CoderTakeout - ASP.NET

Software

• NCrunch 1.37b Released! - Remco Mulder announces the release of NCrunch 1.37b, containing a raft of fixes for reported issues, along with some interesting new features regarding debugging, performance metrics, code coverage, keyboard shortcuts and much more.
• Fluqi - Ease using jQuery UI with ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC - Fluqi is an interesting library which straddles the server and client, providing APIs for applying jQuery UI widgets to your application in a fluent manner. The library is open source, and hosted over on GitHub
• NuGet Project Uncovered: Burro - Jason Jarrett is continuing his series of posts looking at some of the hidden gems of the NuGet packages feed. Today’s post looks at Burro, a project to parse build output. Be sure to check back through Jason’s posts for the rest of his hidden gems.
• Rename Visual Studio Window Title extension for Visual Studio 2010 - The ‘Visual Studio add-ins, extensions and tools’ blog highlights a useful looking Visual Studio Extension for anyone who, like me, often has more than one copy of a project open in different Visual Studio Instances - this extension adds more path information to the window title allowing you to beterr distinguish between IDE instances.

Information

• [Special Edition] It’s Kinect day! The Kinect For Windows SDK v1 is out - Dan Fernandez and Greg Duncan highlight the release Kinect For Windows and the 1.0 release of the SDK, before Dan goes on to walk through Installing and Using the Kinect Sensor and discusses Setting up your Development Environment, both in video
• Kinect for Windows now available! Information and resources for you. - Eric Ligman shares a nice collection of links relating to resources about the Kinect for Windows product and SDK.
• Await, SynchronizationContext, and Console Apps: Part 3 - Stepjhen Toub continues his series looking at SynchronizationContext and its use with async methods, in this part looking at using it to run async methods which return void rather than Task
• Coding in Marble - Rico Mariani looks at the coding style of code which uses Promises, exploring different ways of representing such code to make it more elegant.
• Rx - DistinctUntilChanged - Bnaya Eshet continues his series of posts looking at the various methods of the Reactive Extensions. This post explores the DistinctUntilChanged operator
• WP7: CLR Managed Object overhead - Abhinaba Basu discusses the memory overhead of objects on the Windows Phone platform looking at the structure of objects in memory and looking at how different types of object are stored.
• New Tools in My TDD Arsenal - Alexander Beletsky highlights some of the recent additions to his tools used for Test Driven Development, highlighting NCrunch, NSubstitute and FluentAssertions.
• CSS3 3D Transforms in IE10 - Jennifer Yu of the Internet Explorer team discusses 3d Transformations in CSS3, discussing how the effects are implemented in IE10, and highlighting some demos.
• JavaScript File & Folder Structures: Just Pick One - Derick Bailey takes a look at the various different approaches to managing the files that make up your JavaScript, discussin a few and showing how he structures his client side MV* code.
• Node.js, Require and Exports - Karl Seguin is also discussing the organisation of JavaScript, in this case how you structure code in Node.js, and its module per file approach, looking at the use of Require and Exports.
• Slides, Notes and Recordings for Week 1 and 2 of #6weeksazure are all now available - Eric Nelson highlights the availability of recordings, slides and notes for the first two weeks of 6 weeks of Azure, a series of virual events for UK ISVs to gett them up and running on the Windows Azure Platform.

Apologies for the rather short edition this morning, having some internet connectivity issue, combined with a required early start has resulted in a short one today.

Software

• Kinect for Windows is now Available! - The Kinect for Windows team announce the release of Kinect for Windows, along with the version 1.0 of the Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime. These new devices have close focusing capabilities and will work with Windows 7 and 8, with the SDK providing for raw sensor streams, skeletal tracking, speech and audio and also offering an improved API.
• Why Serenade.js? - Jonas Nicklas introduces Serenade,js, a new client side MVC implementation in JavaScript. In the post Jonas discusses why he created the library, and looks at some of its key features
• Say hello to Bootstrap 2.0 - Mark Otto introduces the next major release of BootStrap, the Twitter front end toolkit for developing websites. V2 responds to the feedback on the previous version, updates documentation completely, introduces a 12 column grid system, adds new JavaScript plugins, and much more.
• jQuery 1.7.2 Beta 1 Released - The jQuery team announce the first beta release of jQuery 1.7.2, which addresses bugs reported in previous versions. This latest beta is available via the jQuery CDN.

