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ASP.NET: Leverage Multiple Code Frameworks with One ASP.NET

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Jeffrey Fritz demonstrates how you can use all four major ASP.NET code frameworks -- ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC and WebAPI, and SignalR -- together to create a cohesive solution.

Jeff Fritz

Microsoft .NET Framework: Migrating Legacy .NET Libraries to Target Modern Platforms

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

.NET libraries that have served you well for years can prove equally useful in today’s new environments—provided you’re willing to expend the migration effort needed. Using the Sterling NoSQL OODB, Josh Lane looks at forward migration patterns and best practices that minimize potential difficulties and maximize opportunities for reuse across platforms.

Josh Lane

Windows Phone: Windows Phone Video Capture: A Best-of-Breed Approach

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to maintain your Windows Phone 7.5 project while giving a richer experience to your Windows Phone 8 users. The techniques discussed here go beyond video capture to apply to any of the APIs reinvented for Windows Phone 8.

Chris Barker

SharePoint 2013: Understanding and Using the SharePoint 2013 REST Interface

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The SharePoint 2013 REST interface is extensive and powerful enough to provide most of what Web and mobile app developers will want to do. This article shows you how you can integrate SharePoint into your applications using the REST interface.

Jim Crowley, Ricky Kirkham

CLR: Shortest-Path Graph Analysis Using a CLR Stored Procedure

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Graph analysis is becoming increasingly important in software applications, and this article shows how to perform shortest-path analysis with techniques that can also be used for many other data-access programming tasks.

James McCaffrey

Editor's Note: Design Matters

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

In the era of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, developers can't afford to ignore the importance of design anymore

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Social Authentication in ASP.NET MVC 4

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

ASP.NET MVC 4 now includes an ad hoc framework to authenticate users via a number of social networks, and Dino Esposito shows you how.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Introducing Direct2D 1.1

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Direct 2D has taken a major step forward, and is now supported on Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8 and, now, Windows 7. Kenny Kerr explains how D2D 1.1 works and how to get started using it.

Kenny Kerr

Windows Azure Insider: Geo-Protection for Video Blobs Using a Node.js Media Proxy

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure blobs are very useful for storing video assets, but sometimes different levels of access are required based on location or domain. This article shows you how to manage these requirements by creating a reverse proxy server in Windows Azure.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

Test Run: Data Clustering Using Category Utility

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

James McCaffrey presents a powerful new clustering algorithm that is relatively simple to implement, has worked well in practice, can be applied to both numeric and categorical data, and scales well to huge data sets.

James McCaffrey

DirectX Factor: Exploring Filters in XAudio2

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold explains how you can alter the harmonic composition of sound through the use of filters and he shows how to accomplish this using XAudio2 in Windows 8.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

When Microsoft ignores its own UI design guidelines in Windows 8, it can only sow confusion.

David Platt

Patterns in Practice: Adding Functionality to an Object: Building the Objects

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Even with design patterns, eventually, you have to stop building infrastructure and actually implement some functionality. Peter starts to create the SalesOption objects that will add functionality to OrderLine objects when that functionality is needed.

Peter Vogel

Leading LightSwitch: Hello, Colors

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how you can use LightSwitch to add some color to your mobile apps to make them more visually appealing.

Jan Van der Haegen

UX By Design: Is UX Investment Worth It?

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Join UX expert Billy Hollis to find out how a designing a better user experience for your line-of-business application can increase productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction and retention as well as decrease training time.

Billy Hollis

SDL: Using the SDL for a LOB Windows 8 App, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Part 2 of a two-part series, this article examines the design phase of the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) and describes its three critical components: developing an attack surface analysis and an attack surface reduction and performing a software architectural risk analysis, or threat model.

Tim Kulp

MVVM: Commands, RelayCommands, EventToCommand

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 May 2013 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, I would like to take a closer look at one of the important components of any Model-View-ViewModel applications: the command.

Laurent Bugnion

Component Extensions: A Tour of C++/CX

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Ready to write your first Windows Store app? One of the first decisions you’ll need to make is whether to use HTML/JavaScript, .NET, or C++. In this article, learn about what makes the C++/CX language extensions for building Windows 8 apps unique and when to use C++/CX to build your Windows Store app.

Thomas Petchel

Microsoft Office: Exploring the JavaScript API for Office: Data Binding and Custom XML Parts

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Here’s part 3 of a series of four in-depth walkthroughs exploring the JavaScript API for Office, focusing on data binding and support for working with custom XML parts.

Stephen Oliver, Eric Schmidt

TFS: Building and Validating Windows Store Apps with Team Foundation Service

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use Team Foundation Service to build your Windows Store apps and validate them using the Windows Apps Certification Kit. SLUG:LeBrun.Windows Store and TFS.0412msdn-1 In this article, we'll see how to create and deploy a virtual machine that will be used by TFS Service to perform builds of Windows Store apps. We’ll also see how to use TFS Build to perform validation of Windows Store apps using the Windows Apps Certification Kit (WACK) tool, modifying builds reports to notify users of the good (or bad) execution of the tool

Thomas LeBrun

ALM Rangers: A Treasure Hunt Through ALM Readiness

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Learn the UX design considerations, coding principles and techniques the ALM Rangers used in developing an instructional Windows Store “treasure map” app to help increase ALM proficiency.

ALM Rangers

CLR: Classification and Prediction Using Adaptive Boosting

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

James McCaffrey explain a fascinating technique called adaptive boosting classification, which uses training data to generate a large collection of very simple rules of thumb that are then weighted and combined to improve their predictive quality.

James McCaffrey

Editor's Note: Patterns in Practice

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Check out the new Patterns in Practice on the MSDN Magazine Web site.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Essential Facebook Programming: Widgets and Timeline

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Learn about the tools and techniques to view and retrieve content from a Facebook wall in order to share it through other means and catalog it for something else, such as business intelligence analysis.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Why Does Entity Framework Reinsert Existing Objects into My Database?

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Entity Framework sometimes reinserts existing objects into databases. In the first of a two-part series, Julie Lerman explains why this happens, and how you can avoid it.

Julie Lerman

Windows Azure Insider: NoSQL Data in the Cloud with Windows Azure Tables

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

This column introduces you to Windows Azure Tables, a NoSQL technology for storing massive amounts of data offered as a service in the cloud.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

The Working Programmer: Capturing Important Business Logic

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

On April 1, Ted Neward pays homage to his feline friends and introduces an important language for your .NET programming toolbox: LOLCODE.

Ted Neward

Modern Apps: Power Your Modern Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

It’s a complete set of cross-platform, back-end services for rapid modern app development, and Rachel Appel shows you how to set it up in Visual Studio, explains how the API works and demonstrates the necessary coding to get started.

Rachel Appel

DirectX Factor: Streaming and Manipulating Audio Files in Windows 8

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Windows 8 makes it easy to write programs that can access individual music files. Using DirectX components is more difficult, but adds versatility, as Charles Petzold describes.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Coining Currency

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

One of the delights of writing this column is that I get to see lots of new things. Sometimes their creators forget to name them, so I get to do it.

David Platt

MVVM: Maximizing the Visual Designer’s Usage with Design-Time Data

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

In his third MVVM article, Laurent Bugnion explains how you can simulate nonstatic data even at design time by tricking the visual designer into executing some design-time-only code.

Laurent Bugnion

SDL: Using the SDL for LOB Windows 8 Apps

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Part 1 of a two-part series, this article examines the planning phase of the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL). The article examines how to build security into a Windows Store project, describing how to compile a risk assessment and identify security and privacy requirements.

Tim Kulp

Patterns in Practice: Adding Functionality to an Object: Loading the Right Classes

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

In this column, Peter Vogel continues his exploration of implementing the roles pattern in a typical business scenario by using Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework to select and load the SalesOption objects that the design pattern requires.

Peter Vogel

Leading LightSwitch: Hello, Mobile

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft makes getting started with HTML5 even easier in the latest LightSwitch update.

Jan Van der Haegen

ALM Rangers: Simplifying the Configuration of Lab Management 2012

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how to set up and configure Lab Management 2012 to maximize the benefits of each component and technology involved.

Micheal Learned

DirectX: Using XAML with DirectX and C++ in Windows Store Apps

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Doug Erickson reviews SurfaceImageSource and VirtualSurfaceImageSource, two Windows Runtime XAML types that use the GPU to boost image rendering in Windows Store apps.

Doug Erickson

Microsoft Office: Exploring the JavaScript API for Office: Data Access and Events

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Moving on from covering the basics in part 1 of this series, Stephen Oliver and Eric Schmidt discuss how to access data and handle events in the JavaScript API for Office.

Stephen Oliver, Eric Schmidt

Async/Await: Best Practices in Asynchronous Programming

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Avoid common asynchronous programming errors and master techniques to take full advantage of the new async/await support in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.

Stephen Cleary

ASP.NET: Migrating ASP.NET Web Forms to the MVC Pattern with the ASP.NET Web API

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Because the ASP.NET Web API leverages the fundamental building blocks of the HTTP protocol, it can provide a way of refactoring your existing ASP.NET applications into an AJAX-enabled, Test Driven Development world.

Peter Vogel

Windows Azure: Moving Your Applications to Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure lets you take advantage of Microsoft’s world-class global infrastructure to deploy your own applications, with the corresponding capabilities to reduce maintenance requirements, maximize performance and minimize costs.

Alex Homer

Data Clustering: Data Clustering Using Naive Bayes Inference

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

James McCaffrey presents a clustering algorithm based on a technique called Naive Bayes inference, which works with either categorical or numeric data.

James McCaffrey

Editor's Note: Developing Apps for Office

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

The Apps for Office platform represents an important change in the way apps are developed for the Office suite.

Michael Desmond

Windows with C++: Rendering in a Desktop Application with Direct2D

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr looks at the unique relationship between Direct2D and the desktop application window.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Playing with the EF6 Alpha

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Explore new features in the first packaged alpha release of Entity Framework 6, including asynchronous processing and custom Code First conventions.

Julie Lerman

Windows Azure Insider: Real-World Scenarios for Node.js in Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Walk through a pair of real-world scenarios where node.js is used for simple connectivity tasks, leveraging its single-threaded approach and modules created by the community.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

The Working Programmer: Noda Time

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Noda Time is a powerful, .NET library that can seriously amp up time and date support in your applications.

Ted Neward

Modern Apps: Data Access and Storage Options in Windows Store Apps

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Local or remote. WebStorage or IndexedDB. SkyDrive or SQLite. What's a developer to do? Here's what you need to decide on a storage strategy for your modern app.

Rachel Appel

Don't Get Me Started: Grieving

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

David Platt says your software isn’t successful until it’s been used in a way that you never imagined.

David Platt

MVVM: Messenger and View Services in MVVM

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

This article, the second in a series about using the MVVM model in Windows 8, describes how the different layers of an application communicate, emphasizing communication between the ViewModel and the view using the MVVM Light Messenger event bus for status messages and a view service implementation for a dialog service.

Laurent Bugnion

Patterns in Practice: Adding Functionality to an Object: Designing the Object Model

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Peter continues to explore implementing the Roles pattern to solve a typical business problem: supporting multiple sales options on an order line. This month he develops the object model design.

Peter Vogel

PowerShell: Managing an Outlook Mailbox with PowerShell

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Rules in Outlook are useful for automatically managing e-mail, but it can be difficult to get a single e-mail into multiple folders. Learn how to create a PowerShell script that automatically sends messages to the appropriate folder based on values you assign.

Joe Leibowitz

Team Foundation Server: Agile Project Management using TFS 2012

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 can help teams plan, manage and track work. This articles explores how to use features such as the product backlog, sprint backlog and task boards in the context of Agile development frameworks.

Suliman Battat

Windows Store Apps: Windows Store Apps: A Guide for WPF and Silverlight Developers, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:00:00 GMT

In this article, Joel Fjordén shows WPF/Silverlight developers how they can implement the MVVM pattern in Windows Store apps without compromising on architecture.

Joel Fjordén

Microsoft Office: Exploring the New JavaScript API for Office

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Here you learn about asynchronous programming, object model hierarchy, testing for application support and more basics of the new JavaScript API for the latest version of Office.

Stephen Oliver, Eric Schmidt

Async Programming: Async Causality Chain Tracking

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how .NET Framework 4.5 enables developers to track and deduce causality/return stacks while debugging or investigating production failures.

Andrew Stasyuk

ASP.NET: Building a Simple Comet Application in the Microsoft .NET Framework

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Develop interactive Web applications that don’t rely on polling or users posting back the page, using just .NET technologies.

Derrick Lau

Data Clustering: Detecting Abnormal Data Using k-Means Clustering

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how C# developers can use k-Means clustering to group data items into similar clusters and enable detection of abnormal data.

James McCaffrey

StreamInsight: Taming the Event Stream: Fast Approximate Counting

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Explore the power of StreamInsight by developing a custom stream operator for fast approximation of event counts in a window.

Michael Meijer

Editor's Note: Inside Modern Apps

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Rachel Appel's new Modern Apps column will guide developers into building compelling Windows Store apps.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Essential Facebook Programming: The JavaScript SDK

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Dive into the principal tools you can leverage to add social plugins to your Web sites, with a mix of HTML markup, CSS and JavaScript code.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Creating Desktop Apps with Visual C++ 2012

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Our resident C++ expert gets a lot of questions about the language and its relevance to developing desktop apps for Windows in these changing times. He answers those questions here.

Kenny Kerr

Test Run: Naive Bayes Classification with C#

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Naive Bayes classification is a fundamental machine-learning technique that can predict which category a data case belongs to. James McCaffrey explains how it works and gives you the foundation for adding prediction features to your .NET applications.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: .NET Collections, Part 2: Working with C5

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward delves deeper into the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#, explaining how their implementations and functionality go a bit beyond the .NET Framework Class Library.

Ted Neward

Modern Apps: Create Windows Store Apps with HTML5 and JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Learn about the Windows Store market opportunity, as well what language, tool and technology choices are available to help you get started writing apps or games.

Rachel Appel

DirectX Factor: Constructing Audio Oscillators for Windows 8

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Windows 8 combines a high-performance audio API with touch screens on hand-held tablets. Join with Charles Petzold as he explores the potential this combination offers for creating musical instruments.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: What's Up, Doc?

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

The Internet still hasn't cracked the health-care industry, the way it has newspapers, media and most recently higher education. But it's about to, says David Platt, and in a big way.

David Platt

Windows Store Apps: Windows Store Apps: A Guide for WPF and Silverlight Developers, Part 1

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Find out what Windows Runtime changes WPF/Silverlight developers need to be aware of as they start creating Windows Store apps.

Joel Fjordén

Patterns in Practice: Data Design for Adding Functionality to a Class

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Peter moves on from designing an application that requires the role pattern to discussing how the pattern should be implemented, beginning with the data design.

Peter Vogel

Security: Access Online Services with the Windows Runtime and OAuth

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Whether managing data with XHR or authenticating to a remote service with the WebAuthenticationBroker, WinJS and WinRT help you mash online services with your app.

Tim Kulp

JavaScript: TypeScript: Making .NET Developers Comfortable with JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

TypeScript is a powerful, typed superset of JavaScript that presents developers with useful means for managing classes, modules and types. Learn how the open source TypeScript project broadens the appeal of JavaScript development.

Shayne Boyer

C#: The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

In part two of a series, learn how the C# memory model is implemented on different architectures and is helpful for understanding the behavior of programs in the real world.

Igor Ostrovsky

ALM Rangers: Version Control in the TFS Client Object Model

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Jeff Bramwell of the Visual Studio ALM Rangers explains how to use version control APIs in the Team Foundation Server client object model.

Jeff Bramwell

Editor's Note: The X Factor

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold rebrands his ongoing column to explore DirectX and the world of native development in Windows Runtime.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Essential Facebook Programming: Building a Windows Client

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Continuing his series, Dino Esposito builds a WPF client app that uses the Facebook API to authenticate users and post updates.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: The Evolution of Threads and I/O in Windows

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Explore the evolution of threading in Windows and C++ to understand the threading capabilities in your programs and work with concurrency building blocks.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Shrink EF Models with DDD Bounded Contexts

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Applying a concept from domain-driven design—Bounded Context—can help you build a targeted model with Entity Framework.

Julie Lerman

Windows Azure Insider: Windows Azure Web Sites: Quick-and-Easy Hosting as a Service

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure Web Sites simplifies the deployment, management, and scalability tasks associated with hosting cloud applications.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

ASP.NET: Building Hypermedia Web APIs with ASP.NET Web API

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Learn why hypermedia is an interesting factor for achieving evolvability in Web API designs, and how it can be implemented in practice using ASP.NET Web API.

Pablo Cibraro

Test Run: Artificial Immune Systems for Intrusion Detection

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Explore how artificial immune systems can model the behavior of the human immune system to detect harmful network packets.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: .NET Collections: Getting Started with C5

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward explores the Copenhagen Comprehensive Collection Classes for C#, which he deems a worthy complement to System.Collections.Generic.

Ted Neward

DirectX Factor: Windows 8 Sound Generation with XAudio2

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold finds that XAudio2 offers sophisticated audio processing for Windows Store applications.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Lowering Higher Education, Again

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 08:00:00 GMT

A year ago, David Platt predicted that universities would get hammered by Internet-based alternatives. Looks like he was right.

David Platt

Windows 8 Networking: Windows 8 and the WebSocket Protocol

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr explores the WebSocket protocol and its relationship to the larger TCP/IP suite. Learn how Windows 8 enables programmers to easily adopt WebSocket in their applications.

Windows Phone: Speech-Enabling a Windows Phone 8 App, Part 2: In-App Dialog

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use speech for input and output in Windows Phone 8 apps, starting with simple examples and working up to more complex scenarios.

Building HTML5 Applications: Designing Accessibility with HTML5

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

To reach the broadest possible audience, you’ll want to design your Web site for accessibility using the latest technologies That means using HTML5, as Rajesh Lal explains.

C#: The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The first of a two-part series, this article describes the C# memory model, explaining the guarantees the model makes and the code patterns that motivate the guarantees.

C#: Matrix Decomposition

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Matrix decomposition is an essential part of many important algorithms. Learn what matrix decomposition is, when it is used, and how to code it in C# and integrate it into your applications.

Editor's Note: Welcome Windows Azure Insider

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Cutting Edge: Essential Facebook Programming: Authentication and Updates

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Integrate Facebook functionality into apps and use the Facebook C# API to authenticate users and post programmatically on behalf of the currently logged-in user.

Data Points: Pain-Free Data Access in JavaScript--Yes, JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Julie Lerman takes a look at Breeze, an open source data access API that makes working with JavaScript a whole lot easier.

Windows Azure Insider: Windows Azure Service Bus: Messaging Patterns Using Sessions

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Learn to take advantage of a robust and flexible implementation of the publish/subscribe pattern via a simple real-life scenario.

Test Run: Graph-Based Shortest-Path Analysis with SQL

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Shortest-path graph analysis is likely to increase in importance as enterprises gather more data and store that data in a cloud environment. This article shows how to use this approach on your data.

Touch and Go: A Touch Interface for an Orienting Map

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Don't Get Me Started: Being Fully Digital

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Remember Cardfile? With Windows 8, Microsoft is telling app developers to stay away from tired meatspace analogies in their UIs.

SQL Server: Data Quality Testing Using SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

SQL Server 2012 Data Quality Services isn’t just for data stewards. Find out how this tool can help your IT team improve the data quality of your data-centric projects.

Gunjan Jain, Raj Kamal

Kinect: Listening with Kinect

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Explore how speech recognition works in Kinect for Windows applications.

Leland Holmquest

JavaScript Security: Web to Windows 8: Security

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Web developers switching to Windows 8 development with JavaScript need to update their views on security. With the tools available in Windows 8, you can transform JavaScript security from a facade to a multifaceted defense system that protects both your data and your users.

Tim Kulp

Windows Phone: Speech-Enabling a Windows Phone 8 App with Voice Commands

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In Windows Phone 8 apps, developers can use two new features to delight their users: voice commands to launch the app and execute commands, and a flexible API for speech recognition and synthesis to interact with the app by voice.

F Avery Bishop

C#, Visual Basic and C++: Managing Memory in Windows Store Apps, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In the second of our two-part feature on identifying, diagnosing, and repairing memory leaks in Window Store apps, Chipalo Street and Dan Taylor focus on C#, VB, and C++ optimizations.

Chipalo Street, Dan Taylor

JavaScript: Building and Using Controls in Windows Store Apps with JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When using JavaScript to build controls in a Windows Store app, you have access to HTML elements, WinRT controls and WinJS controls. See how you can mix and match these or even build your own.

Chris Sells, Brandon Satrom

Team Foundation Service: Implementing Build Automation with Team Foundation Service Preview

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Team Foundation Service Preview provides the ability to run builds entirely in the cloud. Here, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers show how to set up build automation on-premises for scenarios where the development team needs more control of the build machine than is available on Windows Azure.

Tim Star, Tim Omta, Mario Contreras

Editor's Note: Standing Up

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Michael Desmond continues to document his move to a standing desk at work.

Michael Desmond

Windows with C++: The Evolution of Synchronization in Windows and C++

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Some excellent synchronization primitives in Windows and the state-of-the-art C++ compiler make a compelling toolkit for producing lightweight and scalable concurrency-safe programs, says Kenny Kerr, who explains that there’s still work to be done to improve concurrency in the Standard C++ Library.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Entity Framework Designer Gets Some Love in Visual Studio 2012

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The new Entity Framework Designer in Visual Studio 2012 gets a couple of big improvements and a slew of smaller ones, all adding up to an enhanced user experience.

Julie Lerman

Windows Azure Insider: Windows Azure Mobile Services: A Robust Back End for Your Device Applications

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure Mobile Services simplifies the life of mobile developers by automating the creation of a backend, based on open standards and supporting multiple types of devices and operating systems.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

The Working Programmer: Cassandra NoSQL Database, Part 3: Clustering

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Talk about big data, this database can scale to “ridiculous” sizes, says Ted Neward. One firm claimed to use Cassandra to store more than 50PB of information. Learn how clustering makes such implementations possible straight out of the box.

