Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew

Top Links

• Visual Studio Achievements – Remember Kids They’re Just For Fun (Bil Simser)
• Announcing Visual Studio Achievements Beta (Karsten Januszewski)
• Learning leadership from Congress (Seth Godin)
• Introducing ReSharper 6.1 SDK (Dmitri Nesteruk)

 

.NET / Visual Studio

• Don’t brag about your Visual Studio achievements! (yet?) (Maarten Balliauw)
• Ask Ayende: Life without repositories, are they worth living? (Oren Eini)
• [Special Edition] Achievement Unlocked! – Visual Studio Achievement Beta Released (Dan Fernandez & Greg Duncan)
• Visual Studio Achievements Widget (Geoffrey K.)
• TFS11 Scrum board update remaining work without opening the work item… (Clemens Reijnen)
• Visual Studio Achievements Program Brings Gamification to Development (Jeffrey Meisner)
• Visual Studio Achievements FAQ (Karsten Januszewski)
• An introduction to NDepend (Nathan Gloyn)
• Don’t try to allocate memory until there is only x% free (Raymond Chen)
• Querying an Uninitialized Collection with NHibernate (Ricardo Peres)
• P/Invoke Stack Imbalance MDA (Sasha Goldshtein)
• async / await, some reasoning (Bnaya Eshet)
• "Beginner’s Guide to Kinect Programming," from download to demo (Greg Duncan)
• Per Project Settings or How to have different naming styles for my test project (Hadi Hariri)
• Restful WCF / EF POCO / UnitOfWork / Repository / MEF article (Sacha Barber)

 

Web Development

• jQuery Bootstrap 0.2 Brings ‘Beauty’ to Widgets (Christopher Smith)
• An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout" HTML and CSS techniques (Scott Hanselman)
• 160 Music APIs (Wendell Santos)
• Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 3 – Paths and Text (G. Andrew Duthie)
• Add Google Plus One Extension to BlogEngine.NET (Joseph Guadagno)
• Under the Covers: Let It Snow… (Bogdan Brinza)
• HTTP is not a transport protocol, HTTP is not RPC (Glenn Block)
• Format efficiency take 2: really clean JSON (Pablo Castro)
• Windows Azure application VM and (virtual) IP Address (Avkash Chauhan)
• Best Practices For HTTP API Evolvability (Dilip Krishnan)
• Easing Functions in CSS3 (Kirupa Chinnathambi)

 

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Unit Test or Integration Test and Why You Should Care (Steve Smith)
• The next big thing is extremely small (Jimmy Nilsson)

 

Silverlight / WPF / Windows Phone

• How to get the Tapped Item in a MultiselectList control (Windows Phone Geek)
• Silverlight Toolkit ToggleSwitch Databinding Bug (Andy Wigley)
• wp7 skydrive upload (babaandthepigman)
• WP7 PhoneGap Backbutton Support Re-visited (Colin Eberhardt)
• How to simplify coding DependencyProperty in WPF and Silverlight (DawningTiger)
• How to Use the ConnectionSettings Task for Windows Phone and Code to Share Status or Links on Social Media sites in Windows Phone (Dhananjay Kumar)
• Comfortably numb… MVVM’ing Enums in ComboBox (Greg Duncan)
• 2000 WPF Things #476 – Set ZIndex Values for Child Elements of Canvas (Sean Sexton)
• New Ebook by SilverlightShow and Andrea Boschin: Windows Phone 7.5 Fundamentals (SilverlightShow)

 

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• Web Dev Radio Episode 95: Jeff Carouth at ZendCon 2011 (Michael Kimsal)
• The GeekDads Episode #107: And Anyone Who Says Otherwise Is Evil and Bad and Wrong (Ken Denmead)
• Defrag: Gov’s Nest, Bitlocker Q’s, Win7 Defrag, (Larry Larsen)
• Hot Apps: Bug Village, Hasta La Muerte, PixelTV, Make Way, WeatherDuck (Laura Foy)
• The Verge Mobile Podcast 010 – 01.18.2011 (Trent Wolbe)
• Visual Studio Toolbox: Visual Studio Achievements (Robert Green)
• New Videos Uploaded (Jesse Liberty)
• Phoenix Architect Day Panel Discussion – Part 3 (Bob Rhubart)
• .NET Rocks! – Chris Sells Unplugged! (Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell)

