anonymous Types, and extension methods
• Configuring Nancy to use views in a separate assembly - Colin Angus Mackay takes a look at an alternative way of loading views when working with the Nancy Framework, looking at embedding views as resources in assemblies, and how to bootstrap Nancy to load these.
• Communication with Cross Domain IFrame - A Cross Browser Solution - Tadit Dash takes a look at the solution to passing information between browser frames, and even moving information across two different domains using message passing using postMessage
• Developers and Depression - Killing our Knowledge Workers - AgileScout discusses the importance of good mental health, and some of the typical developer traits and work patterns which don’t help - Important stuff which isn’t discussed often enough.

Community

• NxtGenUG - Cross platform game / app dev - Simon Jackson is giving a session on the issues and solutions for developing games to run on the multitude of different platforms available these days at the Manchester/Warrington NxtGenUG on the evening of Wednesday 15th May.
• NxtGenUG - Typescript - Mark Rendle journeys north to Birmingham to deliver a session on TypeScript on the evening of Tuesday 21st May
• Utilize Roslyn to create the next level plugin capability - Filip Ekberg shares the video of his dotnetConf session which looks at using the Compiler as a Service functionality provided by Roslyn as an alternative way of creating plugins for applications. Don’t forget all the other dotnetConf sessions are also available online and are well worth checking out.

• Announcing the Release of WebMatrix 3 & Announcing WebMatrix 3 - Scott Guthrie and Justin Beckwith announce the release of WebMatrix 3, the latest edition of Microsoft’s lightweight web development tooling which enables development in ASP.NET, PHP and Node.js. This release centres around the Windows Azure integration, improving remote editing capabilities and integration with TFS and Git.
• jQuery Migrate 1.2.0 Released - Dave Methvin announces the release of jQuery Migrate 1.2.0 which can be used with jQuery 1.9 or 2.0 to plug the gaps in the API where methods have been removed, providing a means of gradually updating your applications to use only the supported functionality of the V1.9 and v2.0 versions.

Information

• There are now Visual studio project templates for Nancy - Christiaan Baes highlights the availability of Visual Studio project templates for NancyFx available now as a VSIX from the Visual Studio Gallery, providing a much easier way to get up and running with a Nancy project.
• Using Nancy to Remotely Control a Desktop Application & An Example for Self-Hosting Nancy in an Application - Roland Weigelt discusses the how and why of his recent project working with NanxyFx to create an application which allows the controlling of a Desktop application
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: Enabling New Relic Performance Monitoring on Windows Azure Websites - Scott Hanselman takes a look at the free offering of New Relic for working with Windows Azure, looking at how it offers improved monitoring of your Windows Azure services
• Mmm, curry - Eric Lippert highlights the May-June edition of .NET Curry Magazine, a free publication (although registration is required)
• MSDN Magazine - Speaking of Magazines, The May edition of MSDN Magazine is now out with articles looking at authentication with Social Media Applications, JSON support in Windows Runtime Components, ‘One ASP.NET’ and much more

Community

• DDD East Anglia Sessions - Session Voting for DDD East Anglia, the first DDD event of the year, has now opened, with most of the month available for voting on a great range of sessions.
• NxtGenUG - Event: Windows Azure Websites - The Hereford NxtGenUG chapter welcome Richard Conway for a session looking at the use of Windows Azure Websites for hosting your applications on Monday 13th May.

Software

• Announcing the release of Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET - Scott Guthrie announces the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET . This release adds improved support for Azure Websites publishing management and diagnostics from within Visual Studio, support for the new larger Virtual Machine sizes, updated PowerShell integration and much more.
• New Features in the Latest ReSharper 8 EAP - The ReSharper Team over at JetBrains announce their latest Early Access Preview release of ReSharper 8, with its major new feature, a NuGet Gallery based extension Manager making it ever easier to obtain and install ReSharper extensions. This release also has a bunch of other new templating and navigating features.