Ted Neward

Touch and Go: Assembling Bing Map Tiles on Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Getting a map on the Windows Phone screen is easy, but rotating it so that north on the map is actually pointing north is another matter entirely. Charles Petzold describes how he used the Bing Maps SOAP Service to get the results he wanted. The Motion sensor in Windows Phone 7.5 consolidates information from the phone’s compass and accelerometer to create a rotation matrix that describes the orientation of the phone in 3D space. Recently I began pondering how the phone’s orientation could be used in combination with Bing Maps. I anticipated a quickie mashup but the job turned out to be rather more complex.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Here We Go Again

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Every great advance in application design tools heralds a wave of execrable design. David Platt urges software developers to show judgment and restraint with their new WIndows Store apps.

David Platt

Windows Runtime: Reimagining App Development with the Windows Runtime

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Windows Runtime is at the heart of creating Windows Store apps. Learn how it provides a powerful platform on which to create these new apps, with a development surface that’s rich in functionality and consistent and thoughtful in design.

Jason Olson

Windows Runtime and the CLR: Underneath the Hood with .NET and the Windows Runtime

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

A look at how the CLR enables managed developers to talk to the Windows Runtime, exposing Windows Runtime APIs as if they’re just another managed class library for .NET developers to use.

Shawn Farkas

Windows Runtime Components: Windows Runtime Components in a .NET World

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Jeremy Likness walks you through the requirements needed to create a Windows Runtime Component in C#, how to reference and use it, and how it impacts other language selections when developing Windows Store applications.

Jeremy Likness

Silverlight and WPF: Writing Silverlight and WPF Apps with Windows Runtime XAML in Mind

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Business developers will continue to build new Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight applications in the years to come. This article shows you what you can do to make porting, reuse or dual targeting reasonable when considering Windows Store applications.

Pete Brown

MVVM: Using the MVVM Pattern in Windows 8

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern achieves a separation of logic and UX in Windows Store applications and also enables UX designers to create and test UIs without the existence of the underlying logic. Learn how to create an application using the MVVM design pattern in Visual Studio 12, using the MVVM Light Toolkit.

Laurent Bugnion

XAML and C++: Introducing C++/CX and XAML

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to take advantage of a modern, XAML-based UI framework in C++ to build Windows Store apps.

Andy Rich

Windows Runtime and C++: Porting Desktop Applications to the Windows Runtime

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Diego Dagum discusses how to port C++ desktop applications to the Windows Runtime Library, using a sample calculator application as a practical example.

Diego Dagum

JavaScript: Managing Memory in Windows Store Apps

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Users today want to rapidly switch among multiple apps to accomplish tasks, and they expect their machines to keep up. Learn how to identify, diagnose and repair memory leaks so you can be sure your Metro style app will give users the experience they’re looking for.

David Tepper

JavaScript: Data Binding in a Windows Store App with JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how the JavaScript framework for building Windows Store apps and the underlying Windows Runtime allow you to build apps with client-side state, offline storage, controls, templates, binding and much more.

Chris Sells, Brandon Satrom

Design and UX: Authoring Windows Store Apps in Blend

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Explore how Expression Blend for Visual Studio 2012 can be used to create UIs for Windows Store apps using XAML or HTML. Examples show the Blend Device panel, CSS editors, data template editing and interactive mode.

Christian Schormann

Editor's Note: All Eyes on Windows 8

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Windows 8 special edition of MSDN Magazine.

Michael Desmond

Modern Apps: The Windows Store App Lifecycle

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

You’ll want to understand the nuances of the new WinRT application lifecycle so you can build apps that respond as they should at every point. Rachel Appel explains the different stages.

Rachel Appel

Windows Azure Insider: Windows 8 and Windows Azure: Convergence in the Cloud

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The inaugural edition of our Windows Azure Insider column describes how to build a simple cloud-hosted service to support asynchronous clients, then shows you how easy it is to call into a Web service from a Windows Store application to retrieve data.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

TPL: Horizontal Scalability for Parallel Execution of Tasks

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Task Parallel Library (TPL) provides all the necessary infrastructure to achieve optimal utilization of CPU resources within a single multicore computer. Now you can also implement an approach that scales across computer’s boundaries--useful for workload automation and batch processing scenarios.

Jesus Aguilar

OData: OData, the Entity Framework and Windows Azure Access Control

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When Sean Iannuzzi was asked to secure a Web service for an existing database and Web application, he saw the benefits of using OData, but he didn’t think it was secure enough. See how he developed his own custom implementation with extra security.

Sean Iannuzzi

Windows Phone: Building an App for Both Windows Phone and iOS

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how you can create an app from scratch that targets both Windows Phone and iPhone, while staying true to the design philosophy and UX features of each platform.

Andrew Whitechapel

Windows Phone: Tombstoning and the Zen of Async for Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Ben Day walks you through some of the architectural decisions and mistakes he made in his first Windows Phone application, and shows how you can avoid them in your own Windows Phone apps.

Ben Day

Numerics: Testing Math Functions in Microsoft Cloud Numerics

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Suppose you are writing a computer program that calls a library to compute sin(x). You'll get a numeric answer containing up to 16 decimal digits, but how do you know the answer is correct? Learn how the math functions in the new Microsoft Cloud Numerics math library are tested.

Stuart Brorson, Alan Edelman, Ben Moskowitz

Editor's Note: Cutting Edge

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito has been writing for MSDN Magazine and its predecessors since 1996. Michael Desmond talks with the popular Cutting Edge columnist.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Mobile Site Development, Part 5: jQuery Mobile

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito dives into the HTML5-based jQuery Mobile UI technology for popular device platforms. Is it all you need for mobile development?

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Back to the Future with Resumable Functions

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr concludes his three-part series on concurrency in C++, and explores an even more fluid approach to writing efficient and composable asynchronous systems.

Kenny Kerr

Forecast: Cloudy: Windows Azure In-Role Caching

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz shows how you can weather high demand on your site and services using dedicated and co-located roles for caching in the Windows Azure Caching (Preview).

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Neural Network Back-Propagation for Programmers

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Back-propagation is a complex, but tricky to code, algorithm that can be used to train a neural network. James McCaffrey explains how to implement back-propagation.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Cassandra NoSQL Database, Part 2: Programming

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward explains how to connect to the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database from the Microsoft .NET Framework, how to read and write data to it, and more.

Ted Neward

Touch and Go: Viewing the Night Sky on Your Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold concludes his four-part exploration of motion sensors in the Windows Phone platform, building an application that lets users interact with planets and constellations in the night sky.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Brain Droppings

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Have you ever wondered what grinds David Platt's gears?

David Platt

Visual Studio 2012: A More Productive IDE for Modern Applications

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

See how the latest release of Visual Studio—especially the improved IDE— helps to create an environment that lets developers do what developers want to do: work with code in a variety of technologies.

Peter Vogel

Visual Studio 2012: What’s New for Web Development in Visual Studio 2012

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2012 has tons of new features for Web developers. Clark Sell discusses some of the most useful ones for builiding HTML5/CSS applications.

Clark Sell

Windows Azure: Developing and Deploying Windows Azure Cloud Services Using Visual Studio

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

We walk through parts of the Windows Azure application development lifecycle using Visual Studio and highlight the new features as we progress.

Paul Yuknewicz, Boris Scholl

Visual Studio 2012: What's New in Microsoft Test Manager 2012

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers team up to introduce some of the exciting new features in Visual Studio Test Manager 2012, including better exploratory testing, improved performance, video recording enhancements and many more.

Micheal Learned, Sudheer Adimulam, Tim Star

Visual Studio 2012: Testing for Continuous Development

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The accelerated speed of Web development requires streamlined techniques for the entire process, including testing. Here, you learn how to efficiently test Web apps in Visual Studio 2012.

Larry Brader, Alan Cameron Wills

Visual Studio 2012: Shape Up Your Data with Visual Studio LightSwitch 2012

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Although initially dismissed by some professional developers, Visual Studio LightSwitch is evolving with the 2012 release to handle the requirements for modern enterprise applications to scale well, integrate with legacy systems, handle multitenant installations and many concurrent users, and much more, reports Jan Van der Haegen.

Jan Van der Haegen

Editor's Note: Visual Studio 2012: The Next Big Thing

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2012 is another important update of the Microsoft flagship IDE.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Mobile Site Development, Part 4: Managing Device Profiles

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito shows how to classify mobile devices in order to build a Web site that serves different markup to different devices based on their capabilities.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: The Pursuit of Efficient and Composable Asynchronous Systems

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr follows up his column on lightweight cooperative multi-tasking by exploring how C++ might directly support asynchronous programming in a more natural and composable way.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Moving Existing Projects to EF 5

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

To take advantage of enum support and other features added to Entity Framework in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, you need the compatible version of EntityFramework.dll, EF 5. Julie Lerman helps to ease the migration.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Humongous Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

NoSQL is a hot topic, and one of the most popular ways of approaching it is with MongoDB. Joseph Fultz looks at some of the design and implementation aspects of using MongoDB in a Windows Azure environment.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Coding Logistic Regression with Newton-Raphson

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

There are plenty of resources describing the complex mathematics behind finding logistic regression beta parameters using Newton-Raphson, yet few implementation guides. James McCaffrey explains how logistic regression with Newton-Raphson works, and how to implement a solution in C#.

James McCaffrey

Touch and Go: Exploring Spherical Coordinates on Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Charles lays the conceptual, mathematical and programmatic groundwork for a program that lets you point a Windows phone at a spot in the night sky and show the planets and constellations.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: On Honor, Cold Iron and Hot Silicon

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Doctors swear to the Hippocratic oath. Should software engineers be pledging to uphold a code of conduct?

David Platt

Visual Studio 2012: Using PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server for Rapid Feedback in Production

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server lets teams collect production information to analyze and fix defects in an Agile project.

Chris Kinsman

Web Dev Report: Integrating jQuery Mobile into ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC Web Apps

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This month, Rachel Appel explains how jQuery Mobile can make it easier for you to “go mobile” with your new or existing ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC Web apps.

Rachel Appel

Windows Azure Insider: Running Any Workload at Scale

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how you can use Windows Azure with Linux systems to run workloads that offer powerful capabilities.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

Kinect: Working with Kinect Studio

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how you can use Kinect Studio to capture data feeds, save them as .xed files and reuse them to test your Kinect-enabled apps.

Leland Holmquest

C++: Functional-Style Programming in C++

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The new C++ 11 standard greatly improves the language's suitability for functional-style programming, particularly with its support for lambdas. Learn how you can use functional-style programming in your C++ code.

David Cravey

Windows Azure: Windows Azure Comes to the Rescue

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

What do you do when marketing comes to you needing a fully functional conference registration system for a show just a month away? You leverage Windows Azure, Silverlight and Windows Phone to build an app with all the social media trimmings, as Microsoft's Mark Kromer details here.

Mark Kromer

Windows PowerShell: Build User-Friendly XML Interfaces with Windows PowerShell

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Joe Leibowitz explores a way to make reading and editing XML files easier and more convenient, even for nontechnical users, using algorithms that can parse the structure of any given file.

Joe Leibowitz

Building HTML5 Applications: A History (API) Lesson

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Don’t know much about history? Clark Sell shows you how to access and manage session state using the new HTML5 History API.

Clark Sell

ALM Rangers: Using the Team Foundation Server Client Object Model

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers introduce the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) client object model and create the foundation for a new series of articles focused on practical guidance and common coding scenarios with TFS.

Willy-Peter Schaub, Brian Blackman

Windows Azure: CyberNanny: Remote Access via Distributed Components

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

What do you do when you’re a new dad and want to keep track of your baby at home? You use the Kinect sensor, C++, Windows Azure, and local and cloud-based components to get e-mailed photos upon request, wherever you are.

Angel Hernandez Matos

CLR: .NET Development for ARM Processors

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Coding in the .NET Framework means that you don’t normally have to worry about the many differences between ARM and x86-based processors. But there are a few fundamental design differences that may affect your code, as CLR team insider Andrew Pardoe explains here.

Andrew Pardoe

Editor's Note: On Point with Julie Lerman

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Michael Desmond profiles Data Points columnist Julie Lerman.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Mobile Site Development, Part 3: Routing Requests

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito explains how to route Web site visitors between the desktop and mobile versions of a site so they can easily jump between the two.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Lightweight Cooperative Multitasking

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr describes a technique—ideal for very lightweight concurrency—to write asynchronous code in C or C++ without the use of a runtime (such as those provided by Visual C++ and Windows).

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Pitfalls and Pointers for a Base Logging Class in EF Models

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

An unfortunate use of a base class to provide logging data for all classes in an Entity Data Model creates chaos in the database. Learn why this happens and how to avoid the problem.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Decoupling the Cloud with MEF

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use the Microsoft Extensibility Framework to make a cloud deployment a little more manageable and flexible.

Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer: Cassandra NoSQL Database: Getting Started

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward explores Cassandra (the NoSQL database software, not the figure from Greek mythology), which is “an open-source, distributed, decentralized, elastically scalable, highly-available, fault-tolerant, tuneably consistent, column-oriented database that bases its distribution design on Amazon’s Dynamo and its data model on Google’s Bigtable.”

Ted Neward

Touch and Go: Viewing a Virtual World from Your Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Although we no longer believe that celestial spheres surround the Earth, that’s still a handy concept for programs that let you use a smartphone to view a virtual world. Such a program needs to determine its orientation in 3D space, and Charles Petzold explains how to accomplish this using the horizontal coordinate system.

Charles Petzold

Windows Phone: Pragmatic Tips for Building Better Windows Phone Apps

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Andrew Byrne has had his coding ups and downs, but when he has stumbled, he has picked himself up and continued. Here, he points out some Windows Phone programming techniques to make your own road a little smoother.

Andrew Byrne

ASP.NET MVC 4: Test-Driving ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn best practices and techniques for enhancing the testability of your ASP.NET MVC applications.

Keith Burnell

Windows Phone: Writing a Compass Application for Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone now exposes sensors such as the accelerometer, GPS and compass (magnetometer). Here, Donn Morse walks through the creation of a compass app to demonstrate how developers can interact with that sensor.

Donn Morse

Windows Azure: Hadoop on Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

What’s all the buzz about Hadoop? Find out as you learn how to set up a cluster on Windows Azure, how to run a Map/Reduce job using Java, JavaScript and C# Streaming, how to run queries in HIVE, and more.

Lynn Langit

ASP.NET: How to Handle Relational Data in a Distributed Cache

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Iqbal Khan discusses how developers handle data relationships while caching data, and shows through source code examples how those relationships can be mapped. The net effect is that the application doesn’t have to keep track of those relationships in the cache. Rather, the cache is aware of them and handles them correctly.

Iqbal Khan

Internet of Things: A Smart Thermostat on the Service Bus

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

We continue our series on the Internet of Things by building a connected device—a smart thermostat—and wiring it up to the Windows Azure Service Bus.

Clemens Vasters

Editor's Note: The Long Test Run

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Over the years, McCaffrey has proposed, written and reviewed innumerable article concepts. And, no surprise, he has some pointed thoughts on what makes an idea worthy of publication.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Mobile Site Development, Part 2: Design

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito debunks some mobile site development myths as he explains how to present users with Web pages designed to work best with their individual devices.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Create and Consume JSON-Formatted OData

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

JSON is an increasingly important format for application development. Make sure you know how to consume OData in JSON format and create WCF Data Services that return JSON.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Mixing Node.js into Your Windows Azure Solution

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Node.js is generating lots of buzz, and Joseph Fultz explains how he incorporated it into an existing Windows Azure solution.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Classification and Prediction Using Neural Networks

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In the May issue, James McCaffrey explained the basics of neural networks. Now he shows you how to use neural networks to classify existing data into groups, and to predict the group membership of new data.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: The Science of Computers

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Our columnist enlists the help of a bona-fide computer scientist to explain how developers can make their lives a little easier by understanding the theories behind certain parts of computer science.

Ted Neward, Joe Hummel

Touch and Go: Windows Phone Motion and 3D Views

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When a Windows Phone program knows the orientation of the phone in 3D space, the phone can provide a portal into a 3D world. The new Motion class makes it possible, as Charles Petzold explains.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Patient Knows What’s Wrong with Him

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 07:00:00 GMT

It's hard to create an effective user experience when your users struggle to tell you what they need. David Platt says good designers know how to gain actionable insight from their users.

David Platt

CLR: What’s New in the .NET 4.5 Base Class Library

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The .NET Framework 4.5 brings a number of improvments, big and small, to the base class library. Immo Landwerth explores these new features.

Immo Landwerth

CLR: An Attribute-Free Approach to Configuring MEF

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn the reasons for using the Managed Extensibility Framework, and how convention-driven configuration can streamline the development process.

Alok Shriram

Internet of Things: Using Windows Azure Service Bus for ... Things!

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In this second in a series of articles about the Internet of Things, you’ll learn how to leverage the Windows Azure Service Bus, not only to collect information from “things” but also to control them.

Clemens Vasters

Building HTML5 Applications: CSS3 Effects, Transitions and Animations

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how CSS3 makes Web development a lot easier. With a few new CSS properties and some cool demos, you’ll see how to save countless development hours.

Clark Sell

Windows Azure: Democratizing Video Content with Windows Azure Media Services

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This article focuses on how to provide a scalable, video streaming service with little or no upfront investment in hardware or infrastructure. We walk through a step-by-step process using Windows Azure Media Services and a Web-based client. For consumers, a Facebook implementation of these technologies will be presented.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

Windows Phone: Behind the Scenes: A Windows Phone Feed-Reader App

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

See exactly how a group of Microsoft interns developed a robust Windows Phone feed-reader app with the latest technologies such as local database, background agent, Live Tiles and more.

Matt Stroshane

SQL Server: Custom Indexing for Latitude-Longitude Data

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how to create custom indexes for geographical data that includes latitude and longitude location information so that you can retrieve real-time data faster than ever.

James McCaffrey

ASP.NET: Unit Testing in the Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms Framework

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The article will demonstrate the benefits of having a consistent approach to navigation and data passing in a Web Forms application, showing how this bears fruit when building Single-Page Interfaces. Although all the current buzz is around ASP.NET MVC, it will present a compelling argument for using the Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms project I host on codeplex together with standard ASP.NET Ajax and DataBinding.

Graham Mendick

Editor's Note: Old Soldiers Never Die

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft has announced that it has extended support for the Visual Basic 6 runtime to Windows 8. What makes classic VB such a compelling development platform?

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Mobile Site Development: Markup

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This column is the first of a series in which Dino Esposito approaches mobile site development from a perspective that isn’t primarily focused on technology. He says that too often mobile site development is associated with specific frameworks and their solutions without much thinking about use-cases and restructuring of the content. In this colum, he starts from the basics—the mobile markup.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Data Bind OData in Web Apps with Knockout.js

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Knockout.js brings many benefits to client side web apps. Julie Lerman looks at leveraging it to perform data binding with OData.

Julie Lerman

Test Run: Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Why should you be interested in evolutionary optimization algorithms? There are at least three good reasons, James McCaffrey points out, and he shows you how to code them. An evolutionary optimization algorithm is an implementation of a meta-heuristic modeled on the behavior of biological evolution. These algorithms can be used to find approximate solutions to difficult or impossible numerical minimization problems.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Talk to Me, Part 4: Feliza Gets Her Voice

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The final installment of Ted Neward's four-part series on creating an F#-based chatterbot modeled on the old ELIZA software. This time, Ted takes Feliza for a spin.

Ted Neward

Touch and Go: Getting Oriented with the Windows Phone Compass

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Smartphones get lots of input from the world through their sensors, but you can get even more by combining those sensors, as Charles Petzold shows with an example that combines the compass and accelerometer.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Until and unless Microsoft brings out another tool that does these things, Visual Basic 6 will keep scuttling around.

David Platt

Kinect: Starting to Develop with Kinect

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The first in our series of Kinect-themed features shows how you can use the skeleton-tracking capability of the Kinect in a WPF app without writing a single line of code.

Leland Holmquest

Windows Azure: Comparing Windows Azure Queues and Service Bus Queues

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out whether Windows Azure queues or Service Bus queues are the best choice for the messaging queues in your application.

Ricardo Villalobos

Leading Lightswitch: Tales of Advanced LightSwitch Client Customizations

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Enjoy these tales of creating custom applications that show off the versatility and ease of use LightSwitch offers. You will also get a glimpse of how a real pro works with clients.

Jan Van der Haegen

Web Dev Report: Working with Graphics on the Web: Canvas vs. SVG

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In this installment of the Web Dev Report, find out whether to use Canvas or SVG when developing Web graphics.

Rachel Appel

Windows Phone: Creating Media Apps for Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn about the various pieces a media app can use to create an immersive Windows Phone experience—such as integrating with the Music + Videos Hub—and how to make sure your app is a “good citizen” on Windows Phone.

Mark Hopkins

HTML5: Develop HTML5 Windows Phone Apps with Apache Cordova

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

As an introduction to Windows Phone development with Apache Cordova, HTML5 and JavaScript, Colin Eberhardt follows a Model-View-ViewModel approach with KnockoutJS to walk you through building a Twitter Search application.

Colin Eberhardt

Building HTML5 Applications: Using HTML5 to Create Mobile Experiences

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Following on last month’s discussion of media queries, Brandon Satrom looks at the other two pillars of responsive Web design—fluid grids and flexible images. Media Queries are the engines that drive responsive, adaptive sites, but they are only effective when the designs of those sites are also responsive and adaptive. This month, I'll introduce you to some ideas around the other two pillars of "Responsive Web Design." I'll start with an overview of some up-and-coming CSS Layout modules, and then talk about some techniques for making non-textual elements like images and embedded video adaptive as well.

Brandon Satrom

ASP.NET MVC 4: What’s New for Mobile Development in ASP.NET MVC 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

With the popularity of mobile and tablet devices, it’s no surprise that improving the mobile Web site development experience was such a focus in ASP.NET MVC 4. What’s nice is how well it succeeded, as Keith Burnell explains. The article covers features in the upcoming release of ASP.NET MVC4 targeted specifically at mobile Web site development. These features range from making it easier to create a mobile specific sites to making it less work to get your standard MVC site displaying correctly on mobile devices and finally making your feel native with jQuery Mobile.

Keith Burnell

ASP.NET: Introducing the Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms Framework

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Take a fresh look at Web Forms with this new navigation framework that eliminates tight coupling and codebehind while providing for unit-tested data-bound code and many other advantages—enough to make an ASP.NET MVC application green with envy, according to creator Graham Mendick.

Graham Mendick

T4 Templates: Managing Complexity in T4 Code-Generation Solutions

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Building monolithic code generation solutions is every bit as evil as building a monolithic application. Here are all the ways you can refactor your code generation solution into reusable components.