 

Community / Events

• Microsoft-ComponentOne Hands-On-Workshops for Windows Phone Series – January 24th and 26th 2012 (MS Public Sector Team)
• Top 10 Reasons Why I Like Dating A Programmer (Lori Lalonde)
• I have been awarded as Telerik MVP (Dhananjay Kumar)

 

Database

• Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 (MS Downloads)
• SQL SERVER – Importance of Resource Database – Quiz – Puzzle – 18 of 31 (Pinal Dave)
• SQL Performance Tuning – optimizing for response time (Jack Vamvas)

 

Miscellaneous

• Translating Military Experience to Real World Jobs (Joe Wallis)
• Defeating SOPA and PIPA Isn’t Enough (Jeff Atwood)
• New: Presentation Zen (2nd Edition) (Garr Reynolds)
• Learning RegEx – Grouping and Backlinks and Lots-O-emote’s in WPCentral’s complete WP7 emoticons list (Greg Duncan)
• Whoa, that’s a superstar team at IEB (Xbox), what the heck are they building? (Kip Kniskern)
• Microsoft confirms Dave Cutler, father of Windows NT, now working on Xbox (Mary Jo Foley)
• Google Thinks OPEN Is a Rational Alternative to SOPA (Todd Wasserman)

 

More Link Collections

• Cheatsheet: 2012 01.10 ~ 01.19 (yuanjian)
• Daily News Digest 1/18/2012 and Daily News Digest 1/19/2012 (Silverlight Show)
• The Morning Brew #1025 (Chris Alcock)
• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-01-18 (Bob Rhubart)
• Windows Dev News for January 18, 2012 – #00029 (Dave Campbell)
• Daily WP7 Development News 18 Jan 2012 (Windows Phone Geek)

 

The Geek Shelf

Programming Entity Framework: Code First: Code First by Julia Lerman

 

Top Links

• Caliburn Micro Part 1: Getting Started (Jason Fauchelle)
• EF 4.3 Beta 1 Released (EF Team)
• Scoping CQRS/ES Guidance Project (Grigori Melnik)
• JavaScript Pattern Collection (Shi Chuan)
• 101 Async Samples (Joe Mayo)

 

.NET / Visual Studio

• Northwind Starter Kit Review: Data Access review thoughts (Oren Eini)
• SSDT CTP4 and Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview (Adam Mahood)
• How to work with Custom Method in WCF Data Service? and Flyout control in Windows 8 HTML JavaScript Metro Application and Code analysis using Telerik JustCode (Dhananjay Kumar)
• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: Stopwatch Ticks are not TimeSpan Ticks (James Michael Hare)
• My Artilcle on the UITableView with MonoTouch and the iPhone/iOS is now online (Wally McClure)
• Garbage Collection in The Age of Smart Pointers (Sasha Goldshtein)
• Inside the Concurrent Collections: ConcurrentStack (Simon Cooper)
• 2012 Roadmap Revealed: 6 Major Releases (TeamPulse Team)
• Why does CreateEvent fail with ERROR_PATH_NOT_FOUND if I give it a name with a backslash? (Raymond Chen)
• DebuggerDisplay Attribute (Joseph Guadagno)
• Search in JustDecompile (JustDecompile Team)
• Reading and Writing text files in Windows 8 Metro (Morten Nielsen)
• Speaking of Speech Recognition… Check out Julius, the OSS high-performance, two-pass large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) decoder (Greg Duncan)
• EF 4.3 Configuration File Settings and EF 4.3 Beta 1: Automatic Migrations Walkthrough and EF 4.3 Beta 1: Code-Based Migrations Walkthrough (Rowan Miller)
• Developing Apps for Windows 8 (Christopher Smith)
• ReSharper and code generation (Jeremy Alles)
• Unable to cast transparent proxy to type <type> (Rick Strahl)

 