Information

• A WebAPI Basic Authentication MessageHandler - Rick Strahl follows on from his previous post on WebAPI authentication with a look at implementing the same functionality as he did using a filter in the previous post, this time looking at implementing it ‘the correct’ way using a MessageHandler.
• Async Controller In MVC 4 - Prashant Khandelwal takes an introductory look at implementing ASP.NET MVC4 controllers using the AsyncControler to allow the use of tasks to improve the straight line speed of your actions.
• A View Engine for ASP.NET MVC Feature-Based Organized - Matt Honeycutt takes a look at the default ASP.NET MVC file layout conventions and shares a View Engine which operates to different conventions, showing how you can provide support for your on desired layout
• CDNs fail, but your scripts don’t have to - fallback from CDN to local jQuery - Scott Hanselman discusses the ultimate responsibility for the availability of web applications, and takes a look at how you can cater for situations where the Content Delivery Network may go down, exploring how you can ensure that your site continues to operate in such a situation.
• MSDN Magazine May Issue Preview - Michael Desmond gives a preview of the content coming in the May edition of MSDN Magazine which should be available online late today
• Node at Work: A Walkthrough - Garann Means takes a look at the use of Node.js as a rapid prototyping language to quickly building application prototypes / designs in this A List Apart article.

Community

• Windows AzureConf 2013 (Sessions Now On Demand) - Tareq Ateik highlights the availability of the session recordings from the Windows Azure Conf 2013 event

• Team Explorer Everywhere 2012 Update 2 - Brian Harry makes the more formal announcement of Team Explorer Everywhere Update 2, a minor improvements and bug fix release which addresses a number of issues.
• NuPattern Released! - Jezz Santos announces the first release as NuPattern of the project previously called VSPAT which provides a framework to create custom extensibility and tooling in Visual Studio
• Less Than Dot - Blog - Windows Azure Training Kit April 2013 Released - SQLDenis highlights the release of the April 2013 edition of the Windows Azure Training Kit, including newly refreshed infrastructure services related content and 4 new labs sessions.

Information

• Producing permutations, part five - Eirc Lippert continues his exploration of permutations, looking at the representation of numbers in textual and the actual meaning of this under the hood, exploring different bases and considering what happens if the base is different for different digits, relating it all back to permutations.
• Moving 4th & Mayor to Windows Azure Web Sites - Jeff Wilcox - Jeff Wilcox discusses and shares his experiences moving the backend of his 4th & Mayor FourSquare application onto Windows Azure, discussing the state of SSL support, deploying node.js code to the server and monitoring using the Azure portal.
• rwldrn/idiomatic.js - idiomatic.js is a nice coding style guide for JavaScript which aims to lead you towards good practices to ensure consistent JavaScript code
• Entity Framework Code First Inheritance & Entity Framework Code First Relations - Ricard Peres gives a useful reference to the way Entity Framework Code First can model inheritance structures and relationships between types
• Windows Azure joins Microsoft’s billion-dollar business club - Mary Jo Foley highlights the news that Windows Azure has entered the 1 billion club at Microsoft - congratulations to all involved in making Azure a success thus far.

Community

• dotnetConf - The .NET Community Virtual Conference - All the sessions from DotNetConf last week are available online, your chance to get 2 whole days of conference material on a range of subjects but all .NET related.
• Seriously Open, Definitely Required - Nik Molnar highlights a the Seriously Open podcast from Nick Berardi, and Justin Rusbatch , now onto its second episode looking at all things opens source in the ,NET ecosystem,

Update: Fixed the link to John Papa’s DotNetConf post - thanks to David for letting me know via the comments

Software

• Windows Azure: Improvements to Virtual Networks, Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and a new Ruby SDK - Scott Guthrie announces the latest batch of improvements to the Windows Azure Platform, including point to point virtual networks, PowerShell management of Virtual Machines, Remote Desktop enabling on Web/Worker Roles, and anew SDK for developers working in Ruby
• The Windows Azure SDK for Ruby - Larry Franks takes a look at the Azure SDK for Ruby, discussing obtaining the library and linking out to the various components of the documentation for working with Azure in Ruby.
• Visual Studio Tools for Git Update available - Brian Harry announces a new update to the Visual Studio Git Integration which builds on that shipped in Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, offering improved performance, better support for larger repositories, support for non-conflicting local changes when pulling and merging, along with a bunch of other improvements.
• Umbraco - Security vulnerability found - immediate action recommended - The Niels Hartvigof the Umbraco Team reveal some details and a work around for a security hole found in many versions of Umbraco. If you make use of this CMS check out this post to see if you are affected.