Peter Vogel

Kinect: Multimodal Communication with Kinect

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Leland Holmquest continues to explore his virtual office assistant named “Lily,” created with a Kinect-enabled Windows Presentation Foundation application, in order to advance the means of context-aware dialogue and multimodal communication.

Leland Holmquest

Editor's Note: MSDN Magazine Welcomes ScriptJunkie

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

MSDN Magazine has added Microsoft's popular Script Junkie site for cross-browser Web development to its growing online portfolio.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Understanding the Power of WebSockets

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Achieving zero-lag connectivity between Web clients and servers requires going beyond the HTTP protocol. This is just what the WebSocket Protocol provides, and Dino Esposito explains how it's used and what it does.

Dino Esposito

Forecast: Cloudy: 5 Reasons to Start Working with Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz presents five reasons you should get started with Windows Azure today.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Dive into Neural Networks

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Neural networks can be used to solve a variety of practical problems. James McCaffrey explains what they are and presents C# code that implements a neural network.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Talk to Me, Part 3: Meet the Therapist

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

After building a simple cloud-hosted voice-input system and a chat-bot named Feliza to respond to user input in the first two parts of this series, Ted Neward takes his project a bit further by combining the two systems, showing how the host, Tropo, offers voice/SMS access over HTTP/REST-like channels.

Ted Neward

Client Insight: Advanced JsRender Templating Features

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

John Papa continues the exploration of JsRender in more scenarios such as rendering external templates, changing context with the {{for}} tag and using complex expressions. He also demonstrates how to use some of JsRender’s more powerful features including creating custom tags, converters, context helpers and allowing custom code.

John Papa

Don't Get Me Started: The Myth of Informed Consent

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Are your applications posing impossible questions to users? David Platt says too many developers are just protecting their own backsides when prompting users to make decisions they can't possibly understand.

David Platt

Web Dev Report: Integrate HTML5 into Existing ASP.NET Web Forms and MVC Applications

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In this installment of the Web Dev Report, Rachel Appel shows how HTML5 is more than just a shiny new toy when integrated into ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC applications.

Rachel Appel

Leading LightSwitch: Logging in to a LightSwitch Application Using Social Media Credentials

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Find out how to create a LightSwitch application that lets users log into Web sites using their social media credentials no matter where they are.

Jan Van der Haegen

ALM Rangers: Migrating from an On-Premise Team Foundation Server to TFS Preview Using the TFS Integration Tools

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The ALM Rangers introduce a migration from an on-premise Team Foundation Server 2010 to TFS Preview, using the latest Team Foundation Server Integration Tool.

Willy-Peter Schaub

Building HTML5 Applications: Using CSS3 Media Queries to Build a More Responsive Web

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Support for CSS3 Media Queries across all major desktop and mobile browsers means you can use context clues to deliver tailored experiences for a wide range of devices, as Brandon Satrom explains. This article provides an overview of the Media Queries CSS3 module, discusses its syntax and use, and shows a simple example that leverages Media Queries to build tablet- and smartphone-friendly views for an online photo gallery. The goal is to provide a solid foundation for creating responsive Web sites and applications using only CSS and some tailored styles.

Brandon Satrom

C++: A Code-Based Introduction to C++ AMP

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The C++ compiler shipping with Visual Studio 11 adds heterogeneous platform support through a technology called C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism. C++ AMP is a data parallel API that enables developers to take advantage of the performance of accelerators such as GPUs for executing their data parallel algorithms. This article introduces the C++ AMP API.

Daniel Moth

C++ AMP: Introduction to Tiling in C++ AMP

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In C++ AMP, the most common and first step to dialing up performance gains to the next level is through a technique called tiling. This article picks up where Daniel Moth’s introduction to C++ AMP left off, and explains how to tile your C++ AMP algorithms.

Daniel Moth

T4 Templates: Lowering the Barriers to Code Generation with T4

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft’s T4 toolkit substantially lowers the barriers for incorporating code generation into your development process. Here’s how to build, implement, and debug your code generation solution—and how to recognize opportunities for code generation solutions.

Peter Vogel

Microsoft Office: Integrating Windows Workflow Foundation with the OpenXML SDK

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how you can use the OpenXML SDK 2.0 to integrate Microsoft Office-compatible documents with Windows Workflow Foundation, without having to interact directly with the Office applications.

Rick Spiewak

Kinect: Context-Aware Dialogue with Kinect

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Project Lily, a Kinect-enabled Windows Presentation Foundation application, represents an attempt to advance the means of context-aware dialogue as well as multi-modal communication through the creation of a virtual office assistant.

Leland Holmquest

BizTalk: Batching EDI Data in BizTalk Server 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to quickly and easily extract data from a source database and implement mapping and batching using several example scenarios.

Mark Beckner

CLR: An Overview of Performance Improvements in .NET 4.5

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

It’s not always about new features. Sometimes a framework is differentiated by performance, stability and reliability. Here’s a rundown of upcoming performance improvements in the .NET Framework 4.5 that affect the CLR, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Entity Framework and more.

Ashwin Kamath

Editor's Note: More of What You Came For

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

MSDN Magazine's expanded Web coverage includes in-depth tutorials and monthly columns like Rachel Appel's Web Dev Report and Bruno Terkaly's Azure Insider.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Long Polling and SignalR

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito follows up on last month's column, discussing why long polling is useful and how you can use SignalR to facilitate real-time client/server communication.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Let Power Users Create Their Own OData Feeds

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Julie Lerman takes a look at the current preview of SQL Azure Labs Codename “Data Explorer,” and puts it to use to let a customer create his own OData feed.

Julie Lerman

Test Run: Bacterial Foraging Optimization

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Facing a tough numerical optimization problem? A probabilistic technique that models the food-seeking and reproductive behavior of common bacteria might be able to help.

James McCaffrey

Client Insight: Using JsRender with JavaScript and HTML

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

John Papa explores JsRender, the emergent technology poised to replace jQuery Templates.

John Papa

Touch and Go: Musical Instruments for Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

What could be more fun than combining audio streaming with multi-touch and turning your phone into an electronic music instrument? Charles Petzold shows you how.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Poetry of the Geeks

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

David Platt channels his inner muse, and gives new meaning to the phrase poetic license, as he surveys the verse of software and science.

David Platt

Web Dev Report: 5 Things You Need to Know about CSS

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In this second installment of her Web Development Report, Rachel Appel shows you how to create mobile-friendly HTML5 forms in ASP.NET MVC 4 projects that also use jQuery Mobile.

Rachel Appel

Windows Azure Insider: Implementing Pub/Sub Applications with SignalR

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how SignalR enables you to implement asynchronous scalable pub/sub applications with real-time, persistent and long-running connections more easily than you’ve ever imagined.

Bruno Terkaly

Leading LightSwitch: The LightSwitch MVVM Model

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In this month’s Leading LightSwitch column, Jan explains MV3, a variation of the MVVM application architecture used for LightSwitch apps that is even more powerful than the original application architecture.

Jan Van der Haegen

Windows Phone: Transforming an Android App into a Windows Phone App

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Go behind the curtain with Stan Chatman to see how he transformed his popular Hollywood Empire game app from an Android version to the Windows Phone platform.

Stan Chatman

Microsoft StreamInsight: Building the Internet of Things

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Connected devices are opening up an exciting new world of applications—and the tools for building these Internet of Things applications are available from Microsoft today. Learn how you can use your .NET skills at the device level to feed data into the powerful analytics capabilities of StreamInsight.

Colin Miller, Torsten Grabs

ASP.NET MVC 3: Develop Hybrid Native and Mobile Web Apps

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Shane Church shows you how to build a mobile Web application with ASP.NET MVC 3 and take advantage of native mobile features such as the camera and accelerometer.

Shane Church

Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus: Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

David Kean shows how to build a simple continuous client application that spans multiple devices and platforms, using the new Portable Class Libraries and the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus.

David Kean

C++: New Standard Concurrency Features in Visual C++ 11

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Explore the new Visual C++ technologies that allow applications to run independent or semi-independent activities in parallel and provide mechanisms for synchronizing the way these activities handle data to avoid race conditions.

Diego Dagum

Windows Phone: Windows Phone Data Binding

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Jesse Liberty shows the strength of XAML programming as he discusses hands-on code for data binding against runtime data, design-time data and binding one control to another.

Jesse Liberty

Building HTML5 Applications: Adding HTML5 Drag and Drop to SharePoint Lists

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

SharePoint doesn't have any built-in HTML5 goodness, but don't let that stop you. Andrey Markeev demonstrates how easy it is to add HTML5 drag-and-drop support to SharePoint—and why that's just the beginning.

Andrey Markeev

Editor's Note: What You Want

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

It's a serious challenge, balancing coverage of important new tools and technologies with those developers rely on every day.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Build a Progress Bar with SignalR

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

SignalR, a jQuery plug-in being developed by the ASP.NET MVC team, presents some extremely promising functionality currently missing from the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Entity Framework Code First and DbContext FAQs

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Lots of people have lots of questions about Code First and DbContext in Entity Framework 4.2. This month, Julie Lerman shares the answers to some of the most common ones.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Exploring Cloud Architecture

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz uses Windows Azure as the context in which to explore general architectural considerations and some base high-level designs for creating cloud-based solutions.

Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer: Talk to Me, Part 2: ELIZA

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward builds on the example in his last column with a side trip into artificial intelligence. Read on as he uses F# to create Feliza, a chatterbot based on ELIZA.

Ted Neward

Client Insight: Knockout's Built-in Bindings for HTML and JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

John Papa continues his exploration of the Knockout JavaScript library by delving into a number of the built-in bindings it offers.

John Papa

Touch and Go: Streaming Audio in Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold looks into streaming audio on Windows Phone. This occurs through a class derived from MediaStreamSource, which feeds the audio data to the OS's audio player on demand. Petzold shows how to stream audio in the background on Windows Phone OS 7.5.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Touch, Not the Mouse

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Touch is excellent for selecting among alternatives presented on-screen, but it's not the best solution in many cases.

David Platt

Web Dev Report: Manage Data in HTML5 Forms with Entity Framework

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Rachel Appel digs deeper into her look at creating mobile-friendly HTML5 forms in ASP.NET MVC 4 projects, collecting feedback data and saving it back to a database using Entity Framework.

Rachel Appel

Azure Insider: Node.js: Cloud Scaling Goodness for I/O Operations

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The new Azure Insider column kicks off with a look at Node.js, the exciting server-side JavaScript environment that can help scale your cloud applications

Bruno Terkaly

Leading LightSwitch: Consume a LightSwitch OData Service from a Windows Phone application

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Jan Van der Haegen's first LightSwitch column explores one of the key features added in the beta release of the tool--the ability to create and consume OData services, which can in turn be consumed from any client, including custom Windows Phone applications.

Jan Van der Haegen

Coded UI: Test Automation Using Visual Studio 2010 Coded UI

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Leverage the coded UI features of Visual Studio 2010 to enable a continuous, consistent and standard approach to automation for build, deploy and test.

Raj Kamal

Asynchronous Programming: Asynchronous Programming in C++ Using PPL

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Asynchronous operations are essential for building responsive and scalable applications, but using the raw WinRT API for this requires writing lots of boiler-plate code. The Parallel Patterns Library offers a new task-based programming model that makes using asynchronous operations easy and productive.

Artur Laksberg

Windows Azure: Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use RESTful Web services and Windows Azure to build apps for the wide spectrum of mobile platforms and devices that could potentially be used by millions of users.

Bruno Terkaly, Ricardo Villalobos

ASP.NET MVC: The Features and Foibles of ASP.NET MVC Model Binding

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

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

Building HTML5 Applications: Practical Cross-Browser HTML5 Audio and Video

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

John Dyer explores the benefits of using HTML5 for media playback as well as some of the major issues developers face when doing so.

John Dyer

Windows Phone: Get Your Windows Phone Applications in the Marketplace Faster

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use the Marketplace Test Kit to identify issues with an application and the Performance Analysis tool to determine the source of the issues and how to fix them.

Cheryl Simmons

Windows Workflow Foundation: What's New in Windows Workflow Foundation 4.5

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The next version of Windows Workflow Foundation introduces a range of new features and capabilities, based on lots of customer feedback. Leon Welicki gives you the details.

Leon Welicki

NuGet: Creating a NuGet Gallery

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

In the third article in our series on NuGet, Clark Sell and Mark Nichols tell you why you should consider hosting your own NuGet gallery, and how you go about setting one up.

Clark Sell

Editor's Note: Calling out the Client

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

John Papa returns to MSDN Magazine with his new column on the fast-changing arena of rich client development technologies and platforms.

Michael Desmond

Data Points: A Few of My Favorite Things... in the Entity Framework 4.2 DbContext

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The Entity Framework DbContext API simplifies many of the most common coding tasks, says Julie Lerman, who shows you her three favorite DbContext features.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Windows Azure Deployment Domains

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz considers the complexities of updating a Web application deployment, focusing on the use of fault domains and upgrade domains.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Ant Colony Optimization

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

James McCaffrey introduces the Ant Colony Optimization algorithm, an artificial intelligence technique based on the pheromone-laying behavior of ants.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Talk to Me: Voice and SMS in the Cloud

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward shows how to develop applications for Tropo, a free, cloud-hosted, voice-and-SMS solution.

Ted Neward

Client Insight: Getting Started with Knockout

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

This inaugural Client Insights column explains how to get started with the Knockout JavaScript library by learning how and where to use it.

John Papa

Touch and Go: Background Audio on Windows Phone 7.5

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone 7.5 introduces the concept of a background agent, which you can use for playing either music files or streaming audio while your program is suspended. Charles Petzold shows you how to play audio files in the background.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Ring Around My Neck

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

MSDN Magazine's "resident curmudgeon" looks at our obsession with smartphones, and how they draw us together even as they push us apart.

David Platt

Web Development Report: Build Mobile-Friendly HTML5 Forms with ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

In this second installment of her Web Development Report, Rachel Appel shows you how to create mobile-friendly HTML5 forms in ASP.NET MVC 4 projects that also use jQuery Mobile.

Rachel Appel

XAML: Optimizing C# for XAML Platforms

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

By carefully examining the code you use in your XAML applications, you can ensure that you make choices that enhance your application’s performance. Understanding the complexity of the dependency property system, the way LINQ uses collections, and the operation of the XAML layout system will help you enable faster retrievals, use loops more efficiently and optimize custom controls.

Georgi Atanasov, Tsvyatko Konov

XAML: Creating a Single Codebase for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Through five versions of Silverlight and three versions of WPF, component-maker Telerik overcame the challenges involved in creating a single codebase using both platforms. Find out what tips and tricks worked for them in handling the differences between the platforms, from optimizing theming with minimal code to implementing virtualization and container recycling to developing custom controls.

Hristo Hristov

SQL Azure: Scaling Out with SQL Azure Federation

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 GMT

George Huey explores SQL Azure Federations, and how SQL Azure Migration Wizard and SQL Azure Federation Data Migration Wizard can help simplify the migration, scale out and merge processes.

George Huey

Windows Phone 7: Your First Windows Phone Application

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Your first Windows Phone application should be interesting, but not so complex you’ll get bogged down. Jesse Liberty walks you through a simple yet handy application that touches on many aspects of building good-looking and useful XAML-based Windows Phone applications.

Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone 7: Using Cameras in Your Windows Phone Application

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone 7.5 devices can have both back and front cameras. Matt Stroshane introduces the camera APIs and associated capabilities and discusses a few ways you can use a camera in your next Windows Phone 7.5 app.

Matt Stroshane

Windows Phone 7: Design Your Windows Phone App!

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Spend time up front designing your app, Mark Hopkins advises, and you’ll save time in the coding process and reap rewards in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Mark Hopkins

Building HTML5 Applications: Using HTML5 Canvas for Data Visualization

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The new HTML5 canvas element gives you the power to create and manipulate images and animations on the fly. And it’s not just for complex projects like games. As Brandon Satrom demonstrates, you can use it to do some pretty cool data visualization as well.

Brandon Satrom

NuGet: Becoming a NuGet Author

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Clark Sell continues our series on NuGet by exploring what it takes to become a NuGet package author and how to incorporate NuGet into your development life cycle.

Clark Sell

Orchard CMS: Orchard Extensibility

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Orchard is a new open source Web CMS that puts a lot of emphasis on extensibility. This article presents some of the techniques you can apply to build unique sites and contribute to a growing ecosystem.

Bertrand Le Roy

ASP.NET Security: Securing Your ASP.NET Applications

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Continuing his exploration of ASP.NET security, Adam Tuliper takes a look at cross site scripting and cross site request forgery—how these attacks occur and what you can do to prevent them.

Adam Tuliper

Screen-Based Input: Customized On-Screen Keyboards with the .NET Framework

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to create an on-screen keyboard that uses key randomization in the .NET Framework to enhance security and the porting of applications to mobile platforms.

Christopher Frenz

SQL Server Reporting Services: Extending SSRS: Developing Custom Charting Components and Rendering Extensions

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Though SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) provides excellent charting capabilities, the native options may not always satisfy your requirements. Learn how you can create a custom charting component and integrate it with an SSRS report, and how you can develop a custom report renderer (by extending a native one) to render a report just as you’d like.

Manpreet Singh

Editor's Note: A Quarter Century and Counting

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

For 25 years, Charles Petzold has been writing about software development in the pages of MSDN Magazine, going back to the very first issue of Microsoft Systems Journal.

Michael Desmond

The Cutting Edge: Enhancing the Context-Sensitive ASP.NET MVC Progress Bar

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Canceling an ongoing server-side task from within a client browser is not a trivial operation, but Dino Esposito meets the challenge as he enhances last month’s context-sensitive progress bar with cancel capabilities.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Making Do with Absent Foreign Keys

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The absence of foreign key properties in classes adds some challenges to working in disconnected apps. In this column, Julie Lerman explores behavior with inserts and updates when no foreign key is available and demonstrates how to make Entity Framework toe the line.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Windows Azure Caching Strategies

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz maps Windows Azure caching capabilities to caching strategies for output, in-memory data and file resources, balancing the desire for fresh data with the desire for the best performance.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Simulated Annealing and Testing

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

James McCaffrey explores an artificial intelligence technique based on the behavior of cooling metal.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Building Combinators

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward finishes his discussion of parser combinators by extending the Spache library to parse the exact number of parsers you pass to it, incidentally demonstrating the power of functional programming.

Ted Neward

Touch and Go: Playing Audio Files in Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Before he tackles the new background audio capability in Windows Phone OS 7.1, Charles Petzold explores the ins and outs of the more standard way to play songs.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Lowering Higher Education

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

The Internet is set to hammer the higher education industry in the same way it hammered the newspaper industry. I hope that my industry will respond to this challenge with creativity and imagination that will make the world a better place. I expect to find the landscape radically different when my daughters start college, 9 years from now.

David Platt

Agile Development: Working with Agile in a Distributed Team Environment

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

Using what the author calls “de-Agile,” teams can tailor Agile processes to overcome the obstacles of working in a distributed environment. The article recommends best practices based on the author's experience working with remote teams.

Sandeep Joshi

Web Development Report: Getting Started with Mobile Web Development Using HTML5, jQuery Mobile and ASP.NET MVC 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:00:00 GMT

This first installment of the Web Development Report column explains how using jQuery Mobile library and ASP.NET MVC 4 with HTML5 can help you create small, maintainable code bases that work on many mobile devices. The key is data-* attributes.

Rachel Appel

MVPVM Design Pattern: The Model-View-Presenter-ViewModel Design Pattern for WPF

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Bill Kratochvil delves deep into the history of design patterns as he presents the advantages of developing extensible enterprise apps with what he calls the MVPVM pattern, inspired by the Microsoft patterns & practices Prism project.

Bill Kratochvil

Building HTML5 Applications: Integrating Geolocation into Web Applications

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Much of what the world is calling HTML5 is a set of technologies geared toward making real application development possible on the Web—and geolocation is a great example. Brandon Satrom introduces the Geolocation spec and shows you how to get started using it in your applications.

Brandon Satrom

ASP.NET Security: Hack-Proofing Your ASP.NET Applications

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Almost every day, the mainstream media reports that another site has been hacked. Luckily, many of these attacks are surprisingly easy to protect against. Adam Tuliper explains how these attacks occur and discusses best practices for preventing them.

Adam Tuliper

Sysinternals ProcDump v4.0: Writing a Plug-in for Sysinternals ProcDump v4.0

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Capturing a memory dump of an application is a common troubleshooting tactic, but most dump capture tools give you either too much or too little. Now Sysinternals ProcDump v4.0 let you make the memory inclusion decisions, as Andrew Richards explains.

Andrew Richards

Video Encoding: Saving and Reusing Settings for Video Encoding

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Here's a simple way to allow video-processing applications to save compressed video using any codec available on the machine, without the need to manually specify the codec settings each time the app is started or used on multiple/remote/embedded machines.

Adi Shavit

ALM Rangers: Visual Studio ALM Rangers -- Rise of the VM Factory

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The Rangers are back with some ALM guidance about the use of the Virtual Machine Factory, exploring its concepts and advantages.

Willy-Peter Schaub, Brian Blackman, Paul Meyer

Editor's Note: 31 Days of Mango

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Michael Desmond

The Cutting Edge: A Context-Sensitive Progress Bar for ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito tackles the issue of reporting the status of remote operations, providing context-sensitive feedback that faithfully represents the status of the operation for a given session.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Thread Pool Timers and I/O

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Kenny Kerr finishes his series on the Windows 7 thread pool by delving into the two remaining callback-generating objects provided by the API—timer objects and I/O completion objects.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Handling Entity Framework Validations in WCF Data Services

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Windows 8 Metro Style adds yet another UI that can consume OData. Julie Lerman helps you sharpen your OData creation skills with WCF Data Services, Code First and the Entity Framework Validation API.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Completing the Trip with AppFabric Queues

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Joseph Fultz completes his store inventory project based on the new features found in the Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus, using a mix of Topics and Queues.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Tabu Algorithms and Maximum Clique

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Dr. McCaffrey wraps up his examination of the challenging and mysterious maximum clique problem—often used in social networking scenarios—with an advanced solution called the tabu algorithm.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Parser Combinators

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward puts parser combinators to work in a real-life scenario as he designs custom configurations for neuro-optical scientific experiments in which optical tissue is stimulated and the results are recorded.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Video Feeds on Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

While the initial release of Windows Phone included only one camera API, that deficiency has been corrected with two new sets of APIs that Charles uses to have some fun with video.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Jobs and Ritchie: Entangled Photons

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Steve Jobs died on October 5, and the tributes resounded through the universe. Far less noted was the passing of Dennis Ritchie on October 8. He deserves more recognition than he’s gotten, because Jobs couldn’t have accomplished anywhere near what he did without Ritchie’s work.