Information

• The Web is the new Terminal: Are you using the Web’s Keyboard Shortcuts and Hotkeys? - Scott Hanselman discusses the use of keyboard shortcuts in web based applications, showing how you can add hotkeys to your web application, and looking at how a number of well known sites have implemented their hotkeys.
• Get Started with Node.js + Windows Azure: Resources - Peter Laudati shares a nice collection of resources about all aspects of working with Node.js on the Windows Azure platform, covering getting up and running with Node,js on Azure, the sue of online IDEs, MongoDB, IISNode, and a number of more general Node.js resources.
• MSDN Magazine - February 2012 - The February edition of MSDN Magazine is now available online, featuring articles on Async Programming in C++ using PPL, Building consumer device applications using Windows Azure, ASP.NET MVC Model Binding, HTML5, Windows Workflow 4.5, Nuget, Knockout.js, and much more
• February’s PragPub magazine - The Pragmatic Programmers have released their February edition of PragPub magazine, with articles this month looking at tips for agile leaders and freelancers, Scala, and all the usual editorial content
• Prompts and Directories - Even Better Git (and Mercurial) with PowerShell - Scott Hanselman also looks at how you can improve your use of command line version control systems using Powershell, and some community extensions.

(SUMMARY) The built-in Web Pages routing system offers a fair degree of freedom in terms of how friendly URLs can be constructed and managed. However, the major limitation with the standard routing mechanism is that it relies on matching segments of the URL to...

(SUMMARY) You know when you see code like this: class CompulsionsController ApplicationController # ... standard actions above here def update if params :obsessions . include ? ObsessionsTypes :murdering_small_animals handle_sociopathic_obsessions redirect_to...

(SUMMARY) I've been working a bit with C# custom dynamic types for several customers recently and I've seen some confusion in understanding how dynamic types are referenced. This discussion specifically centers around types that implement IDynamicObject or...

Software

• Umbraco 5.0 RTM is on CodePlex, ready for download - The Umbraco team announce the RTM release of V5.0. This release is a major milestone for the project, taking the key features of 4.7 and re-writing on the ASP.NET MVC stack, allowing use of Razor, along with the core CMS functionality.
• Debugger Canvas 1.1 is Released! - Kael Rowan announces the 1.1 release of the Debugger Canvas extension for Visual Studio. The release addresses a number of bugs, improves performance and also includes some new features including the ability to turn the canvas on or off during debugging, view multithreaded code on canvas, navigate more easily through code and view recursive calls side by side.
• StyleCop 4.7.7.0 released - Tatworth highlights the release of StyleCop 4.7.7.0 which includes compatibility with the Visual Studio 11 preview release and ReSharper 5.1, 6.0, 6.1 and 6.1.1, along with addressing further bugs.

Information

• One ASP.NET Sneak Peek: Elegant Web Forms and Snowballs in Hell - Scott Hanselman highlights some of the cool improvements coming in the various aspects of the ASP.NET platform, focusing on some of the exciting things happening for WebForms.
• Modern Web Development - Part 3 - Shawn Wildermuth continues his series looking at modern web development, exploring CSS in this post. Shawn discusses how CSS can be awkward, and how CSS can be made better by using dynamic stylesheet languages like SASS and LESS to enhance the generation of CSS rules via nested styles, mixins and variables.
• How to force Nuget not to update log4net to 1.2.11 - Krzysztof Kozmic talks about the updated Log4Net release which uses a new signing key, and how this is causing issues with lots of projects which have used Log4Net in the past via NuGet and are now having problems, exploring how to tell NuGet to use a specific version of a package.
• Ngen or not? The rules haven’t changed very much since 2004 - Rico Mariani gives a very nice concise explanation of the situations where you will gain performance by using ngen to generate native images for your applications assemblies.
• Free ebook: Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (second DRAFT preview) - Microsoft Press share the second draft preview of a forthcoming title on SQL Server 2012 which includes 6 out of the 12 chapters that will be in the final book - a great resource to have, and free.
• Announcing the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book - Roger Doherty highlights the SQL Server 2012 Early Adoption Cook Book TechNet wiki whcih contains links to a variety of information on SQL Server 2012 from both teams at Microsoft and their partner organisations.
• Visual Studio 2010 UML Design Pattern Toolbox Items Extension - Giles Davies shares a Visual Studio extension which adds the Gang of Four design pattern to the UML Toolbox in Visual Studio, and then goes on to discuss how the extension was created.
• CodeBuild: 15 Best Practices for Exception Handling - Cagdas Basaraner shares 15 best practices for handling exceptions in code - the post has is a bit Java based but a lot of the principles apply more generally, some interesting discussion in the comments.
• Event Handler Memory Leaks, Unwiring Events, and the WeakEventManager in WPF 4.5 - Pete Brown discusses the use of events in your code, focusing specifically on their use in WPF applications, and how they can be a cause of memory leaks, before discussing one of the new features in WPF4.5 makes implementing a solution much easier.
• Installing Mono on Windows - Paul Stack discusses his desire to get TeamCitySharp working on Mono, and to that end takes a look at getting a Mono environment up and running on a Windows machine.

