March 2010

 

IIS Smooth Streaming: Enhancing Silverlight Video Experiences with Contextual Data
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 3
Touch isn't just a form of mouse input in Silverlight 3: 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
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
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

Columns

Editor's Note:
Coming Out the Other Side
The worst is over for technology job-seekers, says Dice.com executive.
Keith Ward

UI Frontiers:
MIDI Music in WPF Applications
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
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

CLR Inside Out:
Migrating an APTCA Assembly to .NET Framework 4
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
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

Security Briefs:
Add a Security Bug Bar to Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010
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
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

Cutting Edge:
ASP.NET Ajax Library and WCF Data Services
Dino this month 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

Extreme ASP.NET:
Model Validation & Metadata in ASP.NET MVC 2
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