David Platt

Windows Phone: How To Translate Common Design Principles To The Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Using the Metro design language, Windows Phone has set a new bar for smart phone navigation. The physical Back button, the Application Bar, and the built-in controls Panorama and Pivot are must-know navigation standards for developers designing applications for Windows Phone.

Jeff E. Smith

Windows Phone: A Mobile Phone Is Not Just a Small Computer

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Designing applications for mobile phones poses a unique set of challenges for developers accustomed to desktop environments. An expert in Web and software UX design offers guidance on how to optimize your smart phone apps.

Marshal Datkowitz

NoSQL Document Database: Embedding RavenDB into an ASP.NET MVC 3 Application

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Nevermore shall we hear the cries of a lack of nonrelational love for the Microsoft stack, says Justin Schwartzenberger. He demonstrates how exploring the NoSQL world is easy with RavenDB, a .NET/Windows-centric document data store solution that can run in an embedded mode within an ASP.NET MVC application.

Justin Schwartzenberger

Windows Phone SDK 7.1: Building a 'Mango' App

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This article walks you through creating an application that uses three of the big new Windows Phone 7.1 features: local databases, live tiles and Silverlight/XNA integration. The theme of the application is mangoes—with mango recipes, mango cocktails and a mango shooter game.

Andrew Whitechapel

LightSwitch and Windows Azure: Deploying LightSwitch Applications to Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this article Mike Wade shows how to deploy an application built using Visual Studio LightSwitch to Windows Azure, which eliminates the need to dedicate resources to infrastructure management.

Mike Wade

Building HTML5 Applications: Better Web Forms with HTML5 Forms

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

A number of new input types in HTML5 make creating Web forms easier than ever, and the best thing about these new types is that they’ll work at some level in all browsers. Brandon Satrom shows you how to start using HTML5 forms in your applications today.

Brandon Satrom

NuGet: Manage Project Libraries with NuGet

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

NuGet is a package manager for developers that puts the best .NET libraries just a click away. It provides acess to free developer libraries and supports a model where companies can set up a private “app store” to manage libraries in their company. Learn how to work with NuGet to streamline your projects.

Phil Haack

SharePoint Security: Custom Claims-Based Security in SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn about the new claims-based identity model in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 as you explore the process of building a custom claims provider in SharePoint, integrating it with FAST Search and managing claims-enabled content.

Ivory Feng, Patrick Stanko, Shabbir Darugar

Silverlight 3D: Developing 3D Objects in Silverlight

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn to create 3D objects in three different ways; the key elements needed to display a 3D object on the screen; and how Silverlight 5 will allow you to go beyond what’s available today and create much richer 3D objects.

Rajesh Lal

Editor's Note: A Game of Risk

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft's Windows Runtime announced at the BUILD Conference in September aims to broaden the definition of the Windows developer.

Michael Desmond

The Cutting Edge: Design of a Domain Model

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Code First encourages the application of domain-driven design principles in the .NET space. However, writing an object model for a realistic scenario raises some issues that currently are not well-addressed. Dino Esposito takes up that challenge.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Thread Pool Synchronization

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Blocking operations are bad news for concurrency. You need a way for the thread pool to wait on your behalf without affecting its concurrency limits. It can then queue a callback once the resource is available or the time has elapsed. Along with work objects, the thread pool API provides a number of other callback-generating objects. Here, Kenny Kerr shows how to use wait objects.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: What the Heck Are Document Databases?

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Our resident database expert explores some of the major players in the NoSQL world and shares what she’s learned. If you’re a database developer wondering what all the fuss is about, this overview of the MongoDB, CouchDB and RavenDB document databases is for you.

Julie Lerman

Test Run: Greedy Algorithms and Maximum Clique

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Dr. McCaffrey this month presents a greedy algorithm as a solution to the graph maximum clique problem, which is to find the largest group of nodes in a graph that are all connected to one another. He explains how to design and test these algorithms to solve the problem.

James McCaffrey

UI Frontiers: Finishing the E-Book Reader

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold finishes his Windows Phone 7 e-book reader with a Web service that gets the catalog file from Project Gutenberg, and a Pivot control to display a search screen and a list of downloaded books.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: BUILD: Microsoft's Call to Arms

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

David Platt says the Microsoft BUILD Conference revealed something he has not seen for a long, long time: Real excitement around Microsoft's platform strategy.

David Platt

HTML5: HTML5 Offline Applications: ‘Donut Hole’ Caching

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The example in this tutorial demonstrates how to cache a “Contact Us” page that displays notifications of upcoming events to users. When a user is connected to the Web, live event listings are displayed; otherwise, a telephone number prompts the user to call for event information. This approach keeps the user informed and connected with or without access to the public Web.

Craig Shoemaker

HTML5: Working with Media in HTML5

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

HTML5 delivers new ways to view and play audio and video files in an HTML page. The days of needing a Flash plugin to play a video or mp3 in your web pages will soon be over. In this article you will learn about the media capabilities in HTML5 and how you can use them in your modern web applications. In this article you will learn: What HTML5 is and why it is important for building media applications on the Internet; and how to play media in an HTML5 page.

Jason Beres

HTML5: 12 Cool Geolocation Ideas and How to Use Them

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

It used to be that users had to actively input their location and submit it to a site—either by typing it in, using a loooong drop-down list, or clicking a map. Now, with the help of Geolocation API, this once menial task can become virtually seamless.

Danwei Tran Luciani

HTML5: Responsive Web Design

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:00:00 GMT

At the basis of Responsive web design there are three technical key features that define the concept: Media queries and media query listeners, Flexible images and media, either through dynamic resizing or CSS, A flexible grid-based layout (using em sizing)

Katrien De Graeve

Asynchronous Programming: Easier Asynchronous Programming with the New Visual Studio Async CTP

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

There are many different techniques for achieving a responsive user interface in a program that performs high-latency operations, but the difficulty factor of doing so is high. The next version of C# and Visual Basic will include a new form of asynchronous control flow that avoids both the dangers of multithreading and the pain of writing callback methods.

Eric Lippert

Asynchronous Programming: Pause and Play with Await

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Asynchronous methods in the upcoming versions of Visual Basic and C# are a great way to get the callbacks out of your asynchronous programming. Mads Torgersen takes a closer look at what the new await keyword actually does, starting at the conceptual level and working down to the iron.

Mads Torgersen

Asynchronous Programming: Async Performance: Understanding the Costs of Async and Await

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

It’s easy to get started writing asynchronous methods in C# and Visual Basic, but there can be hidden performance costs. Stephen Toub explores the ins and outs of asynchronous methods to give you a solid understanding of how they’re implemented under the covers and show some of the more nuanced costs involved.

Stephen Toub

LightSwitch Security: Securing Access to LightSwitch Applications

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio LightSwitch is an exciting new product that helps developers quickly and easily build business applications. This article explores the challenge of securing three-tier applications and describes how developers can use the access control features in LightSwitch to secure their applications.

Valerie Andersen, Matt Evans, Sheel Shah, Michael Simons

F# Programming: Authoring an F#/C# VSIX Project Template

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Encourage reuse and cut out those repetitive, time-wasting setup chores by creating a Visual Studio Extension project template composed of a C# ASP.NET MVC 3 Web app and two F# libraries.

Dan Mohl

Silverlight: Harnessing the Power of the Dynamics CRM 4.0 API from Silverlight 4

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Building Silverlight applications that can interact directly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 can prove challenging, but here’s a little help in the form of an in-depth walkthrough on how to do it right.

Mark Beckner

SharePoint Development: Building Information Architecture in SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use new SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Content Management capabilities to build and implement flexible information architecture for Internet-facing publishing and knowledge management portals.

Shahram Khosravi

HTML5: Browser and Feature Detection

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If you’re building a Web site, you don’t just want it to look terrific today; you want it to dazzle for a long time to come. That means your site has to work not only in today’s browsers, but also in future versions. Tthis article presents tips and best practices to help you achieve this goal.

Sascha P. Corti

HTML5: Writing a Business-Oriented JavaScript Web Application

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft sees HTML5 and JavaScript as key for Windows developers. To help you learn to write production-ready JavaScript, we walk you through creating a basic business application.

Frank Prößdorf, Dariusz Parys

Editor's Note: Thinkin' About Async

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The addition of asynchronous programming support to C# and Visual Basic marks the latest in a series of important evolutionary steps for Microsoft's flagship managed programming languages.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Objects and the Art of Data Modeling

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Today’s apps are too often built around a single data model, says Dino Esposito. He discusses strategies to handle situations where multiple models provide more flexibility and help you develop more layered and robust applications.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: Thread Pool Cancellation and Cleanup

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Cancellation and cleanup are notoriously difficult problems to solve when it comes to multi-threaded applications. However, the thread pool environment enables cleanup groups, which make the thread pool’s objects and callbacks more manageable, as Kenny Kerr details.

Kenny Kerr

Forecast: Cloudy: The Windows Azure AppFabric Service Bus: Topics

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With the AppFabric CTP June Update, the AppFabric Service Bus now offers Topics, a rich, new publish-and-subscribe capability. Joseph Fultz shows how this new messaging technology can be used to facilitate inter-store inventory checks.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Graph Structures and Maximum Clique

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In computer science, the maximum clique problem is challenging and not completely understood. But the code used to solve it can help developers out in important areas such as social networking. So dig in.

James McCaffrey

UI Frontiers: Pages and Pop-ups in Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Charles turns to the horror genre in celebration of Halloween as he improves his e-book reader with the addition of “a whole bunch of dialog boxes” to aid in navigation and enhance user interaction.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Imagine That

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The finals of the 2011 Imagine Cup software competition drew 128 teams from across the globe to New York City. David Platt found that the innovative entries weren't the only amazing thing about the event

David Platt

SQL Server Development Tools: The 'Juneau' Database Project

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With the new Database Project in the latest version of SQL Server Developer Tools, you can now perform your database development in the same environment as your application development. We introduce the new release.

Jamie Laflen, Barclay Hill

Entity Framework: New Features in the Entity Framework June CTP

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The Microsoft Entity Framework (EF) June 2011 CTP brings support for a number of the features developers want most, like enums, spatial types, and TVFs. Srikanth Mandadi introduces these new features by walking you through some simple examples.

Srikanth Mandadi

Open Data Protocol: Build Great Experiences on Any Device with OData

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With smartphone shipments recently outpacing PC shipments for the first time, many organizations want to target client experiences on multiple platforms, such as the desktop, Web, phones and tablets. The Open Data Protocol can help, as you’ll see with here with several detailed examples.

Shayne Burgess

Building Apps with HTML5: No Browser Left Behind: An HTML5 Adoption Strategy

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

As much as the development community and latest browsers are pushing the HTML5 hype up to a fever pitch, the vast majority of people on the web aren’t using those brand new browsers and versions. But that doesn’t mean you have to put off using HTML5 till the next decade. In this column, Brandon Satrom provides some practical strategies for how you can adopt HTML5 technologies today.

Brandon Satrom

F# Programming: Build MVVM Applications in F#

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

F# is known for its ability to simplify complicated problems, but it’s far more than that. Chris Marinos shows you how to use F# to build practical Silverlight and WPF MVVM applications. You’ll learn how useful F# can be for solving everyday problems, and you’ll see how to use F# to make even the simplest applications easier to read, write, and maintain.

Chris Marinos

ALM Guidance: Visual Studio ALM Rangers—Reflections on Virtual Teams

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Who wants to get up at 3 a.m. for a status meeting? Learn valuable lessons about organizing and managing teams with members around the globe, who have various skills, motivations, commitments, project affiliations and restrictions.

Willy-Peter Schaub, Brian Blackman

Editor's Note: 'Mango': Innovation from the Inside Out

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Michael Desmond's first Editor's Note looks to the broad implications of the Windows Phone 7 "Mango" update.

Michael Desmond

Cutting Edge: Software Disasters: Recovery and Prevention Strategies

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Have you ever had to deal with the infamous “big ball of mud” clogging up your project? Learn the best practices to help fix a deteriorated system and patterns to prevent a growing system from growing badly and uncontrolled, degrading over time.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: The Thread Pool Environment

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Our resident C++ guru continues his exploration of the thread pool, this month examining objects that control the environment in which callbacks execute.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Second-Level Caching in the Entity Framework and AppFabric

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Sometimes useful state information about an Entity Framework context is lost when the context goes out of scope, but Julie Lerman explains how a second-level cache can help retain this information for further use, such as in automatically generated database persistence commands, for example.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Reporting on Diagnostics Data

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The SQL Azure Reporting CTP gives developers a familiar paradigm for developing and distributing reports—except that no one has to worry about the infrastructure to host it. Joseph Fultz demonstrates with a simple example that uses data from performance counters captured as part of the diagnostics for a Web Role.

Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 10: Choosing an Approach

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this last article in his series on multiparadigmatic programming, Ted Neward helps you think about how to consider which paradigms to choose when designing an application.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Touch for Text

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Text selection can be awkward on a touch interface, but it offers too many benefits to ignore. Charles Petzold shows you how to implement this feature in the context of an e-book reader, using concepts that can be applied to any Windows Phone program that displays text to the screen and allows the reader to interact with that text.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Development Is Design

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The user experience is determined by your development skills, and not how pretty your UI is.

David Platt

Visual Studio LightSwitch: Advanced Programming Made Easy With Lightswitch

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio LightSwitch dramatically simplifies the development of data-centric business applications because it takes care of all the plumbing for you, as Beth Massi illustrates with a sample application.

Beth Massi

Visual Studio LightSwitch: Build Business Applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Get hands-on experience with this new product in the Visual Studio family aimed at developers of all skill levels who want to quickly create data-centric business applications for the desktop, Web and cloud.

Robert Green

HTML5: Building Apps with HTML5: What You Need to Know

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this article — the first of a series that aims to show you how you can use HTML5 to build apps for the Web — Brandon Satrom introduces HTML5, describes Microsoft’s approach to the new standard and helps you think about how to adopt HTML5 technologies.

Brandon Satrom

Team Foundation Server and Exchange: Build a Ticketing System Using Exchange and Team Foundation Server

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

What do you get if you combine the Team Foundation Server work item tracking functionality with the Exchange Web Services push notification? A unified support ticketing system that integrates e-mail and work items. Mohammad Jalloul shows you how to build it.

Mohammad Jalloul

Parallel Programming: The Past, Present and Future of Parallelizing .NET Applications

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In the world of multi-core and manycore everywhere, parallelism is now something every developer must at least consider, and something that the millions of developers that use managed languages must be able to take advantage of. Stephen Toub shows how parallelism is evolving in .NET.

Stephen Toub

Multi-Platform Development: Portable Class Libraries: A Primer

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

We walk you through a demo application to show how Portable Class Library projects can generate a managed assembly that can be referenced by Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Xbox 360 platforms.

Bill Kratochvil

Artificial Intelligence: Particle Swarm Optimization

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is an artificial intelligence technique which can be used to find approximate solutions to extremely difficult or impossible numeric maximization or minimization problems. It's loosely modeled on group behavior such as bird flocking and fish schooling.

James McCaffrey

Editor's Note: F-Sharp Focus

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The creator of the F# language explains why he felt it was necessary.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Static Code Analysis and Code Contracts

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito delves into static code analysis and discusses how it can be used with Code Contracts to save you time in your builds and, more importantly, save you from nasty bugs that hit your software only in corner cases.

Dino Esposito

Windows With C++: The Windows Thread Pool and Work

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Concurrency means a lot of different things to different people, but at the heart of any contemporary approach is some kind of a thread pool. Here, Kenny Kerr explains how to best use the Windows thread pool API.

Kenny Kerr

Forecast: Cloudy: Searching Windows Azure Storage with Lucene.Net

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

There isn’t yet a lot of support for a cloud-deployed search solution, but with Windows Azure, Lucene.Net and a bit of OpenXML, just about any searching requirements can be met. Joseph Fultz gets you started with a sample implementation.

Joseph Fultz

UI Frontiers: Font Metrics in Silverlight

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Silverlight is a graphical environments that doesn’t provide font metrics to application program developers, so Charles Petzold shows you a workaround to help you lay out text and pages.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Power of the Default

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The default settings can make or break your program. Treat them with respect.

David Platt

ASP.NET WebGrid: Get the Most out of WebGrid in ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Along with the recent WebMatrix release there are a set of productivity helpers including WebGrid and Chart. WebGrid provides a productive way to render tabular data. This article will show the productivity benefits of the WebGrid and to present a few key pointers for effectively working with WebGrid for ASP.NET MVC developers.

Stuart Leeks

SharePoint Development: Build Workflow Solutions for SharePoint Online

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this follow-up to his March article, Chris Mayo illustrates workflow support in SharePoint Online by extending the purchasing solution to include a workflow solution, then extending the workflow with a custom workflow action developed with Visual Studio.

Chris Mayo

Web Development: Visual Studio 2010 SP1 for Web Developers

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Check out the goodies for Web developers in the new Visual Studio service pack, including integration with new offerings of the Microsoft Web Platform, such as IIS Express, SQL Server CE, the Razor syntax, the Web Platform Installer and much more.

Deepak Verma, Scott Hanselman

Silverlight Localization: Tips and Tricks for Loading Silverlight Locale Resources, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This article would be a follow up discussion from the March 2011 article, talking about server side components that are very helpful in rounding off the localization solution. There are a couple of very interesting techniques that we are using including inserting resources into dynamically generated XAP files and on demand generation of resource files.

Matthew Delisle

Windows PowerShell with WPF: Secrets to Building a WPF Application in Windows PowerShell

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Is it a command-line interface, a scripting language or an API? Windows PowerShell is all three, says Doug Finke, who shows you how to tweak Windows PowerShell to build a net present value calculator presented in classic Windows Presentation Foundation GUI style. Special bonus: Windows PowerShell creator Jeffrey Snover weighs in on the Ad Hoc development model and origin of the language.

Douglas Finke

MVC Filters: Easily Add Performance Counters to Your MVC Application

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Ben Grover adds performance counters to a Model-View-Controller (MVC) app and explains how to use MVC filters to clean up and replace repeated, confusing code that was spread throughout numerous action methods in an application.

Ben Grover

Mobile Browsing: Build a Better Mobile Browsing Experience

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If you’re building a public Web site, you need to support mobile browsers. This article explains why this is more important than ever, and suggests techniques for building great mobile browser experiences on ASP.NET Web Forms and Model-View-Controller, including browser detection, generating mobile-specific markup and optimizing usability.

Steven Sanderson

Editor's Note: Why C++ Still Matters

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This month, we welcome the return of Kenny Kerr’s Windows with C++ column. To celebrate, we asked him some questions about where C++ fits into today’s development environment.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: Tools and Techniques for .NET Code Profiling

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Premature optimization may be the root of all evil, but at some point in your app's development cycle you're going to need to analyze your code for performance and memory use. Here's a collection of profiling tools and information that will help make you a lean, mean coding machine.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Code Contracts: Inheritance and the Liskov Principle

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito goes further into his exploration of Code Contracts in the .NET Framework, explaining what they’re used for, how they compare to assertions and tests and how they can help you improve the quality of your software design.

Dino Esposito

Windows with C++: C++ and the Windows API

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Kenny resumes his monthly column with MSDN Magazine with a fresh new approach to Windows programming with C++. In this first installment you will learn how to manage Windows API resources in a way that is natural for the contemporary C++ developer. This is a critical first step in becoming a productive Windows developer.

Kenny Kerr

Data Points: Demystifying Entity Framework Strategies, Part 3: Classes, Queries and Contexts

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Julie Lerman takes on code generation in her third column exploring important decisions you have to make when using the Entity Framework, while also discussing the ObjectContext vs. DbContext choice and query building options.

Julie Lerman

Mobile Matters: Make Money with the Microsoft Ad Control

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Even if you’re just a hobbyist Windows Phone 7 developer producing free apps, the easy-to-use (and free) Microsoft Ad Control lets you monetize your apps with automatic embedded advertising. See just how easy it is to get started.

Arthur Bierer, Boris Feldman

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 9: Functional Programming

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The ninth in our series on multiparadigmatic programming focuses on functional programming, which is about treating functions as values—and which offers operations similar to what LINQ-to-Objects provides.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

For the most fluid page transitions in an e-book, the user interface needs to support three distinct pages—the current page, the next page, and the previous page. Charles Petzold describes a flexible way to implement this using three different page transitions.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: When Security Doesn't Make Sense

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

It’s usually the fault of the developer -- rather than the end user -- when security isn’t applied.

David Platt

Agile C++: Agile C++ Development and Testing with Visual Studio and TFS

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

One aspect of Agile development includes writing automated tests, but that gets complicated when your project mixes C# and C++ code. We'll show you how one team at Microsoft uses Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server to streamline native and managed development.

John Socha-Leialoha

Agile Development: Make Agile Work for You in TFS 2010

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Get an inside peek into internal Microsoft development practices as Chris Adams documents his team’s move to Agile using Team Foundation Server 2010, starting out with the Microsoft Solutions Framework Agile v5.0 process template and eventually switching to the Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 1.0 template.

Chris Adams

Debugger Engine API: Writing a Debugging Tools for Windows Extension, Part 3: Clients and Callbacks

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this third article of a series we delve deeper into the relationship between a debugger extension and the debugger, examining the architecture of debugger clients and debugger callbacks.

Andrew Richards

Multi-Targeting: Build Multi-Targeted Apps for the Desktop, Prism and Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Why duplicate efforts when you can use a single codebase to create multi-targeted applications? We walk you through the process, using Prism, dependency injection and patterns such as MVP and MVVM

Bill Kratochvil

StreamInsight: Master Large Data Streams with Microsoft StreamInsight

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Analyzing and responding to information in large, near real-time streams of data is crucial to many businesses, but traditionally it's been difficult to perform historical and real time queries using the same toolsets and query languages. We'll show you how StreamInsight changes that.

Rob Pierry

Windows Phone 7: Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to leverage the Sterling open source database library to persist and query data locally in Windows Phone 7 apps with minimal effort, along with a simple strategy for managing state when an application is deactivated upon a user switching to another application.