Web Development

• HTML5 Reference Poster and Bipin shows us that creating a tag cloud doesn’t have to be hard to do (in ASP.Net) (Greg Duncan)
• An approach to mobile support in ASP.NET MVC (Jef Claes)
• Automatically numbering headings via CSS (Axel Rauschmayer)
• Understanding the Rails Asset Pipeline (Rob Conery)
• My top 3 improvements in Windows Azure from the December update (Eric Nelson)
• New API Lets You Show Three Alternative Routes on Bing Maps (Bruce Kyle)
• Access Amazon’s EC2 (and more) from within NodeJS (Dave Mahon)

 

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Introducing the Android Design site (Tim Bray)
• New book: Software Change Management: Case Studies and Practical Advice (Valerie Woolley)
• 5 Things Every Mobile Design Should Have (Patrick Cox)
• small-scale software craftsmanship (Ariya Hidayat)
• Inclusive Design (Faruk Ateş)
• Article: Design for Testability – The True Story (Gil Zilberfeld)

 

Silverlight / WPF / Windows Phone

• UriMapper in Windows Phone (Nick Randolph)
• Working with animation in Expression Blend (Alex Mukora)
• Creating Cascading Drop Down Lists in Visual Studio LightSwitch (Beth Massi)
• A Windows Phone-CES Post Mortem (Andrew Brust)
• “Operation Not Permitted” On IsolatedStorageSettings in Windows Phone (Matthias Shapiro)
• 2000 WPF Things #472 – UniformGrid Defaults to Being Square (Sean Sexton)
• Capturing the transport data between Visual Studio and Windows Phone (Dennis Delimarsky)
• New RSS Starter Kit (Chris Koenig)

 

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• The Verge Mobile Podcast 009: CES 2012 – 01.12.2012 and The Vergecast 011: CES 2012 Day 2 – 01.12.2012 (Trent Wolbe)
• VIDEO: Windows Phone wins 88% of #smokedbywindowsphone challenges at CES 2012! (Ben Rudolph)
• Let’s Play TDD #158: writeFile() and readFile() (James Shore)
• Surface 2.0 at CES (Steve Clayton)
• RadioTFS – First Show of 2012 (Martin Woodward)
• Gweek 035: Interview with Robert Anton Wilson’s daughter (Mark Frauenfelder)
• MVP First Timers Webcast On Demand (Denny Cherry)
• Basic Ad Controls for Windows Phone Apps with David Kelley (Silverlight Show)

 

Community / Events

• Boston Area Geek Dinner: Thursday January 19, 2012 (Jason Haley)
• New Cities and New Courses (Shawn Wildermuth)
• F# courses and talks (Winter 2012 and beyond…) (Tomas Petricek)
• A New Coding Project Every Week at Code52 (Paul Betts)
• Charles Petzold on His 25 Years with MSDN Magazine (Michael Desmond)
• MVP Award Program at CES 2012 (Kari Finn)
• Nokia Lumia 900 collects the hardware at CES with numerous awards (PhoneArena Team)
• .NET Performance Diagnostics: How and Where to Start -User Group Meeting January 18th Eagan, MN (Charles Sterling)
• Next Week: Central Ohio Windows Phone User Group January Meetup (Silverlight Show)

 

Database

• Anatomy of the SQL Server Database: Settings and Secrets Video (Brent Ozar)
• SQL SERVER – DACPAC and SQL Azure – Quiz – Puzzle – 12 of 31 (Pinal Dave)
• Missing Indexes (Jason Brimhall)
• Have you tried the “Data Explorer” samples yet? (Data Explorer Team)

 

Miscellaneous

• How to Take Screen Shots From An Android Phone or Tablet (Chris Love)
• Learning Android: Roboguice – Injecting context into PreferenceManager (Mark Needham)
• Microsoft’s Ballmer: If I had it to do all over again… (Mary Jo Foley)
• Why Doesn’t Windows 8 Just Look Like THIS? (Paul Thurrott)
• Kindle Plugin for Adobe InDesign for Windows 0.96 Beta released (Ron)

 