Information

• ASP.NET Web API and greedy query string parameter binding - Filip W follows on from his previous post by answering a question about binding to route values but not query string components, looking at how Web API provides the flexibility to do this.
• Using Remote Powershell with Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Sandrino Di Mattia takes a look at using the Remote Powershell support just introduced for Windows Azure Virtual Machines, showing how to enable it and giving a taste of it in use.
• On Types - Ted Neward shares some thoughts on types, and their use in Object Oriented programming, discussing a number of modelling scenarios, and some recommendations about exposing primitives.
• Free Video: SPA Primer with Durandal, Knockout and Breeze - John Papa highlights the video of his session on Single Page Applications presented at DotNetConf last week. All the session videos are on line and are well worth checking out
• Support for Native Projects - The NuGet team highlight the new support for Native (C++) projects included in NuGet 2.5

Community

• Happy Anniversary Microsoft Open Technologies Inc - ‘TheRockyH’ highlights the 1 year anniversary of Microsoft Open Technologies Inc, who have worked on over 50 projects so far.

• Enterprise Library 6.0 & Just released - Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 - Somasegar and Grigori Melnik announce the release of Enterprise Library Version 6. This new release had a number of targets, to simplify across the board, improve Windows 8 Store Application support, introduce semantic logging and ma few others. The release includes a brand new Semantic Logging application block as well as update to 7 of the existing application blocks
• Gibraltar Software’s Loupe 3.5 Release is Here! & Our Best Log Viewer is now Free - Jay Cincotta & Kendall Miller announce the release of Loupe 3.5, the result of 18 months of development brings about a new Desktop and Server edition giving insight into what is going on in your application. The even better news is that the Desktop Edition is completely free foever (as in beer), so you can get started with and gain the benefits of Loupe at no cost.
• Json.NET 5.0 Release 4 - Performance - James Newton-King announces an update release of Json.NET 5.0 which brings with it some serious performance improvements (in the range of 30% better than Json.NET 4.5) in serialisation and deserialisation.
• NuGet 2.5 Released - Jeff Handley announces the formal release of NuGet 2.5, a real team effort with over 10 contributors to the release, and a wealth of new features for both package authors and consumers to take advantage of.

Information

• Producing permutations, part four - Eric Lippert returns for another Fabulous Adventures in the world of permutations, exploring the numbering of permutations, and applying the big integer type to deal with some of the very large numbers encountered in these situations.
• Penny Pinching in the Cloud: How to run a two day Virtual Conference for $10 - Scott Hanselman discusses the technology platform used for the dotnetConf Virtual Conference, taking place yesterday and today, showing how an incredible experience can be achieved with very little cost. Sessions continue today (evening in the UK) and are well worth checking out - I enjoyed what little I could watch yesterday (internet connection issues at my end sadly limited that)
• Enabling Professional-Quality Online Video: New Specifications for Interoperable Captioning - The Internet Explorer team discuss some of the improvements coming for captioning of videos as a result of their work with the W3C Timed Text Working Group and Timed Text Markup Language (TTML).
• TypeScript Support in SharpDevelop - Matt Ward highlights the early beta support for TypeScript in the SharpDevelop alternative IDE by way of a new Addin, including Code completion, find reference, go to definition and rename refactorings.
• TwitterBootstrapMvc - Dmitry A. Efimenko shares a loot at TwtiterBootstrapMVC, a project which brings Bootstrap awareness to ASP.NET MVC giving a number of HTML helper methods which generate Bootstrap specific markup.