Jeremy Likness

Editor's Note: The Best of Times

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

If you’re a builder of software, take heart: You’re living in the greatest development era ever.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Invariants and Inheritance in Code Contracts

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

After discussing two of the most common types of software contracts—preconditions and postconditions—Dino this month introduces the third most important type of contract—the invariant—and proceeds to examine the behavior of contract-based classes when you apply inheritance.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Demystifying Entity Framework Strategies: Loading Related Data

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With the Entity Framework, modeling the data is just a first step. You'll also need to use the right tools for querying and loading your data. We'll show you the options and help you choose the right ones for your application.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Multi-Platform Windows Azure Storage

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure is far from a single-platform environment. To demonstrate its power, we'll build the same app for three different mobile devices: Windows Phone 7, jQuery and Android.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Curved Lines for Bing Maps AJAX

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This month’s dual-purpose column provides a walkthrough of a JavaScript function to draw a Bezier curve on a Bing Maps AJAX map control along with guidelines for testing a nontrivial JavaScript function.

James McCaffrey

Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 8: Dynamic Programming

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In as far as it goes, parametric metaprogramming provides some powerful solutions. But it’s not the be-all, end-all answer to every design problem. Dynamic languages take the concept of name-bound execution to its highest degree. Let's see how it works.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Principles of Pagination

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

E-book readers are simple, right? Just render some text and a way you go. Well, maybe it's not that simple after all. We start building an e-book reader for Windows Phone 7 by investigating the mechanism behind paginating the text.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Will Microsoft Learn DEC’s Lesson?

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft, for all the things it does right, still thinks like a PC company. For it to survive, that needs to change.

David Platt

Debugger Engine API: Writing a Debugging Tools for Windows Extension, Part 2: Output

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Continuing to work on his Debugger Engine extension, Andrew Richards shows you how to avoid all the dangerous traps you might find as you enhance the tool’s output.

Andrew Richards

Web Migration: Moving Your Web App from WebMatrix to ASP.NET MVC 3

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The Web Pages page-centric programming model supported by WebMatrix is a great way to get Web apps up and running. If you later decide that embracing ASP.NET MVC would give you more flexibility, you're covered. We’ll explain why you might choose to migrate and show you how to do it.

Brandon Satrom, Clark Sell

Windows API Wait Functions: DynWaitList: ID-Based Windows Event Multiplexing

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Event signals are identified by indexes into an array of object handles, which is problematic with dynamic arrays where events are added or removed from the middle of the list. Here’s a container class to solve the problem.

Alex Gimenez

Location-Aware Programming: Visualizing Bing Routes on Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to bring location-aware features into your Windows Phone 7 applications and visualize routes and locations in different ways as you build an app that shows you the location of nearby restaurants.

Sandrino Di Mattia

Business Connectivity Services: Consuming External OData Feeds with SharePoint BCS

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) for Microsoft Office and SharePoint helps you bring external data sources into your SharePoint apps. We'll show you how to write a custom .NET Assembly Connector for BCS that lets you read from and write to an OData feed.

Eric White

Entity Framework: Code First in the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The latest version of the Entity Framework includes two new main features: the DbContext API and the Code First development pattern. We show you how to use these to develop applications, starting with the basics and moving on to more advanced techniques.

Rowan Miller

Editor's Note: Staying Put

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

You don’t have to move to the “hot” areas of development. Old school still has its place.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Code Contracts Settings in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Code contracts in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 rely on a few features in Visual Studio 2010. We'll review the project options for code contracts, how they affect the rewriter tool and some best practices for argument validation.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Demystifying Entity Framework Strategies: Model Creation Workflow

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The Entity Framework now includes more ways than ever to create a conceptual model, starting first with just your code, a model created with the visual designer, or a legacy database. We help you choose which one’s right for you.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Load Balancing Private Endpoints on Worker Roles

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

A client needed to load-balance private service endpoints on Windows Azure Worker Roles without taking on the latency of a queuing operation. I'll walk you through one possible solution to this problem.

Joseph Fultz

Mobile Matters: Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone 7 deals with memory and resource constraints through feature called tombstoning. We'll discuss the role tombstoning plays in the application lifecycle and demonstrate how you can implement it in your own apps.

Jaime Rodriguez

Test Run: Super-Simple Mutation Testing

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Mutation testing is known for being difficult and expensive, but we’re here to show you a real-world system you can build in just a few hours with a little C# code and Visual Studio.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 7: Parametric Metaprogramming

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

In this series we've examined procedural and structural programming, objects, and metaobjects. Now let's take a look at generics and put them to work as an example of parametric polymorphism in action.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Silverlight Printing Basics

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Get a handle on the nuts and bolts of adding printing capabilities to your Silverlight apps as Charles walks through programs to print an ellipse, an image and a calendar.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: R.I.P., DEC

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Digital Equipment Corporation was an industry pioneer. Its eventual demise doesn’t change that fact.

David Platt

Cloud Cache: Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Caching Service

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure AppFabric Caching service provides an easy-to-use cache in the cloud that you can employ for application data, maintaining session state, and other tasks. We'll show you how to start using the Cache service in your apps today.

Wade Wegner, Karandeep Anand

Windows Azure Development: CQRS on Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how Command Query Responsibility Segregation represents a shift from more classic, three-tier application architecture toward a message-based, asynchronous pattern. We walk you through a reservation booking app to demonstrate how CQRS lends itself to Windows Azure development.

Mark Seemann

MapReduce in F#: Parsing Log Files with F#, MapReduce and Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

F# is a powerful new dynamic language for .NET developers. We'll show you how powerful by whipping up a MapReduce algorithm in F# for parsing Windows Azure log files.

Noah Gift

Team Foundation Server: Visual Studio TFS Team Project and Collection Guidance

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft’s expert “Ranger” team presents guidance for organizing and provisioning Team Foundation Server Team Projects and Team Project Collections.

Willy-Peter Schaub, Mike Schimmel

Natural Algorithms: Use Bee Colony Algorithms to Solve Impossible Problems

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Simulated Bee Colony (SBC) algorithms model the behavior of honey bees and can be used to find solutions to difficult or impossible combinatorial problems. In this article I explain what exactly SBC algorithms are, describe the types of problems which can be solved using SBC algorithms, and present a complete end-to-end example which uses an SBC algorithm to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem.

James McCaffrey

ASP.NET Web Pages: Introduction to WebMatrix

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This new site editor for ASP.NET Web Pages is different from the usual Microsoft product. See how it simplifies everything from site creation to data access to deployment and even Search Engine Optimization.

Clark Sell

Editor's Note: Cancel This!

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

One man’s journey into the dark heart of a Web site.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: F# Tools and Resources

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

F# is a new functional, type-safe programming language for the .NET Framework. It may be a relatively young language, but F# has quickly developed a cult following within the programming community. Here's a guide to the tools and resources that will help you get started.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Give Your Classes a Software Contract

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With the .NET Framework 4, software contracts are available and even integrated with Visual Studio. We show you the benefits of a contact-first approach, such as code maintainability and ease of development.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Composing WPF DataGrid Column Templates for a Better User Experience

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Julie Lerman struggled for days with some vexing user experience problems related to the WPF DataGrid, so she’s saving you the bother by explaining how she solved them.

Julie Lerman

Mobile Matters: Windows Phone Navigation, Part 2: Advanced Recipes

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Following up on last month’s examination of basic Windows Phone navigation techniques, we now present step-by-step instructions for more advanced scenarios.

Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty

UI Frontiers: Lissajous Animations in Silverlight

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

The pattern created by the interaction of two sine waves is a Lissajous curve – you've probably seen one on an oscilloscope. We'll show you how to make one in Silverlight for the Web or Windows Phone 7.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Cat Butt Factor

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Do you plan for all contingencies when building your program—including cat butts?

David Platt

SharePoint Online: Cloud-Based Collaboration with SharePoint Online

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how SharePoint Online development is similar to and different from SharePoint 2010 development by following along with Chris Mayo as he builds solutions that run in the cloud.

Chris Mayo

BizTalk EDI Solutions: Processing Health Care Claims with BizTalk Server 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

BizTalk Server 2010 introduces a variety of new functionality for developing and configuring EDI solutions. This article walks through each of the key stages to BizTalk EDI development and introduces a number of techniques to aid the developer.

Mark Beckner

Silverlight Localization: Tips and Tricks for Loading Silverlight Locale Resources

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Your customers deserve to enjoy your Silverlight app with locale-appropriate resources. We'll show you some tricks for creating, loading, and changing locales at run time.

Matthew Delisle

Debugging Engine API: Writing a Debugging Tools for Windows Extension

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learning how to debug is a crucial developer skill. Fortunately, Visual Studio provides great tools for helping you debug your code. We'll cover the basics of building a custom debugger extension so you can analyze dump files (and also live systems) with ease.

Andrew Richards

RIA Frameworks: Building Data-Centric Web Apps with ASP.NET MVC and Ext JS

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

JavaScript frameworks provide an alternative to plug-ins for rich web app front ends. We'll show you how to use the Ext JS library and ASP.NET MVC to quickly build a robust data-centric solution.

Juan Carlos Olamendy

Cache Integration: Building and Using Custom OutputCache Providers in ASP.NET

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

With the .NET Framework 4.0, you can now boost performance by replacing the default ASP.NET output cache with your own implementation. We show you how to do this with the MongoDB "NoSQL" database in a simple ASP.NET MVC app and then we swap out the custom provider to leverage features of Windows Azure AppFabric.

Brandon Satrom

Editor's Note: How to Get Rejected

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

A guide to not getting published in MSDN Magazine.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: Data Integration Tools and Resources

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Data integration is the cornerstone of many apps these days, which means you’ll need to add database expert to the many hats you wear. Or maybe not. We’ll show you some handy tools and resources for maximizing data access while minimizing muss and fuss.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Application Extensibility: MEF vs. IoC

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

You can create extensible apps using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), which is built right into the .NET Framework 4. We'll walk through an example to compare plug-in implementations using both MEF and Inversion of Control frameworks.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Server-Side Paging with the Entity Framework and ASP.NET MVC 3

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

You don't always need to get huge amounts of data with your database queries. See how Julie Lerman uses new features of ASP.NET MVC 3 and Entity Framework to perform efficient server-side paging when you don't need to return those big data payloads.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Cloud Services Mashup

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to combine multiple cloud services into a single app, taking advantage of services offered by Windows Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control, Bing Maps and Facebook.

Joseph Fultz

Mobile Matters: Windows Phone Navigation: The Basics

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

In the first installment of our new monthly column focusing on Windows Phone 7 development, we present the basics of the page navigation model, best practices to get the most out of the current APIs and some actionable, easy-to-follow recipes to create complex navigations not implemented with those APIs.

Jaime Rodriguez, Yochay Kiriaty

Test Run: Diffusion Testing

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The doctor prescribes a little-known technique that—under the right circumstances—lets you automatically generate new test case data from existing test cases that yield a pass result, saving time and work.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 6: Reflective Metaprogramming

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Code generation can simplify many programming tasks, but harnessing reflection gives you an entirely new kind of variability. Now names can refer to elements within the program at a much later time than the compiler traditionally permits. We'll show you how it works.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Touch Gestures on Windows Phone

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Charles this month takes a look at multi-touch APIs and delves into the workings of the new gesture support in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Missing the (Power) Point

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:00:00 GMT

It’s time to start licensing PowerPoint users until they learn the true point of the program.

David Platt

Dynamic .NET: Understanding the Dynamic Keyword in C# 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The dynamic keyword brings exciting new features to C# 4. We'll show you how it works and why it simplifies a lot of your coding tasks, including some handy COM interop possibilities.

Alexandra Rusina

Data Contract Inheritance: Known Types and the Generic Resolver

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Developers often struggle with the hassles of data contract inheritance in WCF, a problem called known types. We'll explain the origin of the problem, then show you how to eliminate the problem altogether with the generic resolver.

Juval Lowy

Dynamic Data: Pattern Matching Database Records with F#

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

When migrating data from other sources into a single database used by your app, you'll probably have to employ some matching and de-duplication processes to end up with a useful data store. We'll show you four different matching algorithms and the F# code to implement them.

Ambar Ray

Business Connectivity Services: Managing Employee Rewards with Office and SharePoint BCS

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

When Microsoft designed a new employee rewards management platform, they turned to Business Connectivity Services (BCS), a feature of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010, to edit employee information directly in Excel. We'll show you how they did it.

Ying Xiong

Parallel Computing: It's All About the SynchronizationContext

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

SynchronizationContext is a class (and concept) that is central to the correct operation of multithreaded components on .NET, but is often overlooked or misunderstood.

Steve Cleary

Windows Workflow: Securing WF 4 Workflow Services

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

We explain various security options for different workflow hosts, including a discussion of the Workflow Security Pack project and how its collection of activities can be used to bring end-to-end security to workflow solutions.

Zulfiqar Ahmed

Team Foundation Server: Visual Studio TFS Branching and Merging Guidance

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learn firsthand from members of one of Microsoft’s expert “Ranger” teams how best to handle software development branching with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Willy-Peter Schaub, Bill Heys

Editor's Note: Quick Guide to Getting Published

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

So, you want to write for MSDN Magazine. Here are a few tips on getting started.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: Windows Phone 7 Development Tools and Resources

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone 7 has a large, and continually growing, ecosystem of resources for developers. Here are some of the main ones.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Policy Injection in Unity

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito follows up on his discussion of the Unity interception API by explaining how policy injection lets you concentrate on the details of the behavior you want, leaving the library to decide which methods it applies to based on the rules you give it.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Slice and Dice OData with the jQuery DataTables Plug-In

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

OData lets you access data over the Web through simple HTTP commands. We’ll show you how the jQuery DataTables plug-in along with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Silverlight OData client libraries let you retrieve and display this data quickly, easily and with style.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Branch-Node Synchronization with SQL Azure, Part 2: Service-Based Sync

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how using Windows Azure to sync corporate databases lets you scale to many more end nodes than are possible with direct-to-database synchronization.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Measuring Test Effort Progress with EVM

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

An important part of software testing -- or coding -- effort is the ability to measure the progress. One technique for doing this is a technique called Earned Value Management, and we'll show you how easy it is to apply EVM to your own projects.

James McCaffrey

UI Frontiers: Sound Recording in Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Stripping down the UI to essentials is important when programming for a smartphone. We'll see just how stripped down an app can get while still being useful, and we'll explore the sound recording APIs in Windows Phone 7 along the way.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Never, Never Land

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 08:00:00 GMT

As in medicine, certain events in software development should never happen. Not ever.

David Platt

Workflow Services: Scalable, Long-Running Workflows with Windows Server AppFabric

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Server AppFabric provides tools that make it easy to deploy, configure and run highly scalable web applications. We’ll show you how to use AppFabric to build highly scalable, long-running workflows with built-in persistence.

Rafael Godinho

Windows Foundation 4: Authoring Custom Control Flow Activities in WF 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Control flow options in Windows Workflow Foundation 4 are not limited to the activities shipped in the framework. You can write your own and use them in combination with the ones provided in the box, as Leon Welicki describes.

Leon Welicki

Silverlight Exposed: Using MEF to Expose Interfaces in Your Silverlight MVVM Apps

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) lets you expose interfaces and classes in your Silverlight apps without having to expose the real implementation. We'll show you how it works.

Sandrino Di Mattia

Parallel Computing: Data Processing: Parallelism and Performance

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

How can you use parallel coding techniques to squeeze the utmost performance out of multi-core systems when processing data? There are many different approaches, but we show you the absolute best.

Johnson Hart

Visual Studio: Use Multiple Visual Studio Project Types for Cloud Success

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Patrick Foley explains how he took advantage of the strengths of several different Visual Studio project types to solve a real-world problem with a cloud-based, data-centric Web site.

Patrick Foley

ASP.NET Dynamic Data: Build a Data-Driven Enterprise Web Site in 5 Minutes

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

It used to be a chore to build data-driven web apps with CRUD functionality. ASP.NET Dynamic Data makes it much easier to wire up a fully customized front end for your application. We'll show you how.

James E. Henry

Editor's Note: Change the World!

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Tim Berners-Lee brought about the World Wide Web. What about you?

Keith Ward

Toolbox: Visual Studio Tools and Extensions

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

If Visual Studio is your IDE of choice, you have a plethora of tools to make it even better. Here’s a selection of some of the most valuable ones.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Interceptors in Unity

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

The Unity framework provides dependency injection for .NET applications. We'll show you how to leverage the interception API in Unity 2.0 to inject your own functionality into exiting code.

Dino Esposito

Forecast: Cloudy: Branch-Node Synchronization with SQL Azure

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use SQL Azure and the Sync Framework to move data between the corporate data center, various branches and individual devices.

Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 5: Automatic Metaprogramming

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Inheritance stands at the center of the object-oriented paradigm, but it isn’t always the best solution for all problems in OO programming, and despite its flaws and pitfalls, automatic metaprogramming, or code generation, is a useful tool to keep in your toolbox.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: A Color Scroll for XNA

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

Charles this month serves up an introduction to XNA programming for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight coders as he shows you how to build a color scroll control for Windows Phone 7.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Turn! Turn! Turn!

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

David Platt comes up with his own lyrics depicting the seasons of a developer.

David Platt

Windows Phone 7 Development: Sudoku for Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Get started with Windows Phone 7 development with this Silverlight-based game tutorial that demonstrates key concepts such as the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern, serialization, user storage and multiple orientations.

Adam Miller

Windows Phone 7 Apps: Build Data-Driven Apps with Windows Azure and Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The performance of data-driven Windows Phone 7 apps relies on both good UI coding practices and snappy access to data. We’ll cover some important design considerations for using Windows Azure effectively with Windows Phone apps.

Danilo Diaz, Max Zilberman

BDD Primer: Behavior-Driven Development with SpecFlow and WatiN

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Behavior-Driven Development techniques let you test and code in the language of your business scenario. We’ll explain how the BDD cycle wraps traditional Test-Driven Development techniques and walk you through an example BDD development cycle for an ASP.NET application.

Brandon Satrom

.NET Performance: Performance Diagnostics of .NET Applications Using ETW

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) is a powerful logging technology that's leveraged in the .NET Framework 4 CLR to make profiling your managed application simpler than ever. ETW collects system-wide data and profiles all resources (CPU, disk, network and memory) making it very useful for obtaining a holistic view.

Subramanian Ramaswamy

Windows Azure AppFabric: Re-Introducing the Windows Azure AppFabric Access Control Service

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

See how to easily authenticate and authorize users from the likes of Windows Live ID, Facebook, Yahoo and Google within your Web sites and services.

Wade Wegner, Vittorio Bertocci

Editor's Note: Windows Phone 7 Approval

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

One developer’s journey through the Windows Phone 7 application approval process -- and why screenshots need special attention.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: Windows Azure Development Resources

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The Windows Azure platform is Microsoft’s stack of cloud computing resources. Here’s a collection of tools and information that will get you writing apps for Windows Azure today.

Terrence Dorsey

Cutting Edge: Aspect-Oriented Programming, Interception and Unity 2.0

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Learn about the aspect-oriented programming paradigm and the related capabilities you find in Unity 2.0 as Dino Esposito explores how to deal with cross-cutting concerns in your code.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Profiling Database Activity in the Entity Framework

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

It’s important to profile your database queries to see what happens in response to Entity Framework queries and other data access activities, says Julie Lerman, who gives you the details on several profiling options to improve you coding.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: Pushing Content from SharePoint to Windows Azure Storage

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

We walk through a sample implementation that lets users selectively push content from SharePoint to Windows Azure Storage, providing links to the new locations and taking into account access control to the files.

Joseph Fultz, Shad Phillips

Test Run: Web Application UI Testing with jQuery

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Although jQuery was created with Web development in mind, it has several characteristics that make it well-suited for lightweight Web UI test automation. We’ll show you how to build a simple jQuery-based test harness.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 4: Object Orientation

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Object-oriented developers may be too comfortable modeling commonality and variability with inheritance. As Ted Neward points out, that can lead to problems for the unwary.

Ted Neward

Security Briefs: Improve ASP.NET Security with Visual Studio Code Analysis

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio code analysis and FxCop enable you to check your code automatically for design, performance and security issues. Now you can check your ASP.NET apps, too. We’ll show you how.

Sacha Faust

UI Frontiers: Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and the Multi-Touch Thumb

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The versatile, touch-enabled Thumb control is supported by Silverlight on both the Web and Windows Phone 7. We’’ll show you how to create a shared-code project for both platforms that uses Thumb for both mouse and multi-touch input.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Secret to a Successful Windows Phone 7 App

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Want to build a Windows Phone 7 app that sells? Forget cool; remember useful.

David Platt

Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket: Introducing DataMarket

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

See how the former Microsoft Project Codename “Dallas” has matured into an information marketplace that makes it easy to find and purchase the data you need to power applications and analytics.

Elisa Flasko

Cloud Data: Getting Started with SQL Azure Development

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

SQL Azure provides features similar to a relational database for your cloud apps. We’ll show you how to start developing for SQL Azure today.

Lynn Langit

Cloud Computing: Synchronizing Multiple Nodes in Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to utilize elasticity—the ability to provision resources and remove them on the fly—to take full advantage of cloud computing.

Josh Twist

Cloud Collaboration: Connecting SharePoint to Windows Azure with Silverlight Web Parts

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

There are many ways to integrate Windows Azure applications with SharePoint 2010. We’ll walk you through one example: a Silverlight-based Web Part that consumes data from the cloud.

Steve Fox

Task-Based Programming: Scalable Multithreaded Programming with Tasks

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Getting the most out of multicore systems means diving head-first into multithreaded programming. Ron Fosner follows up on his previous article by introducing you to a more sophisticated multithreading technique called task-based programming.

Ron Fosner

"Hello World!": A Coder’s Guide to Writing API Documentation

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Creating documentation for your APIs may not be the most interesting part of the development process, but doing it right saves your users from confusion and frustration. We offer some useful tips to help you write effective API docs.

Peter Gruenbaum

Editor's Note: Proactive Education

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

This Florida agency goes beyond talking about the problem of IT education: it’s getting involved in students’ lives.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Dynamic Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Action filters are a powerful feature of ASP.NET MVC controllers that can help you build aspect-oriented Web solutions. In this issue we dive deeper into creating your own dynamic action filters.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Using the Entity Framework to Reduce Network Latency to SQL Azure

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Your app may function as expected when you switch to using a cloud database, but profiling and tuning queries to account for the varying effects of network latency can help you boost overall performance.

Julie Lerman

Forecast: Cloudy: SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table Storage

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

When migrating your applications to Windows Azure, there are several data storage options to choose from. We’ll look at strengths of SQL Azure and Windows Azure Table Storage to help you understand which is the right choice for your app.

