MSDN Magazine January 2015

Visual Basic .NET: 14 Top Improvements in Visual Basic 14

Microsoft has rebuilt Visual Basic 14 from the ground up. VB team member Lucian Wischik presents the Microsoft VB Language Design Team’s top 14 improvements in the new Visual Basic 14. Lucian Wischik

Visual Studio 2015: Web-Based Test Case Management with TFS

Manoj Bableshwar shows you how to plan, create, run and track manual tests on any platform with Visual Studio Online. Manoj Bableshwar

Azure SDK 2.5: Hadoop Made Easier for Microsoft Developers

HDInsight enhances big data processing in Microsoft Azure using the popular suite of Hadoop tools. Now the new Visual Studio tooling for HDInsight makes it easier than ever to take on big data projects using familiar frameworks. Omid Afnan

Big Data: Protect Your Online Services with Big Data and Machine Learning

This article explores how big data and machine learning techniques are used to protect the online assets in the Microsoft Application & Services Group, including large services like Bing and MSN properties. Alisson Sol, Don Ankney, Eugene Bobukh

Microsoft Azure: Occasionally Connected Data in Cross-Platform Mobile Apps

Learn how Xamarin and Microsoft Azure Mobile Services enable cross-platform mobile apps to work regardless of connectivity and to synchronize data gracefully with the cloud in Windows, iOS and Android. Kevin Ashley

Azure Insider: BYOD Challenge: Connect Mobile Devices to the Enterprise

In this month’s issue we’ll take a closer look at what it takes to support more complex scenarios when connecting mobile applications to resources in the enterprise. Bruno Terkaly, Greg Oliver

TypeScript: Understanding TypeScript

TypeScript is a lot more than just syntactic sugar for JavaScript. With its support for data typing, Intellisense and compile-time checking, TypeScript is a programming language worth considering on its own merits. Peter Vogel

Windows Phone 8.1: Adding Application Data to the Windows Phone 8.1 Map Control

In his second article on the mapping capabilities of Windows Phone 8.1, Keith Pijanowski shows you how to get application data into the map control and how to use that data so your maps can be used offline as well. Keith Pijanowski

Microsoft Azure: Cross-Platform Cloud Automation with JavaScript

Linux developers working with Azure resources can't turn to PowerShell. For them, the best scripting solution is the Azure Cross-Platform Command-Line Interface (xplat-cli), which provides a set of open source, cross-platform commands to work with. Steven Edouard

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Editor's Note: Back to Basic Lucian Wischik's "14 Top Improvements to Visual Basic 14" leads off this month's issue, and for good reason. Microsoft has performed a ground up rework of the #2 .NET programming language, and the improvements are striking. Michael Desmond	Cutting Edge: Mobilize an Existing Web Site Mobile users expect as seamless and smooth an experience working with Web sites on their mobile devices as they have on their desktops. While responsive Web design is one approach, creating discrete sites may be the best answer. Dino Esposito	Data Points: Looking Ahead to Entity Framework 7 In this first look at EF7, Julie Lerman discusses what EF7 will bring to developers, the motivations behind decisions being made about the framework, and what this version means to existing apps that use EF6 or earlier. Julie Lerman
Test Run: Logistic Regression Classification with Multi-Swarm Optimization James McCaffrey takes a look at one of the most fundamental forms of machine learning—logistic regression classification—and presents a technique called multi-swarm optimization that can be used for training. James McCaffrey	Don't Get Me Started: An Upstart Again Microsoft has done a fine job remaking itself in the image of an increasingly cloud- and mobile-centric world, and the company's partnership with Xamarin is one reason why. David Platt