More Link Collections

• Interesting Finds: January 13, 2012 (Jason Haley)
• The Morning Brew #1021 (Chris Alcock)
• Windows Dev News for January 12, 2011 – #0026 (Dave Campbell)
• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-01-12 and ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 2012-01-13 (Bob Rhubart)
• Double Shot #795 (Mike Gunderloy)
• Daily WP7 Development News 12 Jan 2012 (Windows Phone Geek)
• Daily News Digest 1/13/2012 (Silverlight Show)
• Web Dev Tweets 12-Jan-2012 (Elijah Manor)

 

The Geek Shelf

Professional iPhone Programming with MonoTouch and .NET/C# (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) by Wallace B. McClure

 

Top Links

• Learn Windows Azure Next Tuesday (Dec 13th) (Scott Guthrie)
• Hello GitHub! (Phil Haack)
• A Windows Phone 7 Slide View with Page Pips (Colin Eberhardt)
• MVVM Light template and WCF services (or any ASP.NET application for that matter) (Laurent Bugnion)
• NuGet: little known features (Peter Kuhn)

 

.NET / Visual Studio

• Preview Tab in Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview (Abhijit Jana)
• MSSQL & NHibernate – mapping week numbers to properties (Gunnar Peipman)
• Use Projections and a Repository to Fake a Filtered Eager Load (Julie Lerman)
• Python Tools for Visual Studio 1.1 Beta 1 (CodePlex)
• Gibraltar 3.0 Beta 2 Available – More scalable, lighter weight agents, and real time data. (Kendall)
• Download .NET Reflector 7.5 EA Build 3 (RedGate)
• LINQ to Reports… As in transform your LINQ queries into reports, with extensible formats like Excel, PDF, CSV, HTML (Greg Duncan)
• A Key Code Checker for DOM Keyboard Events (Rick Strahl)
• Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games Version 1.2.0 (beta) Released (Nathan Totten)
• What is Package.appxmanifest File in Windows 8 Metro Style Application? (Kunal Chowdhury)
• Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Group Chat SDK (Steve Jones)
• Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 Beta 2 (MS Downloads)
• Using a bar code scanner in .NET (Chad Z. Hower)
• Setting up your first use of the Animation library in WinJS (Adam Kinney)
• The Road To LINQ-dom Part 2–Delegates (Kyle Burns)

 

Web Development

• The CSS profilers are coming! (Lennart Schoors)
• HTML Forms in HTML Emails (Chris Coyier)
• Practical PHP Refactoring: Hide Method (Giorgio Sironi)
• IIS Tuner 1.1 and ProDinner ASP.net WebForms Awesome Sample Application (CodePlex)
• Set the AsyncTimeout attribute for your async controllers (Simone Chiaretta)
• Updated Live Connect API announced (Kip Kniskern)
• Moving to Standards-based Web Graphics in IE10 (Ted Johnson)
• MPNS module for Node: A simple push notification helper for the cloud (Jeff Wilcox)
• Running PHPUnit in Windows Azure (Brian Swan)

 

Design / Methodology / Testing

• Unit Testing with CRM 2011 (Mark Schweigert)
• Good UX in the Wild: Dropbox’s attention to detail on their download page (Scott Hanselman)
• Design It to Build It: What to Consider When Designing for the Web (Patrick Cox)
• It’s okay for your UI to know some business process (Kyle Szklenski)
• 31 Days of Testing—Day 7: Automated Test Basics (Jim Holmes)
• A Manifesto For Sofware Team Leaders – Take 1 (Roy Osherove)

 

Silverlight / WPF / Windows Phone

• Building WPF Applications with Self-Tracking Entity Generator – Project Setup (Weidong Shen)
• Building an Augmented Reality XAML control (Morten Nielsen)
• Syncing Windows Phone database with backend SQL Server (Andy Wigley)
• Have an idea for a Windows Phone Starter Kit? and Windows Phone Starter Kit for Schools v2.0 Released! (Chris Koenig)
• Debugging the Update Process for Windows Phone Apps (Doug Holland)
• Case Study: TailSpin Windows Phone Survey Application and Tombstoning in Windows Phone 7.5 (Francis K. Cheung)
• WPF Elements 5 Released! (John-Daniel Trask)
• 2000 WPF Things #446 – Default Docking for DockPanel Children (Sean Sexton)
• Calling WCF REST Service with Basic authentication from Windows Phone 7 (Dhananjay Kumar)
• How to add and remove Secondary Tiles in Windows Phone apps (Windows Phone Geek)