Joseph Fultz

Test Run: Web UI Test Automation with the WebBrowser Control

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Modal message boxes generated by a Web application pose a tricky problem for automated testing. We’ll show you a relatively simple technique for creating a test harness for these cases.

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 3: Procedural Programming

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Procedural programming is often seen as “old school,” outdated and useless in modern software design, but the design paradigm still shows up in a surprising number of places—including the compiler and MSBuild.

Ted Neward

Security Briefs: Web Application Configuration Security Revisited

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Bryan Sullivan follows up on configuration security with some relatively obscure—but important—web.config settings that should be addressed, and discusses a new free tool to help you find potential problems.

Bryan Sullivan

UI Frontiers: The Intricacies of Touch Controls

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Charles is intrigued by the Windows Phone 7 touch controls and tries to duplicate them in Windows Presentation Foundation, finding out that good multi-touch coding is a lot harder than it seems.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: A Real Pain in the Neck

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

At a minimum, UI design shouldn’t cause physical pain to readers and users.

David Platt

Thread Pools: Scalable Multithreaded Programming with Thread Pools

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Getting the most out of multicore systems means diving head-first into multithreaded programming. In this issue, Ron Fosner demonstrates some simple methods for adding parallel operation to your code, along with techniques for measuring how much you’ve improved execution.

Ron Fosner

Bing Map Apps: Building a Real-Time Transit Application Using the Bing Map App SDK

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use the free Bing Map App SDK as we walk you through the creation of a real-time transit application for bus routes in King County and show you how to submit apps to the Bing Map site.

Luan Nguyen

Embedded Programming: Connected Devices Using the .NET Micro Framework

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how .NET Framework programmers can now easily develop apps for the increasing number of small devices that are becoming interconnected—while you build your very own bicycle computer!

Colin Miller

Interoperability: Runtime Data Sharing Through an Enterprise Distributed Cache

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how an enterprise distributed cache can help .NET and Java apps share data at run time, providing high performance and scalability.

Iqbal Khan

WCF Architecture: AppFabric Service Bus Discovery

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to roll your own discovery mechanism as we walk you through a small framework the author wrote to support discovery over the service bus, bringing it on par with the built-in support for discovery in WCF.

Juval Lowy

Mobile Apps: Getting Started with Windows Phone Development Tools

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Phone 7 has shipped, and now it’s your turn to start developing apps for it. We’ll introduce you to the Windows Phone Developer Tools and walk you through the creation of a Windows Phone application that accesses a web service.

Joshua Partlow

Editor's Note: A Few of My Favorite App Things

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

For Windows Phone 7, mobile apps will be one of the keys to its success. Keith Ward lists what he thinks are the four most important features a Windows Phone 7 app should have.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Here’s an in-depth exploration of a powerful feature of ASP.NET MVC controllers that can greatly help you in the building of aspect-oriented Web solutions.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Entity Framework Preview: code first, ObjectSet and DbContext

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

With the code first feature in Entity Framework, there is no visual data model and no XML describing that model. You simply create the classes for your application domain and go. We’ll show you this and several other nifty new features in the latest EF CTP.

Julie Lerman

CLR Inside Out: New Features and Improved Performance in Silverlight 4

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Silverlight 4 brings a number of important changes including new GC modes, improved startup performance, and new base class features that enable new offline scenarios. We’ll walk you through the details.

Justin Van Patten, Andrew Pardoe

Forecast: Cloudy: Performance-Based Scaling in Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

One of the great features of cloud computing is the ability to scale up or down to serve the needs of the application owner. We’ll show you a technique for programmatically scaling your app in Windows Azure based on application performance.

Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Finding the commonalities and variabilities within a system, and expressing them, forms the heart of design.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Multi-Touch Inertia

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

One of the ways in which a multi-touch interface attempts to mimic the real world is by introducing inertia. We’ll show you how easy this is to duplicate in your own WPF apps.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: The Devs and the Designers Should Be Friends

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Instead of being at odds, developers and designers should work together from the beginning. Better software will result.

David Platt

Async Tasks: Simplify Asynchronous Programming with Tasks

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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, Krishnan Varadarajan

App Migration: Migrate Your ASP.NET 1.1 Apps to Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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, Richard Marsden

The Working Programmer: Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 1

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Software development isn’t all about object-oriented design; it’s about finding what works best, and incorporating it into your solution.

Ted Neward

Editor's Note: U.S. Schools Not Getting It Done

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Readers weigh in on the question of whether U.S. schools are preparing students for software development jobs.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Better Web Forms with the MVP Pattern

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

Going Places: IronRuby on Windows Phone 7

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

Test Run: Request-Response Testing Using IronPython

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

Security Briefs: The MSF-Agile+SDL Process Template for TFS 2010

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

UI Frontiers: Touch and Response

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

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

Don't Get Me Started: Weasel Words

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Euphemisms are the refuge of cowards.

David Platt

Federated Identity: Passive Authentication for ASP.NET with WIF

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The goal of federated security is to provide a mechanism for establishing trust relationships between domains. Platform tools like Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) make it much easier to support this type of identity federation. We show you how.

Michele Leroux Bustamante

Windows Azure: Tips for Migrating Your Applications to the Cloud

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure is already helping many companies move their apps into the cloud. We’ll share some of the tips and tricks that we discovered working with customers on real-world migrations.

George Huey, Wade Wegner

In Sync: Creating Synchronization Providers with the Sync Framework

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The Sync Framework can be used to build apps that synchronize data from any data store using any protocol over a network. We’ll show you how it works and get you started building a custom sync provider.

Joydip Kanjilal

OData and AtomPub: Building an AtomPub Server Using WCF Data Services

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to use the AtomPub protocol to pump up your blogs. Chris Sells includes a practical demonstration of mapping so you can expose a standard AtomPub service from a Web site and use Windows Live Writer to provide a rich editing experience against the service.

Chris Sells

Speed SQL: Tuning Your Database Calls with Tier Interaction Profiling

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Tier interaction profiling (TIP) is a feature of the Visual Studio profiling tools that measures the duration of synchronous calls to ADO.NET-compliant data stores. We’ll show you how TIP works and provide some best practices for using TIP to diagnose performance problems in your apps.

Mark Friedman

Smart Client: Building Distributed Apps with NHibernate and Rhino Service Bus, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Smart client applications are responsive and promote interactivity with the user. In this article, we continue building a smart client application using NHibernate for data access and Rhino Service Bus for reliable communication with the server.

Oren Eini

Windows Phone 7: Windows Phone and the Cloud--an Introduction

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

See how easy it is to create a Windows Phone 7 app and tie it to a Web service as Ramon Arjona walks you through the creation of a language translation tool.

Ramon Arjona

Editor's Note: Does Your Program Smell Like Bacon?

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

When building your program, are you content with “good enough”? If so, your expectations are fatally low.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Don’t Worry, Be Lazy

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Being lazy in software development can be a good thing, but until the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, coders had to implement lazy behavior themselves. Dino Esposito shows how to use the new Lazy class to maximize your resources.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Deny Table Access to the Entity Framework Without Causing a Mutiny

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Julie Lerman shows database administrators how to limit access to databases from the Entity Framework by allowing it to work only with views and stored procedures instead of tables—without impacting application code or alienating developers.

Julie Lerman

Test Run: Fault Injection Testing with TestApi

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Fault injection testing is the process of deliberately inserting an error into an application to determine whether it deals with the error properly. We’ll explain how you can introduce faults into .NET applications at run time using the Managed Code Fault Injection APIs of the TestApi library

James McCaffrey

The Working Programmer: Inside SQLite

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

After tackling NoSQL, Ted Neward turns back to the relational world of SQL—SQLite, that is. Learn all about the lightweight, embedded database whose running footprint can be as small as one file installed in a client file system.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Multi-Touch Manipulation Events in WPF

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Multi-touch has progressed from being a futuristic prop of sci-fi films to a mainstream means of user interface. We’ll show you how support for multi-touch in Windows 7 has filtered down and settled into various areas of the .NET Framework.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Mars and Venus

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 07:00:00 GMT

It’s a fact that men and women don’t think alike—remember this when designing software for the half of users that aren’t like you.

David Platt

Office Add-Ins: 3 Solutions for Accessing SharePoint Data in Office 2010

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

SharePoint 2010 introduces a number of new ways to access business data and present it to the user. We’ll show you several options that range from no-code solutions to fully integrated Office add-ins.

Donovan Follette , Paul Stubbs

SharePoint Security: Trim SharePoint Search Results for Better Security

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

SharePoint search may return too much information, causing data security problems. Learn how to use the custom security trimmer to ensure users see only the documents they have permission to view.

Ashley Elenjickal, Pooja Harjani

OneNote 2010: Creating OneNote 2010 Extensions with the OneNote Object Model

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to build applications and plug-ins that interoperate with data from OneNote 2007 and 2010 using the OneNote Object Model library freely available on CodePlex. Andy Gray demonstrates how easy it is to integrate information from OneNote notebooks, sections and pages into smart client and Web apps.

Andy Gray

Office Services: Merging Word Documents on the Server Side with SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 include a new set of components called Application Services. These put a rich set of tools in a developer's bag for Office automation. We’ll show you how to use Office OpenXML, Word Automation Services and SharePoint to build a simple application that merges separate status reports into a single document.

Manvir Singh, Ankush Bhatia

Smart Client: Building Distributed Apps with NHibernate and Rhino Service Bus

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Smart client applications are responsive and promote interactivity with the user. In this article, we start the processes of planning and building a smart client application using NHibernate for data access and Rhino Service Bus for reliable communication with the server.

Oren Eini

C# 4.0: New C# Features in the .NET Framework 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The C# language has been improved over the years with numerous features that make common tasks involving generic types, legacy interop, and working with dynamic object models much simpler.

Chris Burrows

Design Patterns: Problems and Solutions with Model-View-ViewModel

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern describes a popular approach for building Windows Presentation Foundation or Microsoft Silverlight applications. Robert McCarter shows you how the ViewModel works, and discuss some benefits and issues involved in implementing a ViewModel in your code.

Robert McCarter

Editor's Note: Over-Educated, Yet Under-Qualified?

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Are we teaching computer science graduates the right things to prepare them for the world of real work? If not, how do we fix it?

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Expando Objects in C# 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The .NET Framework 4 introduces some new features that enable you to go beyond static types. We explore dynamically expando objects and demonstrate how they can be used like dynamically updatable dictionary objects.

Dino Esposito

Data Points: Windows Azure Table Storage – Not Your Father’s Database

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Let go of your traditional relational database thinking if you want to understand how Windows Azure Table storage works, says Julie Lerman. Luckily for you, she’s done the hard work to grasp the new concepts and help you get up to speed.

Julie Lerman

Security Briefs: View State Security

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Effectively managing user state in web applications can be a tricky balancing act of performance, scalability, maintainability and security. The security consideration is especially evident when you’re managing user state stored on the client. Here's what you need to know about view state security.

Bryan Sullivan

The Working Programmer: Going NoSQL with MongoDB, Part 3

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Wrapping up his examination of MongoDB, Ted Neward discusses predicate queries, aggregate functions and LINQ support, and provides some tips on hosting the NoSQL database in a production environment.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: The Fluid UI in Silverlight 4

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold shows how to extend the limited fluid UI capabilities of Silverlight 4 with new techniques so you too can dazzle users with those cool object entrances and transitions.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Rejectionists Rejected

MSDN Magazine — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Standards for Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight aren’t the enemy; in fact, they should be your starting point.

David Platt

Silverlight Online: Silverlight in an Occasionally Connected World

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

We discuss the latest incarnation of occasionally connected Silverlight applications, which come with a highly interactive user experience and can run either inside or outside of a browser.

Mark Bloodworth, Dave Brown

AppFabric Cache: Real-World Usage and Integration

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Server AppFabric provides a distributed cache for both web and desktop applications. Well show you how to integrate AppFabric caching into your apps, along with some hints for taking advantage of new cache features in the .NET Framework 4.

Andrea Colaci

SOA Tips: Address Scalability Bottlenecks with Distributed Caching

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

SOA makes application scalability easier, but getting the best performance out of your SOA means paying close attention to the details. We’ll give you some tips for coding your app more effectively and using distributed caching to remove data access bottlenecks.

Iqbal Khan

Thread Performance: Resource Contention Concurrency Profiling in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 includes new resource contention profiling features that help detect concurrency contention among threads. We walk through a profiling investigation to demonstrate how you can pinpoint and fix resource contention problems in your code.

Maxim Goldin

Cloud Diagnostics: Take Control of Logging and Tracing in Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

It’s difficult to troubleshoot any application without a trail of clues to follow, and cloud apps are no different. We look at how logging and tracing are enabled for Windows Azure, and how you can use Windows PowerShell to manage diagnostics for a running service.

Mike Kelly

Express Yourself: Encoding Videos Using Microsoft Expression Encoder 3 SDK

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Video on the Web involves huge amounts of data. Learn the best way to manage and move that data with the help of Microsoft Expression Encoder 3.

Adam Miller

Input Validation: Enforcing Complex Business Data Rules with WPF

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Windows Presentation Foundation has a rich data binding system that includes flexible support for business data validation. We take a look at implementing some complex data input validation scenarios that include customized data errors for users.

Brian Noyes

Practical OData: Building Rich Internet Apps with the Open Data Protocol

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

See how you can build Rich Internet Applications that take advantage of the OData protocol to creatively interact with Silverlight, PowerPivot, SQL Server, SharePoint, the Windows Azure platform, “Dallas” and more.

Shayne Burgess

Editor's Note: We're All Ears

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Help us help you, by sending your feedback on various topics.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: C# 4.0, the Dynamic Keyword and COM

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Are you a Microsoft .NET Framework programmer who struggles with critical legacy applications using COM objects that are beyond your control? Dino Esposito shows how to lessen the burden by going dynamic.

Dino Esposito

CLR Inside Out: F# Fundamentals

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

F# is a new, functional and object-oriented programming language for the Microsoft .NET Framework. To help you get started using it, we take a look at some of the core concepts in the F# language and its implementation on top of the CLR.

Luke Hoban

Test Run: Generating Graphs with WPF

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

A common software-development task is generating a graph from a set of test-related data. But if you're doing it by hand and the underlying data changes frequently, this particular task can become quite tedious. James McCaffrey shows you how to automate the process using Windows Presentation Foundation technology.

James McCaffrey

Basic Instincts: Multi-Targeting Visual Basic Applications in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 lets you create applications that target versions of the Microsoft .NET Framework from 2.0 to 4, and each step in between. We take a look at how multi-targeting works in Visual Studio today, and explain how you should approach multi-targeting in your projects.

Spotty Bowles

The Working Programmer: Going NoSQL with MongoDB, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Ted Neward continues his dissection of the alternative MongoDB database system, using exploration testing to investigate the underlying technology.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: The Ins and Outs of ItemsControl

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold performs more UI magic by implementing a variation of the drag-and-drop that presents users with a natural, fluid look and feel.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Chainsaw Development

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:00:00 GMT

It’s time to standardize the UI for Windows Presentation Foundation.

David Platt

Now Playing: Building Custom Players with the Silverlight Media Framework

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The Silverlight Media Framework is an extensible and scalable video framework upon which you can create your own player experiences. We’ll walk you through a custom player project that displays suggested videos for further viewing after the current video ends.

Ben Rush

Silverlight Security: Securing Your Silverlight Applications

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Josh Twist explains the unique challenges developers face in securing Silverlight applications. He shows where to focus your efforts, concentrating on the key aspects of authentication and authorization.

Josh Twist

RIA Services: Enterprise Patterns with WCF RIA Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn how to leverage WCF RIA Services in your Silverlight applications. Michael D. Brown uses an extensive point-of-sale program to illustrate how to meet the needs of the simplest to the most complex business apps with various enterprise design patterns.

Michael D. Brown

Workflow Services: Visual Design of Workflows with WCF and WF 4

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The .NET Framework 4 makes it easier than ever to implement WCF services using WF. We’ll demonstrate just how easy it is by modeling a long-running, durable and instrumented workflow based on a real-world business case without having to write any code.

Leon Welicki

Editor's Note: This Way-Cool 'Internet' Doohickey

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

It wasn’t all that long ago that surfing meant grabbing a board and hanging 10.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Using the Dynamic Keyword in C# 4.0

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

C# 4 provide a new dynamic keyword that enables dynamic typing in what has traditionally been a strongly typed language. We explain how the dynamic keyword works and what it offers that casting, var, and System.Object cant’ match.

Dino Esposito

CLR Inside Out: Production Diagnostics Improvements in CLR 4

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The Common Language Runtime (CLR) 4 includes new APIs that expand diagnostic support toward the production end of the spectrum. We explain how the debugging APIs support dump debugging for application crash and hang scenarios and make it easier to detect when hangs are caused by multi-threading issues.

Jon Langdon

Data Points: LINQ Projection Queries and Alternatives in WCF Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

LINQ's ability to project randomly shaped data into anonymous types can be a blessing and a source of frustration, says Julie Lerman. It’s great when you just need to grab a special view of your data, but it can be problematic in certain circumstances. She explains what the limitations are and how to get around them.

Julie Lerman

Test Run: Combinations and Permutations with F#

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Understanding combinations and permutations is a fundamental skill in software testing. We show you how to work with combinations and permutations using code written in the new F# language.

James McCaffrey

Foundations: Service Bus Buffers

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn some advanced Windows Communication Foundation programming techniques as Juval Lowy begins an in-depth examination of the Windows Azure AppFabric service bus, focusing first on buffers.

Juval Lowy

Security Briefs: Regular Expression Denial of Service Attacks and Defenses

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft security expert Bryan Sullivan believes denial-of-service blackmail attacks will become more common as privilege escalation attacks become more difficult to execute. He demonstrates how to protect your apps against regular expression DoS threats.

Bryan Sullivan

The Working Programmer: Going NoSQL with MongoDB

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

MongoDB is one of the principal tools of the NoSQL movement, which offers alternatives to the traditional relational database system. Learn its strengths and weaknesses as Ted Neward examines the document-based database in detail in the first of a series of columns.

Ted Neward

UI Frontiers: Thinking Outside the Grid

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

In Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, using a Canvas or a single-cell Grid seems very similar. The difference is in how the container appears to the rest of the layout system. Canvas doesn’t participate in layout, so you can use it whenever you need to transcend layout.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: Fundamental Laws

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Programmers will never develop great software until they learn that it’s not about themselves.

David Platt

Better Coding: Better Coding with Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

From functional IDE improvements to better support for parallel programming, Visual Studio 2010 comes with a host of new features to help meet the needs of today’s demanding, ever-changing development environment. Doug Turnure provides an overview of the more important ones and practical advice on how to use them.

Doug Turnure

Visual Basic: What’s New in Visual Basic 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Learn about what’s new in Visual Basic 10 straight from a program manager on Microsoft’s Visual Basic team. Jonathan Aneja demonstrates time-saving features that help developers get more done with fewer lines of code.

Jonathan Aneja

IntelliTrace: Debugging Applications with IntelliTrace

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Justin Marks shows how to use the IntelliTrace feature coming with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, which gives developers powerful new debugging tools to "turn up the dial" and collect the complete execution history of an application, get deeper levels of information and quickly find bugs.

Justin Marks

F# Basics: An Introduction to Functional Programming for .NET Developers

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

F# has clean syntax, powerful multi-threading capabilities, and fluid interoperability with other Microsoft .NET Framework languages. We’ll give you an introduction to functional programming concepts and how they're implemented in F#.

Chris Marinos

Visual C++: Exploring New C++ and MFC Features Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2010 offers huge benefits for C++ developers, from new C++0x features to MSBuild integration to a revived MFC Application Wizard. Join us for a tour of these new Visual C++ features.

Sumit Kumar

Windows Azure: Developing and Deploying Cloud Apps in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

You’ll find direct support for building Windows Azure applications in Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. We’ll walk you through using Visual Studio 2010 for the entirety of the Windows Azure application development lifecycle.

Jim Nakashima

VS 2010: Entity Framework 4.0 and WCF Data Services 4.0 in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Elisa Flasko takes you through a sample weblog application to demonstrate how new improvements in Entity Framework and WCF Data Services work together to simplify the way data is modeled, consumed and produced in Visual Studio 2010.

Elisa Flasko

Usability in Practice: The Decade of Convergence

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

As devices converge, user experience design needs to change, too.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg

Editor's Note: Scott Guthrie on Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The man most responsible for Visual Studio 2010 discusses what developers have to look forward to.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Revisiting Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

If you need to scale up an existing Web application, you should first look to asynchronous operations, says Dino Esposito. He explains how new features coming in ASP.NET MVC 2 make this easier.

Dino Esposito

UI Frontiers: Projection Transforms Sans Math

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

See how to taper text, flip panels, animate a calendar and more--without resorting to complicated math--as Charles Petzold delves into new “pseudo 3D” capabilitie in Silverlight 3, made possible by the new Projection UIElement property.

Charles Petzold

Don't Get Me Started: In Praise of Dumbing Down

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Making things easier for the end user isn't "dumbing down" -- it's smart design.

David Platt

IIS Smooth Streaming: Enhancing Silverlight Video Experiences with Contextual Data

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Adaptive streaming addresses the problem of smooth content delivery and decoding. We walk you through the basics of IIS Smooth Streaming and demonstrate how you can manipulate audio, video and caption data in your own Silverlight projects.

Jit Ghosh

Finger Style: Exploring Multi-Touch Support in Silverlight

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Touch isn't just a form of mouse input in Silverlight: Sometimes what's required are controls specialized and optimized for touch.

Charles Petzold

Thread Diagnostics: Performance Tuning with The Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Understanding performance bottlenecks in multithreaded apps used to require significant instrumentation and analysis by expert developers. The Concurrency Visualizer in Visual Studio 2010 significantly reduces the burden of parallel performance analysis.

Hazim Shafi

Test Run: Testing Silverlight Apps Using Messages

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Silverlight greatly simplifies the process of building rich Web applications, and we’ll walk through an example of using Messages as a quick method of interactively testing simple Silverlight apps.

James McCaffrey

Editor's Note: Coming Out the Other Side

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The worst is over for technology job-seekers, says Dice.com executive.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: ASP.NET Ajax Library and WCF Data Services

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

This month Dino takes a look at the JavaScript components coming in the ASP.NET Ajax Library and explains how they can be used for effective client-side data access.