Community

• DDD East Anglia - Session submissions for DDD East Anglia close this weekend, so if you would like to give a talk, get your submission in soon, session voting opens on Wednesday.
• Pablo’s Fiesta is Back!! - John Teague highlights the plans for a Pablo’s Fiesta open spaces event to run on the 25&26 (and social activities on 27th) October in Austin TX.

• Project-less scripted C# with ScriptCS and Roslyn - Scott Hanselman takes a look at ScriptCS, an application of Roslyn’s compiler as a service capabilities, along with C# and NuGet to give a Scripting engine which runs C#, and looks at some of the exciting uses like hosting WebAPI and NancyFx applications which this can be put to.
• Infer.NET: Machine Learning Tailor-Made - The Microsoft Research news blog highlights Infer.NET a new .NET Machine Learning library being created by the clever folks at Microsoft Research Cambridge
• Tasks are not Threads - ‘BenWilli’ discusses one of the common misconceptions about tasks - that they are not actually analogous to threads in classical multithreaded programming.
• Using Visual Studio’s JavaScript Memory Analysis tool to find memory leaks on your Windows 8 JavaScript app - David Catuhe takes a look at using the Visual Studio tooling to profile your JavaScript based applications on Window 8 to identify any memory leaking which is occuring
• How to profile a JavaScript Windows Store App for performance problems - Haseeb Ah is also discussing the Visual Studio profiling tools for JavaScript Windows Store Applications, this time focusing on computational performance, looking at profiling a CPU intensive graphic visualisation.
• Foq It Easy - Phil Trelford gives an overview of his Foq mocking library for .NET which has first class support for F#, showing how a small sample project has grown into a full framework over its various releases, and is now something he considers to be stable at version 0.9.
• #829 - Add Comments to Indicate Shallow vs. Deep Copying - Sean Sexton discusses how there are two different types of clone of an object, shallow cloning and deep cloning, and how the use of comments on methods implementing clones are a good idea to help people working on your code understand what is really happening.

Community

• Scottish Developers welcome Microsoft’s Mike Taulty and Andy Wigley 1st June Windows 8, Windows Phone and Azure Event - The Scottish Developers Group welcome Mike Taulty and Andy Wigley for a all day Saturday event on Saturday 1st June which will look at Windows 8, Windows phone 8 and Azure development.

• Introducing: Code Digger, an extension for VS2012 - Nikolai Tillmann announces the release of Code Digger, a Visual Studio 2012 extension from the Pex Team (Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux). The extension looks at your code, and generates a table of inputs and outputs from that code allowing you to understand what your code will do in different situations,
• Windows Azure Storage Extensions - Dmitry Tretyakov updates his Windows Azure Storage Extensions library which aims to plug some gaps and add in some functionality to to the SDK

Information

• Immutable Data and Memoization in C#, Part 2 - Jérôme Laban continues his series looking at the use of Functional Programming techniques in C#. This part takes a look at Memoization, looking at some of the supporting classes in the Framework, and exploring the technique and how you can help alleviate the memory impact of the technique.
• Are you coding for change or stability - the followup post - Marcus Hammarberg follows on from his previous discussion post on two models for programming, programming for change, and programming for stability, discussing and shareing some of the discussions which kicked off around the original post
• Remove Unwanted HTTP Response Headers - ‘mathurvarun’ takes a look at how you can convince IIS to not output some of the informational HTTP Header provide information about Server OS and Version, and the ASP.NEt version.
• Things you still cant do with ASP.NET modules on IIS - Mike Volodarsky discusses a little history about how you used to use ISAPI to extend IIS, but with the release of IIS7 you were able to create managed extensions to IIS, before looking at some of the limitations of the managed extensions.
• Annotating PDF Documents in a Windows 8 Store App - Mike Taulty takes a look at some of the PDF SDK libraries out there for working with PDF documents, digging into Foxit’s SDK and ComponentOne’s product in detail, with mention of a few others too.
• Building Windows Azure Cloud Services App with Web Role, Worker Role, Table Storage and Service Bus - Shiju Varghese walks through the process of setting up a Multi-Tier application running on the Windows Azure platform, and utilising a good range of the features of the Azure platform.