(SUMMARY) Dive deep into the heart of ASP.NET MVC’s model binding subsystem, examining each layer of the model binding framework and ways to meet your application’s needs. Jess Chadwick MSDN Magazine February 2012

Software

• Beta release of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) SDK for Windows Phone - Lee Stott highlights the release of the Amazon Web Services SDK for Windows Phone allowing you to consume the range of Amazon Services (S3, SimpleDB, SQS Cloud Services) from the comfort of a sensible Windows Phone compatible API. Lee highlights a good set of resources for getting up and running with the library including video content from Channel 9.

Information

• Anonymous Types Unify Within An Assembly, Part Two - Eric Lippert continues his discussion of anonymous types within assemblies, and the unification of types which contain the same definition.
• Currying vs partial function application - Jon Skeet discusses the differences between the functional programming concepts of currying and partial application, looking at doing both in C# when programming in a more functional programming style.
• Hazards of Converting Binary Data To A String - Phil Haack picks up on an interesting group of questions on StackOverflow discussing how you can represent binary data as a string, and looking at the implications of the encoding used as to what it does to the data being encoded, and how it can result in changes to the actual bytes being written.
• About Orchard Governance and Microsoft - Bertrand Le Roy discusses the recent change to the Orchard project, and how the project which was initiated by Microsoft has now been formally handed over to the community in a more complete way than many company created open source projects have been in the past.
• The new OpenEverything organization - While on the topic of Open Source project involvement, Sebastien Lambla discusses some of the organisation changes for the OpenEverything (OpenWrap, OpenRasta, OpenFileSystem,…) projects and how he is now focusing his involvement.
• From Concept to Code in 6 hours: Shipping my first Windows Phone App - Scott Hanselman walks through the creation of his very first Windows Phone 7 Application, from concept to application in 6 hours, sharing the key bits along the way.
• 31 Weeks of Windows Phone Metro Design - #5 Choosing between Panoramas, Pivots and/or Pages. - Arturo Toledo is into week 5 of his 31 post series looking at all aspects of Windows Phone Metro design. This post takes a look at the three key UI concepts beginning with ‘P’ - Panorama, Pivots and Pages, looking at their use and how they are similar to other more familiar design concepts.
• The Big Dummies Guide for Windows Phone Developer Resources - Bil Simser shares a great collection of Windows Phone development resources, ranging from articles, frameworks, design concepts, training, to marketing and monitzation of applications.
• Winning on the Marketplace: The differentiation game - Paul Laberge discusses how you can make your applications stand out in the Windows Phone Marketplace, including how some application feature will make users love your application all the more.
• Introducing Apache Hadoop Services for Windows Azure - Roger Jennings discusses the use of Apache Hadoop Services on Windows Azure, looking at and highlighting some posts on the concepts and product, before walkig through two tutorials, and highlighting plenty of further resources.
• Find the jQuery Bug #3: Give Me Truth - Elijah Manor is running a series of posts looking at common bugs found in jQuery consuming code, and discussing what the problem is, and how you can resolve the issue.
• Testing a jQuery Plugin with ExpectThat and Mocha - Dan Mohl continues discussion of his ExpectThat library for CoffeeScript / JavaScript assertions, looking in this post at the application of the library in testing a jQuery Plugin
• Using SpecFlow to drive Selenium WebDriver Tests - Eli Weinstock-Herman discusses the use of SpecFlow combined with the Selenium WebDriver to provide a way fo executing tests derived from human readable requirements, running through the process from scenario to working test

Community

• SQL Bits X - The Biggest SQL Event in Europe - Sara Allison highlights the SQL Bits X SQL Server event and the associated training days. SQL Bits is a great conference, with SQL experts from all over the world, and this event is particularly special as it also doubles as the UK launch event for SQL Server 2012. Spaces are limited (although it is a large limit) and registrations for both the ‘pay for’ conference / training days and the Free Community Day are currently open.
• NxtGenUG - Event - Straighten Spaghetti with C# 5 - Jon Skeet takes a trip to Microsoft Research in Cambridge on Thursday 16th February for the NxtGenUG where he will be delivering a session on how C#5 and the new async functionality can help straighten out complex spaghetti code. Be sure to register early for what is bound to be a very popular event.