Dino Esposito

CLR Inside Out: Migrating an APTCA Assembly to the .NET Framework 4

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The CLR security model in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 has undergone some substantial changes, including the adoption of ”Level2” transparency, similar to the Silverlight security model. Mike Rousos provides an in-depth explanation of how that will likely impact authors of AllowPartiallyTrustedCallers (APTCA) libraries.

Mike Rousos

Data Points: Precompiling LINQ Queries

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Did you know that by precompiling LINQ queries you might actually be degrading your app’s performance if you’re not careful? Julie Lerman explains how to ensure you’re not re-precompiling queries each time and losing the expected performance benefits across post-backs, short-lived service operations and other code where critical instances are going out of scope.

Julie Lerman

UI Frontiers: MIDI Music in WPF Applications

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Every PC contains a built-in 16-piece band ready to play some music. Charles shows you how MIDI support in the NAudio sound library lets you play tunes in your .NET apps.

Charles Petzold

Basic Instincts: Generic Co- and Contravariance in Visual Basic 2010

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Dig into the new co- and contravariance features coming in Visual Studio 2010. Binyam Kelile provides hands-on Visual Basic examples to explain how they provide more flexibility when working with generic interfaces and delegates.

Binyam Kelile

Extreme ASP.NET: Model Validation & Metadata in ASP.NET MVC 2

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Scott Allen shows how to improve your user input validation with new features coming out in ASP.NET MVC 2 that easily allow validation on both the client and server.

Scott Allen

Security Briefs: Add a Security Bug Bar to Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Take a peek inside Microsoft’s strict development security structure as Bryan Sullivan describes the objective security bug classification system─the “bug bar”─used by internal product and online services teams. He will show you how to incorporate this classification system into your own development environment using Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010.

Bryan Sullivan

Don't Get Me Started: Edge Cases

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Developers should focus their time and effort on the 99 normal use cases, rather than the one unusual use case that often gets way too much attention.

David Platt

Managed Extensibility Framework: Building Composable Apps in .NET 4 with the Managed Extensibility Framework

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Glenn Block explains how the Managed Extensibility Framework, a new library coming in .NET Framework 4.0, tackles the longstanding issue of building applications and components that can be reused and extended by others. Learn how to build apps that can use new functionality introduced by developers, framework authors and third-party extenders.

Glenn Block

Robotics: Writing and Testing VPL Services for Serial Communication

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

VPL, part of Robotics Developer Studio is intended for novice programmers, but is also useful for testing and prototyping. We write a simple serial port service that allows you to send and receive data.

Trevor Taylor

Dynamic .NET: Creating Interactive Bing Maps with Silverlight and IronRuby

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Silverlight provides support for dynamic languages such as IronRuby and IronPython. We’ll walk you through the creation of a custom Silverlight control using Bing Maps and IronRuby.

Ashish Ghoda

Cloud Computing: Windows Azure Platform for Enterprises

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Learn all about Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform at the architectural level and how it addresses enterprise cloud computing concerns including economics, security, storage and more. Included are an Azure pricing table and a sample cost calculator.

Hanu Kommalapati

Beyond MVP: Extending the MVP Pattern to Simplify UI Architecture

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

MVP has become a dominant pattern for UI design, but there are many interpretations of how to implement MVP. We take a look at some MVP-extending pattern and pull them into a holistic view of UI architecture.

Haozhe Ma

Editor's Note: Not Your Father's MSDN

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Changes are coming to MSDN Magazine. They begin this month, with the unveiling of a number of new, monthly columns.

Keith Ward

Cutting Edge: Predictive Fetch with jQuery and the ASP.NET Ajax Library

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito builds upon his exploration of new data binding features coming in the ASP.NET Ajax Library, explaining how to implement the predictive fetch design pattern.

Dino Esposito

Going Places: Gesture Magic

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Windows Mobile 6.5 is the first version of the OS to expose gesture support to developers. Marcus Perryman explains how five touch screen gestures are handled, detailing message routing, the physics engine and some handy tips and tricks.

Marcus Perryman

CLR Inside Out: Formatting and Parsing Time Intervals in the .NET Framework 4

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Learn about enhanced TimeSpan formatting and parsing features coming in the .NET Framework 4, and some helpful tips for working with TimeSpan values.

Ron Petrusha

UI Frontiers: Sound Generation in WPF Applications

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

A good case could be made that computers should not make noise except in response to a specific user command. We’re going to ignore that and show you how to play custom sounds in a WPF application.

Charles Petzold

Security Briefs: Security Compliance as an Engineering Discipline

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Many companies starting out with the SDL are doing so in combination with a security compliance program. We’ll show you some best practices and pitfall we’ve seen when employing SDL principles for compliance.

Brad Hill

Test Run: WCF Service Testing with Sockets

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

There are many ways to test WCF services, but the socket-based approach is flexible and very useful for security and performance testing. We show you show you how to test a WCF service using a network socket based approach.

James McCaffrey

Don't Get Me Started: The Human Touch

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:00:00 GMT

People aren't computers; keep this in mind when developing software. When developers confuse people and computers, bad things happen.

David Platt

Cloud Patterns: Designing and Deploying Services for Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

To better understand how SOA patterns can be applied to Windows Azure deployments, we walk you through a scenario in which a bank moves its services to the cloud.

Thomas Erl, Arman Kurtagic, Herbjörn Wilhelmsen

Cloud Storage: Fueling Your Application's Engine with Windows Azure Storage

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Yes, you can run background processes in the cloud. Kevin Hoffman and Nate Dudek use a shopping cart example to demonstrate how to build an application engine as well as implement asynchronous messaging and processing using Azure Storage.

Kevin Hoffman, Nathan Dudek

Cloud Security: Crypto Services and Data Security in Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Many early adopters cloud platforms have questions about security. We review some of the cryptography services and providers in Windows Azure along with some security implications for applications in the cloud.

Jonathan Wiggs

Code Cleanup: 9 Useful Tactics for Paying Back Technical Debt

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Now that you’ve identified technical debt in your code base, let’s turn our attention to some specific tactics that will help you pay back that debt.

David Laribee

Editor's Note: Two Guys in the Cloud

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Microsoft made a big Azure splash at its Professional Developer's Conference last fall. An overheard conversation gives insight on how developers see the potential of the cloud.

Keith Ward

Toolbox: UI Mockups, User Experience Tips, JavaScript Checker and More

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Scott Mitchell reviews a user interface mockup tool, a blog for user experience tips, a JavaScript code checker and a book that expertly explains the ins and outs SQL Server Reporting Services.

Scott Mitchell

Cutting Edge: Master-Detail Views with the ASP.NET Ajax Library

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

When you think of data-driven Web pages, most of the time what you really have in mind is a master-detail view of some cross-related data. Dino builds an example with ASP.NET AJAX 4 and jQuery.

Dino Esposito

Patterns in Practice: Internal Domain Specific Languages

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Jeremy Miller explains how internal Domain Specific Languages can help you craft code that is easier to read and write. His bag of tricks to improve your programming includes extension methods, fluent interfaces, object extensions and use of the semantic model.

Jeremy Miller

Extreme ASP.NET: Text Template Transformation Toolkit and ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

The Visual Studio T4 code generation engine lets you parse an input file and transform it into an output file. We give you a basic introduction to T4 templates and show you how ASP.NET MVC uses this technology.

Scott Allen

The Polyglot Programmer: ACID Transactions with STM.NET

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

STM.NET allows developers to mark their code with ACID-style transactional semantics, and leaves the grunt work of managing locks to the underlying environment.

Ted Neward

Extreme UI: Line Charts with Data Templates

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Charles Petzold continues his investigation into robust XAML coding made possible by Windows Presentation Foundation, this time tackling the complicated process of creating line charts.

Charles Petzold

Foundations: Discover a New WCF with Discovery

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Juval Lowy explains how the industry-standard discovery solution enables clients to discover available addresses for WCF calls at runtime, and he provides tools and helper classes to simplify the process.

Juval Lowy

Test Run: Web Application HTTP Request-Response Test Automation with JavaScript

MSDN Magazine — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 08:00:00 GMT

Write a simple browser-based request-response test automation using JavaScript that’s platform independent and useful when you are working in a highly dynamic environment.

James McCaffrey

Generation Test: Automated Unit Tests for Legacy Code with Pex

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Creating and maintaining a unit test suite for legacy code can be a challenge. Pex automatically produces a small test suite with high code and assertion coverage.

Nikhil Sachdeva

Code Cleanup: Using Agile Techniques to Pay Back Technical Debt

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Every codebase contains some measure of technical debt – code that is maddeningly hard to test and maintain. We outline some ideas for identifying and dealing with the high-interest debt in your code.

David Laribee

Data Access: Building a Desktop To-Do Application with NHibernate

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Building an NHibernate-based desktop application isn’t any harder than building a web application, and in many cases NHibernate simplifies elements of session handling and concurrency.

Oren Eini

Team System: Building a Visual Studio Team Explorer Extension

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

There’s no magic behind how the TFS Power Tools were integrated with Team Explorer, and we’ll show you how to expose your own custom features inside the Team Explorer window.

Brian A. Randell, Marcel de Vries

SharePoint 2010 and BCS: Using Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Kirk Evans shows how to take advantage of SharePoint 2010 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) to develop solutions with deep integration of external data and services. BCS builds upon its BDC predecessor in the key areas of presentation, connectivity, tooling and lifecycle management.

Kirk Evans

Editor's Note: Shaping a New Era in MSDN Magazine

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Diego Dagum

Toolbox: Database and OR/M Tools, Oren Eini and Custom Visual Studio Tabs

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This month we look at tools for enhancing the LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework designers, Oren Eini’s .NET development blog, Visual Studio tab customization, and more.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: In-Process Side-by-Side

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

The new .NET Framework 4.0 maintains backward compatibility while allowing core innovations by using a new feature called In-Process Side-by-Side. Learn about how it works and some problems it didn’t solve.

Luiz Fernando Santos, Jesse Kaplan

Cutting Edge: Live Data Binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Dino Esposito discusses various forms of client-side data binding as they are coming out in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, focusing on some advanced features of data binding and observable objects.

Dino Esposito

Test Run: Pairwise Testing with QICT

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this month's column, James McCaffrey explains exactly what pairwise testing is and provides you with complete C# source code for a production quality pairwise testing tool named QICT.

James McCaffrey

Extreme ASP.NET: Looking Ahead to ASP.NET 4.0

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

When Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 arrive next year, ASP.NET developers will have two mature frameworks for building Web applications: ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. This article highlights some of the important new features for these two frameworks.

Scott Allen

Windows with C++: Layered Windows with Direct2D

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Layered windows provide the unique ability to compose a window on the desktop using per-pixel alpha blending. We take a look at how you can implement this drawing technique in Direct2D.

Kenny Kerr

Going Places: Enhancing Windows Touch Applications for Mobile Users

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article describes how to use the Windows Touch API and related APIs to enhance mobile application. The discussion focuses on general usability, object selection and implementing a natural user interface.

Gus Class

Concurrent Affairs: Data-Parallel Patterns and PLINQ

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Multicore processors are now ubiquitous on mainstream desktop computers, but applications that use their full potential are still difficult to write. Version 4 of the .NET Framework will deliver several tools that programmers can employ to make this task easier. This article explores the use of one of those tools: Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).

Igor Ostrovsky

Usability in Practice: More Than Skin Deep

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 08:00:00 GMT

While style and slick visuals are important in Web site design, they shouldn’t detract from a site’s usability and functionality. Here are some hands-on tips for look and feel, readability, discovery of affordances, and more, with plenty of examples of good and bad design.

Ambrose Little, Charles B. Kreitzberg

Claims-Based Apps: Claims-Based Authorization with WIF

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Over the past few years, federated security models and claims-based access control have become increasingly popular. Platform tools in this area have also come a long way. Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) is a rich identity model framework designed for building claims-based applications and services and for supporting active and passive federated security scenarios.

Michele Leroux Bustamante

AD FS 2.0 in Identity Solutions: Using Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 in Identity Solutions

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article explains how you can use Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0 to claims-enable Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services and browser-based applications. The focus is on the token issuance functionality in AD FS 2.0. You’ll find out how to use AD FS 2.0 as an identity provider; set up an AD FS 2.0 security token service (STS) to interact with WCF; federate AD FS 2.0 with your custom STS or another AD FS 2.0; enable Web single sign-on and federation with WS-Federation and SAML 2.0 protocols; and externalize authentication logic through Visual Studio. You’ll come away appreciating how AD FS 2.0 and Windows Identity Foundation make programming identity solutions in Windows less of a chore.

Zulfiqar Ahmed

Digital Signatures: Application Guidelines on Digital Signature Practices for Common Criteria Security

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article is an overview of digital signature practices and user considerations necessary to write applications in compliance with ISO/IEC 15408 Common Criteria security. Signing categories are described, including those that are a potential risk to the implied trust association that goes with a digital signature.

Jack Davis

N-Tier Apps and the Entity Framework: Building N-Tier Apps with EF4

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article is the third in a series about n-tier programming with the Entity Framework, specifically about building custom Web services with the Entity Framework and WCF. This article looks at features coming in the second release of the Entity Framework (EF4) and how you use them to implement the Self-Tracking Entities and Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) n-tier patterns.

Daniel Simmons

Workflow Essentials: Collaborative Workflow Improvements in SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this article, the author covers the new features in SharePoint 2010 geared for workflow developers and then walks the reader through a couple of new user scenarios.

Paul Andrew

SharePoint's Sandbox: Developing, Deploying and Monitoring Sandboxed Solutions in SharePoint 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

The challenge in SharePoint development has always been the balance between creating and deploying solutions that you can trust not to damage or impair a SharePoint farm. A new feature in SharePoint 2010, called Sandboxed Solutions, enables farm administrators to feel comfortable that the SharePoint farm is safe, gives site collection administrators the authority to manage applications in their site collection, and provides developers with the flexibility to create solutions they know will be deployed in a safe and rapid manner.

Paul Stubbs

Editor's Note: Beginnings and Endings

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Howard Dierking talks about the recent changes and updates to the MSDN Web sites and the MSDN Subscriptions program.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Database Documentation, API for Pre- and Post-Conditions, Blogs and More

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this month's column, Scott explores one-click database documentation, covers an API for pre- and post-conditions, takes a look at an interesting blog, and reviews the latest book about the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: Exploring the .NET Framework 4 Security Model

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

The .NET Framework 4 introduces many updates to the .NET security model that make it much easier to host, secure and provide services to partially trusted code. This article dives into the many features and benefits of the .NET security model.

Andrew Dai

Cutting Edge: Conditional Rendering in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Last month, Dino covered the basics of the new DataView client control and the binding techniques most commonly used. In this article, he goes one step further and covers conditional template rendering.

Dino Esposito

Security Briefs: XML Denial of Service Attacks and Defenses

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article reviews what makes XML vulnerable to denial of service attacks and how to mitigate these attacks.

Bryan Sullivan

Under the Table: Visualizing Spatial Data

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this article, the author shows you three new arrivals on the SQL Server spatial visualization scene: the map control in SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services (SSRS), the ESRI MapIt product, and the MapPoint Add-In for SQL Server 2008.

Bob Beauchemin

Foundations: Workflow Services for Local Communication

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This month’s column describes how to use WCF for communication between a workflow and a host application in Windows Workflow Foundation 3. This knowledge should help developers with their efforts using WF3 and prepare them for WF4, where WCF is the only abstraction over queues (referred to as “bookmarks" in WF4) that ships with the framework.

Matthew Milner

Windows with C++: Windows Web Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

With the introduction of the Windows Web Services (WWS) API, C++ developers no longer have to think of themselves as second-class citizens in the world of Web Services. In this article, the author explores the features and benefits that the WWS API has to offer.

Kenny Kerr

Usability in Practice: Search Is Key to Findability

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this column, Ambrose Little and Charlie Kreitzberg discuss best practices, design patterns, and other considerations related to implementing a search feature.

Ambrose Little, Charles B. Kreitzberg

Inside Microsoft patterns & practices: Dependency Injection in Libraries

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article discusses how to write a library or framework that uses the Dependency Injection pattern and how the change in focus affects the usage of the pattern.

Chris Tavares

First Look: Visual Studio 2010 Tools for SharePoint Development

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article provides a first look at tools in Visual Studio 2010 designed to support development and deployment of SharePoint 2010 solutions. The article provides an example of designing and deploying a visual Web part.

Steve Fox

SharePoint and Open XML: Generating Documents from SharePoint Using Open XML Content Controls

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes how to generate documents that contain data stored in SharePoint lists. The example demonstrates how OpenXML content controls can be defined to capture list data in a Word document and how LINQ to XML can be used to query the lists. The documents are generated from a SharePoint Web Part.

Eric White

Event Tracing For Windows: Core Instrumentation Events in Windows 7, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In Part 2, the authors cover core OS Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events as well as present simple scripts to demonstrate a few basic accounting techniques on some of the OS events introduced.

Alex Bendetov, Insung Park

Contract-First Web Services: Schema-based Development with Windows Communication Foundation

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Schema- first contract-first modeling of Web Services gives you the ability to model your contracts with an XML-centric mindset. This process keeps you focused on universally acceptable types and the hierarchical data structures that can be represented in XML.

Christian Weyer, Buddhike de Silva

Editor's Note: The Capability-Delivery Business

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month’s issue of MSDN Magazine takes a look at some of the new features and tools in Visual Studio 2010 and Microsoft .NET Framework 4 that will continue improving the experience of creating business applications that run on the Microsoft Office platform. This is an area of software development that holds tremendous potential in terms of solving the right problems—those being the business problems. To get to the next step of really transforming the manner in which business is conducted, highly domain-specific functionality must be developed below the metaphorical surface—and thus can only be meaningfully implemented by you.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: User Interfaces, Podcasts, Object-Relational Mappings and More

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This column covers common user interface groupings, configuring NHibernate using C#, and a look at interesting books and podcasts.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: Profiling the .NET Garbage-Collected Heap

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, the authors complete the picture for Garbage Collected (GC) heap related memory issues by providing step-by-step instructions on using the CLR Profiler for .NET GC heap memory investigations.

Subramanian Ramaswamy, Vance Morrison

Basic Instincts: Collection and Array Initializers In Visual Basic 2010

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Collection Initializers are a great addition to the language and allows concise syntax in order to initialize both framework and user defined collection types.

Spotty Bowles

Data Points: Data Validation with Silverlight 3 and the DataForm

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month’s column, John Papa shows you how the DataForm control works and how it can be customized. He presents in detail a sample application that uses several features to bind, navigate, edit and validate data using the DataForm.

John Papa

Cutting Edge: Data Binding in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, Dino reviews the pillars of real-world AJAX development as supported in ASP.NET AJAX 4.0. In doing so, he mostly focuses on client-side templates and data-binding but doesn’t ignore other goodies, such as ADO.NET Data Services proxy classes and programming facilities.

Dino Esposito

Patterns in Practice: Functional Programming for Everyday .NET Developers

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article examines how the new support for functional programming techniques in .NET 3.5 can developers make code more declarative, reduce errors in code, and write fewer lines of code for many common tasks.

Jeremy Miller

Team System: Customizing Work Items

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Team Foundation Server’s work iIem tracking system provides a number of advanced customization options.This article explores custom control support that lets you link to date, enhance the user experience, present data, and more.

Brian A. Randell

Test Run: Partial Anitrandom String Testing

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This column presents an approach to Antirandom (AR) testing the author calls partial AR string testing, which can be used to test a wide range of software systems.

James McCaffrey

Service Station: Building RESTful Clients

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This column how to build clients applications based on the REST architecture using HTTP AP1s. The article describes how to address the question of autogenerated types and code.

Jon Flanders

Foundations: Routers in the Service Bus

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes aspects of using routers with the .NET service bus, especially their use in a message-based architecture.

Juval Lowy

Concurrent Affairs: Four Ways to Use the Concurrency Runtime in Your C++ Projects

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes how to integrate the new parallel computing libraries in the Visual Studio 2010 Beta into existing C++ projects. Based on four common scenarios, the column explains a few of the ways developers can use the APIs and classes that are part of the Parallel Pattern Library (PPL), Asynchronous Agents Library, and Concurrency Runtime.

Rick Molloy

Usability in Practice: Getting Inside Your Users’ Heads

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article explores techniques developers can use to gather information about and incorporate their users' mental models in their software designs.

Ambrose Little, Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg

Windows Mobile and Accelerometers: Shake and Skip to Interact with Your Music

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes an approach to using accelerometers with Windows Mobile to control Windows Media Player Mobile.

Chris Mitchell

Synchronization Coverage: Code Coverage for Concurrency

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

As more and more multi-threaded software applications get developed, software development professionals need to adopt new tools, techniques and metrics that can deal with multi-threaded software. Synchronization coverage is a simple, practical way to do this and this article covers a prototype synchronization coverage tool for .NET, called Sync Cover.

Chris Dern, Roy Tan

Parallel Debugging: Debugging Task-Based Parallel Applications in Visual Studio 2010

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In Visual C++ 10 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4, Microsoft is introducing new libraries and runtimes to significantly ease the process of expressing parallelism in your code base, together with new tool support for performance analysis and debugging of parallel applications. In this article, you will learn about debugging support in Visual Studio 2010, much of which is focused on task-based programming models.

Stephen Toub, Daniel Moth

Event Tracing for Windows: Core Instrumentation Events in Windows 7

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In the first article of a two-part series, the authors present a high-level overview of the ETW technology and core OS instrumentation.

Alex Bendetov, Insung Park

Message Orientation: Decouple Applications with SQL Server Service Broker

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

John Charles Olamendy

Editor's Note: Find Your Anchors

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month, Howard Dierking explores the value of maintaining a few discrete technology interests in order to avoid being swept away in a sea of buzzwords and new technologies.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Distributed Caching, Object-Object Mapping, Blogs and More

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This column covers Web application performance with distributed caching, a utility for object-object mapping, and a look at interesting blogs.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: What’s New in the .NET Framework 4 Base Class Library

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Just about everyone who uses Microsoft .NET uses the Base Class Libraries (BCL).When we make the BCL better, almost every managed developer benefits. This column will focus on the new additions to the BCL in .NET 4 beta 1.

Justin Van Patten

Cutting Edge: Exploring ASP.NET 4.0—Web Forms and Beyond

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

The upcoming ASP.NET 4.0 platform has the same foundation as the latest 3.5 SP1 version, but it provides further refinement in the areas of Web Forms, Dynamic Data controls, and ASP.NET AJAX. In this article, Dino takes a look at what’s new and improved in the Web Forms model.

