September 2010

Async Tasks: Simplify Asynchronous Programming with Tasks Asynchronous programming lets you run expensive operations concurrently without blocking the UI thread. We’ll show you three simple techniques for implementing asynchronous operations in your code. Igor Ostrovsky Concurrency: Throttling Concurrency in the CLR 4.0 ThreadPool The trend toward manycore architectures and parallel apps has resulted in many changes to the CLR 4.0 ThreadPool. If you’re emphasizing concurrency in new apps or adding it to old ones, or making use of ASP.NET or Parallel Extension technologies, this is for you. Erika Fuentes

Async Agents: Actor-Based Programming with the Asynchronous Agents Library
The agent model provides an effective method of hiding latency for efficient parallel execution. The Asynchronous Agents Library (AAL) lets you use this actor-based model with message-passing interfaces, and we’ll show you how it works.
Mike Chu

App Migration: Migrate Your ASP.NET 1.1 Apps to Visual Studio 2010
Protect against obsolescence, gain new capabilities and increase your marketability by getting on board with the .NET Framework 4. You can start right here by learning how to migrate older applications to the latest and greatest
Jonathan Waldman

Data-Bound Design: Create a Silverlight 4 Web Part for SharePoint 2010
When building custom SharePoint 2010 solutions, it makes a lot of sense to take advantage of Silverlight 4 on the front end. We’ll walk you through the process of building a Silverlight Web Part with Visual Studio and Expression Blend.
Paul Stubbs

SQL Server and MapPoint: Making MapPoint 2010 and SQL Server Spatial Work Together
While SQL Server is a good repository for geospatial data, it doesn’t communicate with MapPoint as well as it could. So our geo-data experts show you how to read point and polygon objects from SQL Server and render them in MapPoint and how to write points and polygons back to SQL Server using Entity Framework 4.0 included with Visual Studio 2010.
Eric Frost

Columns

Editor's Note:
U.S. Schools Not Getting
It Done
Readers weigh in on the question of whether U.S. schools are preparing students for software development jobs.
Keith Ward

Don't Get Me Started:
Weasel Words
Euphemisms are the refuge of cowards.
David Platt

The Working Programmer:
Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 1
Software development isn’t all about object-oriented design; it’s about finding what works best, and incorporating it into your solution.
Ted Neward

UI Frontiers:
Touch and Response
Charles Petzold continues his exploration of multi-touch Manipulation events in the Windows Presentation Foundation and shows you how to design custom classes to decorate elements and provide visual feedback to users.
Charles Petzold

Cutting Edge:
Better Web Forms with the
MVP Pattern
The Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern is an evolution of MVC. We take a look at implementing MVP for ASP.NET Web Forms and compare it to ASP.NET MVC and MVVM for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight.
Dino Esposito

Security Briefs:
The MSF-Agile+SDL Process Template for TFS 2010
The MSF-Agile project template for Team Foundation Server makes it easy for your team to implement Agile techniques. The new MSF-Agile+SDL template adds Security Development Lifecycle requirements. We’ll show you how it works.
Bryan Sullivan

Test Run:
Request-Response Testing Using IronPython
Beef up your testing toolset by learning how to perform HTTP request-response tests of your ASP.NET Web apps using IronPython, a .NET Framework-compliant implementation of Python.
James McCaffrey

Going Places:
IronRuby on Windows Phone 7
IronRuby expert Shay Friedman goes mobile and shows you how to build a Windows Phone 7 app with Microsoft’s implementation of the popular Ruby dynamic language.
Shay Friedman