MSDN Magazine June 2006

This article introduces 10 development tools that can increase your productivity, give you a better understanding of .NET, and maybe even change the way that you develop applications. The tools covered include NUnit to write unit tests, Reflector to examine assemblies, FxCop to police your code, Regulator to build regular expressions, NDoc to create code documentation and five more.

James Avery

MSDN Magazine July 2004

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June 2006

Inside MSBuild: Compile Apps Your Way With Custom Tasks For The Microsoft Build Engine

Learn how you can use MSBuild to customize your builds. Since it ships as a part of the .NET Framework, you don't even need to have Visual Studio installed on your machine. Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

WCF Essentials: Discover Mighty Instance Management Techniques For Developing WCF Apps

Instance management refers to a set of techniques used by Windows Communication Foundation to bind a set of messages to a service instance. This article introduces the concept and shows you why you need instance management. Juval Lowy

Configure This: Parameterize Your Apps Using XML Configuration In The .NET Framework 2.0

There are a number of ways to configure an application in the .NET Framework 2.0. This article explores the classes of the revamped System.Configuration namespace and explains how to use XML configuration files for your app configuration settings. Bryan Porter

Class To Contract: Enrich Your XML Serialization With Schema Providers In The .NET Framework

The Microsoft .NET Framework 1.x provided minimal options for mapping classes to schemas and serializing objects to XML documents, making this sort of mapping quite a challenge. The .NET Framework 2.0 changes all this with Schema providers and the IXmlSerializable interface. Keith Pijanowski

Share The Load: Report Visual Studio Team System Load Test Results Via A Configurable Web Site

This article discusses a new load test tool in Visual Studio 2005 Team System for performance and stress testing your Web sites, Web services, and other server components. Combined with its handy reporting capabilities, the load test tool provides some powerful options for sharing and managing test results. Wen Ding

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Columns

Editor's Note: New and Improved Team We've all been subconsciously conditioned through the years to turn a skeptical eye towards claims of being "new and improved. " After all, the phrase often means that some favorite feature has been turned into a new deficiency.	Toolbox: Generate Office Documents, Monitor Event Logs, and More Most data-driven Web sites are used as interfaces to collect, process, and summarize information. Reports that summarize the data can be presented to the user in a variety of formats—the most common way is to display the report directly in a Web page. Scott Mitchell	Advanced Basics: Setting Word Document Properties the Office 2007 Way The last time I wrote this column (March 2006), I shared an application that allows you to update all the Microsoft® Word documents in a folder and its subfolders. Each time the application finds a document in the specified path, it updates the document properties to match those you specified in the application. Ken Getz
CLR Inside Out: Windows Vista Globalization Features Windows XP and the Microsoft .NET Framework both have APIs that support globalization. Windows Vista™ will further extend globalization support by introducing several new features. Shawn Steele	Data Points: Designing Reports with SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 Many applications require some degree of integration with a reporting tool. A good solution, SQL Server™ Reporting Services 2005, provides Web-based reports and can be integrated into both Windows® Forms and Web-based applications. John Papa	Test Run: Five Ways to Emit Test Results as XML The use of XML files in software testing has steadily increased over the past few years. Test case data, test harness configuration information, and test result data are now stored as XML. Recently I was writing some . Dr. James McCaffrey
Cutting Edge: A Provider-Based Service for ASP.NET Tracing When it comes to catching programming errors, the debugger is a developer's best friend. ASP. NET tracing, however, is a nice complement to the debugger and shouldn't be overlooked. It enables your ASP. Dino Esposito	Service Station: WSE 3.0, SOAP Transports, and More It's that time again. Time to answer some of the questions I get on a regular basis. This month I'll look at service orientation and policy-based compatibility, SOAP's transport-neutral design, and Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0. Aaron Skonnard	Wicked Code: Three Cures for Common Site Map Ailments Data-driven site navigation is among the niftiest and most useful features in ASP. NET 2. 0. To get it working, all you do is create an XML site map file (or a SQL site map if you're using the MSDN®Magazine SqlSiteMapProvider), add a SiteMapDataSource, and bind a TreeView or Menu to the SiteMapDataSource. Jeff Prosise
Concurrent Affairs: Reader/Writer Locks and the ResourceLock Library If multiple threads concurrently execute code that writes to or modifies a resource, then obviously the resource must be protected with a thread synchronization lock to ensure that the resource doesn't get corrupted. Jeffrey Richter	.NET Matters: Parameterized ThreadStart, EventWaitHandle, and More This month Stephen Toub answers readers questions that include: How do I pass data to a new thread? Why can't I convert from "ref string" to "ref object"? And what's the difference between EventWaitHandle, AutoResetEvent and ManualResetEvent? Stephen Toub	Netting C++: The .NET Wrap This month, we are changing the column name from Pure C++ to Netting C++ to better reflect our focus on Microsoft® . NET programming using C++/CLI, the . NET extensions to Visual C++® that are supported in Visual Studio® 2005. Stanley B. Lippman
C++ at Work: Managed Code in Visual Studio 2005 Many of you are no doubt in the process of upgrading to Visual Studio® 2005, so I thought now would be a good time to relate some of my own experiences with the new compiler. What took me so long? Hey, I'm a retro kind of guy! Better late than never!. Paul DiLascia	{End Bracket}: Singularity When the C and C++ programming languages were invented, computers were slow, memory was limited, and compilers were simple and memory challenged, so a practical language could be little more than a veneer for assembly language. James Larus, Galen Hunt, and David Tarditi