 

Podcasts / Screencasts / Videos

• .NET Rocks! – Development Practices at Oredev (Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell)
• The Verge Mobile Podcast 005 – 12.07.2011 (Trent Wolbe)
• Announcing the Learn Windows Azure Live Event! (Wade Wegner)
• Project Compatibility in Visual Studio 11 (Robert Green)
• Let’s Play TDD #148: Asynchronous Assertions (James Shore)
• Hot Apps: Farm Frenzy 2, Pocket Party Game, Archie, Race & Battle, Double Jumper (Laura Foy)
• A little responsive video demo (Leigh Howells)
• SOA Made Simple – Part 3 of 3 (Bob Rhubart)

 

Community / Events

• Win Free Copies of Nhibernate 3 Beginner’s Guide (Oren Eini)
• Phil Haack is a GitHubber (Tim Clem)
• 5 Minutes on The Verge: Paul Thurrott (Thomas Houston)
• Nokia and T-Mobile USA making announcement on December 14th (Chris Ziegler)
• thatConference Announced! (Dave Bost)

 

Database

• SQL Server Storage: Files and Filegroups Video (Brent Ozar)
• SQL SERVER – Error: Deleting Offline Database and Creating the Same Name (Pinal Dave)
• SQL Advent 2011 Day 7: Crosstab with PIVOT and  SQL Advent 2011 Day 8: UNPIVOT (Denis Gobo)
• Dynamic Connections in SSIS – Extract, Transform and Load and SQL Server Integration Services tools to have – Expression Editor & Tester (Ted Krueger)
• Data Explorer Feedback part 1 (Jamie Thomson)
• Community created Forward Engineer Database Diagrams Addin for Visio 2010 (Think "Diagram to T-SQL," like in past versions, but with source) (Greg Duncan)
• The Day-to-Day Tasks of the Average DBA (Brad M McGehee)

 

SharePoint

• Renaming SharePoint Service Apps Databases (Brian Farnhill)

 

Miscellaneous

• Power Tools for Windows (Steve Jones)
• Ruby On REST: Introducing the Representer Pattern (Nick Sutterer)
• Get your app in the Store on opening day (Antoine Leblond)
• I’ve got my XBox Live Avatar, right here…. on my T-Shirt! and Getting Started with Scratch – A Programmer’s Guide (Greg Duncan)
• Introducing the official Xbox LIVE iOS App (Larry Hryb)
• Just how important is Desktop App support for Windows 8 ARM tablets? (Mary Jo Foley)
• Pinworthy: 7 apps for entertaining kids during the holidays (Michael Stroh)
• Windows 8 –Trust me, we got this covered this time I promise… (Scott Barnes)
• Xbox Companion App Available Now (Control Your Xbox From Your Windows Phone) (Antonio Hernandez)
• O’ Reilly Deals on Cookbooks to Jan 19th (Tatworth)
• Welcome to the New Xbox 360 Dashboard (XNA Team)
• Rumor: Amazon Retail Stores Coming & Predatory Pricing Channel Destruction (Jason Calacanis)

 

More Link Collections

• Double Shot #769 (Mike Gunderloy)
• The Morning Brew #998 (Chris Alcock)
• ArchBeat Link-o-Rama for 12/07/2011 (Bob Rhubart)
• SilverlightShow Top 5 for November 28 – December 4, 2011 (Dave Campbell)
• Daily WP7 Development News 7 Dec 2011 (Windows Phone Geek)
• Daily News Digest 12/8/2011 (Silverlight Show)
• Interesting Finds: December 7, 2011 (Jason Haley)

 

The Geek Shelf

Android for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach (Deitel Developer Series) by Paul J. Deitel