Dino Esposito

The Polyglot Programmer: Concurrency with Channels, Domains and Messages

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Axum is not a general-purpose language like C# or VB, but one aimed squarely at the problem of concurrency, designed from the outset to be part of a suite of languages that collectively cooperate to solve a business problem.

Ted Neward

Security Briefs: A Follow-on Conversation about Threat Modeling

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article explores the use of threat modeling to address security concerns in your applications.

Michael Howard

Extreme ASP.NET: Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010 and IIS7

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, the author takes a look at SEO practices that the reader can apply when using the latest Microsoft Web technologies.

Scott Allen

Foundations: Charting with DataTemplates

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

For WPF programmers, one major revelation about the power of the DataTemplate comes with a demonstration of how XAML can turn business objects into bar charts. This column explores how to use DataTemplates to create different types of charts.

Charles Petzold

Windows With C++: Drawing with Direct2D

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, the author shows you how to draw with Direct2D by introducing Direct2D’s color structure and its various types of brushes.

Kenny Kerr

Going Places: An Introduction to IPsec VPNs on Mobile Phones

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Many commercial phone models, including Windows phones, come with a VPN client. This article covers some of the basics of the technology behind IKEv2 and MOBIKE and how to use them to create and manage a VPN for a mobile phone.

Ramon Arjona

Usability in Practice: The Tao of Screen Design

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes methods for designing screens in a user interface and the technology frameworks that support screen design.

Ambrose Little, Charles B. Kreitzberg

.NET Visualization: Visualizing Information with .NET

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Having the capability to draw pictures usually isn’t enough for a good information visualization platform. The key to building a visualization platform is capabilities such as interactivity, generating metadata, and overlaying related data. You need a level of flexibility that lets you render any data in any way at any time.

Laurence Moroney

Entity Framework: N-Tier Application Patterns

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article examines n-tier patterns for success and some of the key APIs and issues specific to the Entity Framework. It also provides a sneak peak at features coming in the Microsoft .NET Framework 4 that should make n-tier development significantly easier.

Daniel Simmons

Domain Models: Employing the Domain Model Pattern

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, we’ll go through the reasons to (and not to) employ the domain model pattern, the benefits it brings, as well as provide some practical tips on keeping the overall solution as simple as possible.

Udi Dahan

EF Data Access: EF v2 and Data Access Architecture Best Practices

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Developers deploy a wide variety of development philosophies and architecture styles. This article explores three common perspectives on application development and describes how the Entity Framework can be employed in each. Specifically, the article looks at the forms-centric, model-centric, and code-centric development styles and their relationship to the Entity Framework.

Tim Mallalieu

SQL Data Services: The Relational Database of the Azure Services Platform

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article shows you the new face of SQL Data Services, explores its architecture, and shows how it is truly an extension of SQL Server in the cloud.

David Robinson

Inside Windows 7: MultiTouch Capabilities in Windows 7

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This is Part 3 of a multipart article series on Windows 7. Part 3 covers the Windows 7 multitouch capabilities.

Yochay Kiriaty

Editor's Note: Editor's Note

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Data Snapshots, Subversion, Source Code Organization and More

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you want to save, organize, and annotate snapshots of your database data, find an easy way to install and configure Subversion, and automate the organization of your source code, then you'll want to read more about these latest tools.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: Code Contracts

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article will share some of the best practices that the Base Class Libraries (BCL) team devised as they added the code contract libraries and started to take advantage of them in their own code.

Melitta Andersen

Data Points: Data Performance and Fault Strategies in Silverlight 3

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month’s column, the author shows how binary encoding works, the effect it has on an application’s performance, and how it behaves by demonstrating it in action.

John Papa

Cutting Edge: Pros and Cons of Data Transfer Objects

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

After a brief refresher on procedural and object based patterns for organizing the business logic layer, the author focuses on data transfer objects and the impact they have on the development of the software project.

Dino Esposito

Patterns in Practice: Incremental Delivery Through Continuous Design

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

The end goal of software projects is to deliver value to the customer. Software design is a major factor in how successfully a team can deliver that value. The best designs are a product of continuous design rather than the result of an effort that tries to get the entire design right up front. This approach lets you strive to apply lessons learned from the project to continuously improve the design, instead of becoming locked into an erroneous design developed too early in the project.

Jeremy Miller

Security Briefs: Cryptographic Agility

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Even if you use only the most secure algorithms and the longest key lengths, there’s no guarantee that the code you write today will remain secure. A better alternative is to plan for agility from the beginning. Rather than hard-coding specific cryptographic algorithms into your code, use one of the crypto-agility features built into the Microsoft .NET Framework. This article shows you how.

Bryan Sullivan

Under the Table: How Data Access Code Affects Database Performance

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, the author delves into some commonly used ways of writing data access code and looks at the effect they can have on performance.

Bob Beauchemin

Foundations: Windows Workflow Design Patterns

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Design patterns provide a common, repeatable approach to solving software development tasks, and many different patterns can describe how to accomplish a certain goal in code. When developers begin working with Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), they often ask about how to accomplish common tasks with the technology. This month's column discusses several design patterns used in WF.

Matthew Milner

.NET Matters: Aggregating Exceptions

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Exceptions in .NET are the fundamental mechanism by which errors and other exceptional conditions are communicated. This month’s column provides information about how to aggregate exceptions to help manage a variety of scenarios in which multiple exceptions might result from one operation, including scenarios involving parallelism and concurrency.

Stephen Toub

Inside Microsoft patterns & practices: Building WPF and Silverlight Applications with a Single Code Base Using Prism

MSDN Magazine — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article discusses the Project Linker tool and other techniques to create applications that target both WPF and Silverlight from a single code base.

Erwin van der Valk

Silverlight: Composite Web Apps With Prism

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article reviews the Prism project developed by the Microsoft patterns & practices group and demonstrates how to apply it to composite Web applications using Silverlight.

Shawn Wildermuth

RESTful XHTML: RESTful Services With ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This article describes how to use XHTML and ASP.NET MVC to implement REST services.

Aaron Skonnard

Scale Out: Distributed Caching On The Path To Scalability

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Developers frequently face issues related to scalability bottlenecks when they have applications that need to handle a lot of load. This article describes the role of a distributed cache in building scalable applications.

Iqbal Khan

Inside Windows 7: Introducing The Taskbar APIs

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This is Part 2 of a multipart article series on Windows 7. The focus of Part 2 is the Windows 7 taskbar.

Yochay Kiriaty & Sasha Goldshtein

Testable MVC: Building Testable ASP.NET MVC Applications

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Justin Etheredge

Editor's Note: Viva la Evolution!

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Static Analysis Database Tools, Managing Remote Computers, And More

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you want to apply static analysis to your databases, connect to remote computers, find out more about the Entity Framework, or just check into some cool podcasts for your daily commute, then you'll want to read more about these latest tools and resources.

Scott Mitchell

Usability in Practice: Usability Testing

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month's column describes the benefits and methodologies of usability testing.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little

CLR Inside Out: Building Tuple

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this column, the author lays out some guiding principles that you should follow when working with the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Matt Ellis

Basic Instincts: Stay Error Free With Error Corrections

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Error corrections are an essential part of the Visual Basic coding experience. This article explores the many error correction features offered by Visual Basic and provides a glimpse at the future release of Visual Studio 2010.

Dustin Campbell

Cutting Edge: Comparing Web Forms And ASP.NET MVC

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month's column, we’ll explore the pros and cons of both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC.

Dino Esposito

Test Run: Request-Response Testing With F#

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we show you how to use F# to perform HTTP request-response testing for ASP.NET Web applications.

James McCaffrey

Service Station: More On REST

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month's column answers frequently asked questions about implementing REST.

Jon Flanders

Extreme ASP.NET: Guiding Principles For Your ASP.NET MVC Applications

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this column, the author lays out some guiding principles that you should follow when working with the ASP.NET MVC framework.

Scott Allen

Wicked Code: Taking Silverlight Deep Zoom To The Next Level

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

With the help of Silverlight Deep Zoom and a remarkable control named MultiScaleImage, you can create scenes with many levels of zoom. Jeff Prosise illustrates with what else but the Mandlebrot set.

Jeff Prosise

Foundations: Securing The .NET Service Bus

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This column shows you how to secure the .NET Services Bus and also provides some helper classes and utilities to automate many of the details.

Juval Lowy

Test-Driven Design: Using Mocks And Tests To Design Role-Based Objects

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Use Test-Driven Development with mock objects to design object oriented code in terms of roles and responsibilities, not categorization of objects into class hierarchies.

Isaiah Perumalla

Entity Framework: Anti-Patterns To Avoid In N-Tier Applications

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Danny Simmons explores some anti-patterns you should look out for when building n-tier applications with the Entity Framework.

Daniel Simmons

Velocity: Build Better Data-Driven Apps With Distributed Caching

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Microsoft Velocity exposes a unified, distributed memory cache for client application consumption. We show you how to add Velocity to your data-driven apps.

Aaron Dunnington

Peer Fun: A Peer-To-Peer Work Processing App With WCF

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

We demonstrate creating a peer-to-peer processing platform where multiple players function together for a common purpose: getting your work done.

Matt Neely

Inside Windows 7: Introducing Libraries

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This is Part 1 of a multipart article series on Windows 7. This article is about the new user profile storage concept in Windows 7, called Libraries.

Yochay Kiriaty

Usability in Practice: Agile Ux Development

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month the authors show you how to treat the user experience as an essential dimension of the development process while retaining the advantages of Agile.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little

Editor's Note: Architecture and Aggregates

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Managing in the Cloud, UX Design Patterns, Anders Hejlsberg’s The C# Programming Language, and More

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Now that you're even managing projects in the cloud, you'll need some tools to help. This month we illustrate one, discuss UX design patterns, a book by Anders Hejlsberg, and more.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: Memory Usage Auditing For .NET Applications

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Memory usage can have a direct impact on how fast an application executes and thus is important to optimize. In this article we discuss the basics of memory optimization for .NET programs.

Subramanian Ramaswamy and Vance Morrison

Data Points: Building An Out-of-Browser Client With Silverlight 3

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Silverlight 2 applications are restricted to running inside a browser. However, Silverlight 3 applications can run inside the browser or out. Here we build a social networking app as a standalone Silverlight 3 application.

John Papa

Cutting Edge: Go Beyond HTML Forms With AJAX

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we examine forms in the context of AJAX applications and look at various approaches to implementing features such as auto-saving, just-in-time validation, and submission throttling.

Dino Esposito

Patterns in Practice: The Unit Of Work Pattern And Persistence Ignorance

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Jeremy Miller continues his discussion of persistence patterns by reviewing the Unit of Work design pattern and examining the issues around persistence ignorance.

Jeremy Miller

Test Run: .NET Module Testing with IronPython

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we demonstrate how easy it is to use IronPython to test .NET-based libraries.

James McCaffrey

The Polyglot Programmer: Reaping The Benefits Of Cobra

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Cobra, a descendant of Python, offers a combined dynamic and statically-typed programming model, built-in unit test facilities, scripting capabilities, and much more. Feel the power here.

Ted Neward

Foundations: Customizing the New WPF Calendar Controls

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Late last year Microsoft released Calendar and DatePicker controls for WPF in the WPF Toolkit. We’ll show you how they work, and how you can customize them.

Charles Petzold

Concurrent Affairs: Solving The Dining Philosophers Problem With Asynchronous Agents

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

We use the new Asynchronous Agents Library in Visual C++ 2010 to solve the classic Dining Philosophers concurrency problem.

Rick Molloy

Windows With C++: Introducing Direct2D

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If you want to develop high-performance and high-quality commercial applications, you’ll still look to C++ and native code. Direct2D will help you deliver the graphics power you need.

Kenny Kerr

{End Bracket}: Think Before You Speak

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Steven M. List

.NET RIA Services: Building A Data-Driven Expense App with Silverlight 3

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

.NET RIA Services provides a set of server components and ASP.NET extensions such as authentication, roles, and profile management. We’ll show you how they work.

Jonathan Carter

Cloud Computing: Patterns For High Availability, Scalability, And Computing Power With Windows Azure

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Here we examine the typical cloud platform architecture and some common architectural patterns, along with their implementation on the Windows Azure offering from Microsoft.

Joshy Joseph

Data Services: Access Your Data On Premise Or In The Cloud With ADO.NET Data Services

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article the author looks at two versions of the same application--one consuming an on-premise Data Service, and one consuming an Azure Table Data Service to illustrate data access in the cloud.

Elisa Flasko

SOA Simplified: Service Virtualization With The Managed Services Engine

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

By using Managed Services Engine service virtualization technology, you can begin participating in the cloud by simply configuring virtual service endpoints and operations that integrate with the .NET Service Bus.

Aaron Skonnard

Editor's Note: Head in the Clouds

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month Editor-in-Chief Howard Dierking comes down from Cloud 9 when he realizes that employing cloud services is less about magic and more about planning. Take a few tips from his recent experiences.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Easy File Backup, Exploring Files And Folders Inside Visual Studio, Multiple Monitor Software, And More

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

If the responsibility for creating, managing, and executing routine backups is yours, these tools will make it easier. Also see how you can browse folders and files from inside Visual Studio.

Scott Mitchell

Basic Instincts: Documenting Your Code With XML Comments

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

XML comments provide an easy and effective way to document your code. We’ll show you how to use and customize XML comments in your Visual Basic projects.

Lisa Feigenbaum

CLR Inside Out: Understanding The CLR Binder

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, we cover some of the best practices for assembly binding and loading using the CLR.

Aarthi Ramamurthy and Mark Miller

Cutting Edge: Build Rich User Interfaces with jQuery

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month's installment we build modal and modeless dialog boxes in jQuery and explain how to post data from them to the Web server.

Dino Esposito

Extreme ASP.NET: The Life And Times of an ASP.NET MVC Controller

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Here the author dissects the ASP.NET MVC framework and looks at how controllers work. He then explains how the framework interacts with your controllers and how you can influence those interactions.

Scott Allen

Foundations: Versioning Workflows

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Developers often struggle with versioning workflows and their related classes. Matt Milner discusses the core issues related to workflow versioning and provides recommendations for making changes to workflow definitions, activities, and workflow services.

Matthew Milner

Going Places: Gaming In The Key Of Zune

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Mike Calligaro shows you the basics of using XNA Game Studio 3.0 to write games for Zune.

Mike Calligaro

Office Space: Custom Field Types for SharePoint 2007

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Custom field types provide a powerful way to define a reusable SharePoint column definitions.

Ted Pattison

Security Briefs: A Conversation About Threat Modeling

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Listen in on a chat between a developer and security pro that delves into some of the major Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) requirements we impose on product teams here at Microsoft

Michael Howard

Under the Table: Programming with FileStreams in SQL Server 2008

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

There's always been disagreement about whether large blobs, such as document and multimedia items, should be stored in the database or file system. In SQL Server 2008 you don't have to choose; filestream storage provides the best of both approaches.

Bob Beauchemin

Patterns and Practices: Simplifying Patterns and Practices

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we in introduce a new column that takes you inside the Microsoft patterns & practices group. This first installment focuses on ways groups inside Microsoft have implemented the Dependency Injection pattern in Microsoft products and tools.

Alex Homer

Usability in Practice: Useful, Usable and Desirable: Usability as a Core Development Competence

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month's installment, learn how to achieve the most important outcome of all UI design: ensuring that your software is useful, useable, and desirable.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little

{End Bracket}: The Unconference: Where Geeks JIT Together

MSDN Magazine — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month the author takes us on a tour of the unconference and other unconventional get-togethers. Learn how these unique approaches to conferences are being widely adopted.

Steven M List

Lessons Learned: Optimizing A Large Scale Software + Services Application

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Udi Dahan explains how his team identified and overcame unforeseen problems while developing a large-scale software + services trading application.

Udi Dahan

Dynamic WPF: Create Flexible UIs With Flow Documents And Data Binding

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Flow documents offer enormous flexibility in arranging text layout and pagination, but they don’t support data binding, so you can’t dynamically change content. Here we build a component to solve that problem.

Vincent Van Den Berghe

Cloud Computing: Building Distributed Applications With .NET Services

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

We show you how .NET Services within the Azure Services Platform makes it easy to bring workflow apps to the cloud.

Aaron Skonnard

Take Control: Use SharePoint to Manage Your Windows Services

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this article, we show you how to integrate a Windows Services-based solution with SharePoint. The results enable you to provision, start, stop, and remove service instances through SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration.

Pav Cherny

Sync Up: Manage Your Data Effectively With The Microsoft Sync Framework

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Synchronization Services for ADO.NET provide a set of tools to help you synchronize data between two database sources, synchronize files between machines, and synchronize with an RSS or ATOM feed. Learn more here.

James Yip

Editor's Note: What's In Style

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

From fat to thin to fat again--Howard Dierking chronicles the dieting habits of a Web client and the technologies that continue to fuel the shifts.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Microsoft Chart Controls, Visual Studio Automatic Code Snippets, And More

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this installment we look at the Microsoft Chart Controls; Snippet Designer, a free, add-in for Visual Studio 2008 for creating and editing Code Snippets; refactoring SQL applications; and this month’s favorite blog.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: CLR Optimizations In .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

See the changes the CLR team made to the CLR .for NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and the improvements you’ll get running your existing CLR 2.0-based apps against this service pack.

Surupa Biswas

Data Points: Using Silverlight 2 With ADO.NET Data Services

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

ADO.NET Data Services and Silverlight make a powerful combination, but to make them work well together, there are a few things you need to understand. Here, John Papa explains.

John Papa

Cutting Edge: Explore Rich Client Scripting With jQuery, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Achieving cross-browser compatibility for events is no easy task. The jQuery event handling API addresses the differences in event handling across browsers, allowing you to write more predictable JavaScript.

Dino Esposito

Patterns in Practice: Persistence Patterns

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Here we examine data persistence patterns to help you determine which best suits your needs. We look at a number of patterns, including the Active Record, the Data Mapper, the Repository, the Identity Map, the Lazy Loading, and the Virtual Proxy.

Jeremy Miller

Service Station: Creating And Consuming Web Feeds

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Jon Flanders demonstrates creating and consuming Web feeds with Windows Communication Foundation and AtomPub.

Jon Flanders

Foundations: Working With The .NET Service Bus

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

The .NET Services Bus is arguably the most accessible, powerful, and useful piece of the new Windows Azure Cloud Computing initiative. See how it manages cloud communications.

Juval Lowy

Windows With C++: The Virtual Disk API In Windows 7

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we look inside the Windows 7 beta to examine the Virtual Disk API and the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format.

Kenny Kerr

.NET Matters: Parallelizing Operations With Dependencies

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

In this month’s installment, Stephen Toub examines some techniques for enforcing dependencies in the running order of asynchronous operations and builds a DependencyManagement class to help.

Stephen Toub

Usability in Practice: The Power of Personas

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

A persona is a description of a fictional person representing an amalgamation of traits found in a segment of your users. Emplolying personas arms you with a powerful foundation on which to base design decisions.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little

{ End Bracket }: Translate This Page

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

This month we examine the Microsoft translation Web service and show you how you can incorporate translation services into your own Web application.

Sandor Maurice & Vikram Dendi

Internet Explorer 8: New Features To Slice, Store, And Accelerate Your Web Applications

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Internet Explorer 8 sports some exciting new features including Web Slices, Accelerators, and search suggestions along with AJAX navigation and DOM storage.

Daron Yöndem

Silverlight Patterns: Model-View-ViewModel In Silverlight 2 Apps

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In this article, you’ll learn how to avoid problematic tight coupling by applying the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in Silverlight 2.

Shawn Wildermuth

SharePoint: 10 Best Practices For Building SharePoint Solutions

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Here we summarize a number of best practices for developing SharePoint solutions.

E. Wilansky, T. Stojecki, P. Olszewski and S. Kowalewski

Database Development: Introducing New Features In The VSTS Database Edition GDR

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This article describes features introduced in the GDR for Visual Studio Team Server Database Edition.

Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill

.NET Interop: Automate Acceptance Testing With IronRuby

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Acceptance testing verifies that the system under development meets the customer’s requirements. Learn the benefits here.

Ben Hall

MSBuild: Best Practices For Creating Reliable Builds, Part 2

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Find out here how you can use MSBuild to better manage and control large build projects in Visual Studio.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi

Editor's Note: Growing Pains

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

An economic downturn is no time to stop moving forward. Remember the core goals of your business and forge ahead.

Howard Dierking

Toolbox: Rich AJAX Data Controls, Analyzing HTTP Traffic, And More

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This month we look at rich data Web controls for AJAX, HTTP traffic analysis, and more.

Scott Mitchell

CLR Inside Out: Isolated Storage In Silverlight 2

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

See how to get the most out of isolated storage in Silverlight to keep your applications safe.

Justin Van Patten

Cutting Edge: Explore Rich Client Scripting With jQuery, Part 1

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Thanks to selectors and function chaining, jQuery allows you to write compact, cross-browser code.

Dino Esposito

The Polyglot Programmer: Mixing And Matching Languages

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

See why you need to be a polyglot programmer and what mixing and matching languages can do for your projects.

Ted Neward

Test Run: Automating UI Tests In WPF Applications

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

This month we describe techniques for automating UI testing in Windows Presentation Foundation applications.

James McCaffrey

Security Briefs: Protect Your Site With URL Rewriting

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Learn the numerous ways in which you can rewrite URLs to defend against common Web vulnerabilities.

Bryan Sullivan

Extreme ASP.NET: Charting With ASP.NET And LINQ

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

The combination of the ASP.NET Chart Control and the data querying power of LINQ lets you build flexible charts. Learn how here.

K. Scott Allen

Wicked Code: 3 Important Tips For Silverlight Development

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

As a Web platform, Silverlight should be fast. Don’t keep your users waiting by not heeding these performance tips.

Jeff Prosise

Team System: Team Build 2008 Customization

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

See how to modify the default behavior of Team Build, extend your builds with custom tasks, and make use of the enhancements in Team Build 2008 SP1.

Brian A. Randell

Foundations: Writing More Efficient ItemsControls

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Here Charles Petzold explains several techniques for improving the performance of ItemsControls.

Charles Petzold

Usability in Practice: Strategies for Designing Application Navigation

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Good navigation makes for happy users, and happy users are good for your business. See what makes users happy this month.

Dr. Charles B. Kreitzberg and Ambrose Little

{ End Bracket }: Perfect API Design

MSDN Magazine — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Why is good API design so difficult when all you really need is perfection? Intrigued? Read on.

James Waletzky