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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Tim Berners-Lee brought about the World Wide Web. What about you? 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. 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. Learn how to use SQL Azure and the Sync Framework to move data between the corporate data center, various branches and individual devices. 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. 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. David Platt comes up with his own lyrics depicting the seasons of a developer. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. One developer’s journey through the Windows Phone 7 application approval process -- and why screenshots need special attention. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Want to build a Windows Phone 7 app that sells? Forget cool; remember useful. 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. 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. Learn how to utilize elasticity—the ability to provision resources and remove them on the fly—to take full advantage of cloud computing. 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. 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. 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. This Florida agency goes beyond talking about the problem of IT education: it’s getting involved in students’ lives. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. At a minimum, UI design shouldn’t cause physical pain to readers and users. 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. 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. 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! Learn how an enterprise distributed cache can help .NET and Java apps share data at run time, providing high performance and scalability. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Finding the commonalities and variabilities within a system, and expressing them, forms the heart of design. 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. Instead of being at odds, developers and designers should work together from the beginning. Better software will result. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Software development isn’t all about object-oriented design; it’s about finding what works best, and incorporating it into your solution. Readers weigh in on the question of whether U.S. schools are preparing students for software development jobs. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Euphemisms are the refuge of cowards. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. When building your program, are you content with “good enough”? If so, your expectations are fatally low. 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<T> class to maximize your resources. 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. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Standards for Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight aren’t the enemy; in fact, they should be your starting point. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Help us help you, by sending your feedback on various topics. 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. 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. 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. 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. Ted Neward continues his dissection of the alternative MongoDB database system, using exploration testing to investigate the underlying technology. 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. It’s time to standardize the UI for Windows Presentation Foundation. 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. 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. 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. 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. It wasn’t all that long ago that surfing meant grabbing a board and hanging 10. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Programmers will never develop great software until they learn that it’s not about themselves. 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. 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. 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. 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#. 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. 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. 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. As devices converge, user experience design needs to change, too. The man most responsible for Visual Studio 2010 discusses what developers have to look forward to. 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. 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. Making things easier for the end user isn't "dumbing down" -- it's smart design. 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. Touch isn't just a form of mouse input in Silverlight: Sometimes what's required are controls specialized and optimized for touch. 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. 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. The worst is over for technology job-seekers, says Dice.com executive. 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. 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. Did you know that by precompiling LINQ queries you might actually be <i>degrading</i> your app’s performance if you’re not careful? Julie Lerman explains how to ensure you’re not <i>re</i>-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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Changes are coming to MSDN Magazine. They begin this month, with the unveiling of a number of new, monthly columns. 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. 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. Learn about enhanced TimeSpan formatting and parsing features coming in the .NET Framework 4, and some helpful tips for working with TimeSpan values. 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. 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. 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. People aren't computers; keep this in mind when developing software. When developers confuse people and computers, bad things happen. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Howard Dierking talks about the recent changes and updates to the MSDN Web sites and the MSDN Subscriptions program. 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. 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. 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. This article reviews what makes XML vulnerable to denial of service attacks and how to mitigate these attacks. 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. 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. 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. In this column, Ambrose Little and Charlie Kreitzberg discuss best practices, design patterns, and other considerations related to implementing a search feature. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This column covers common user interface groupings, configuring NHibernate using C#, and a look at interesting books and podcasts. 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. Collection Initializers are a great addition to the language and allows concise syntax in order to initialize both framework and user defined collection types. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This article describes aspects of using routers with the .NET service bus, especially their use in a message-based architecture. 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. This article explores techniques developers can use to gather information about and incorporate their users' mental models in their software designs. This article describes an approach to using accelerometers with Windows Mobile to control Windows Media Player Mobile. 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. 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. In the first article of a two-part series, the authors present a high-level overview of the ETW technology and core OS instrumentation. 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. This column covers Web application performance with distributed caching, a utility for object-object mapping, and a look at interesting blogs. 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. 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. 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. This article explores the use of threat modeling to address security concerns in your applications. In this article, the author takes a look at SEO practices that the reader can apply when using the latest Microsoft Web technologies. 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. In this article, the author shows you how to draw with Direct2D by introducing Direct2D’s color structure and its various types of brushes. 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. This article describes methods for designing screens in a user interface and the technology frameworks that support screen design. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is Part 3 of a multipart article series on Windows 7. Part 3 covers the Windows 7 multitouch capabilities. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. This article discusses the Project Linker tool and other techniques to create applications that target both WPF and Silverlight from a single code base. 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. This article describes how to use XHTML and ASP.NET MVC to implement REST services. 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. This is Part 2 of a multipart article series on Windows 7. The focus of Part 2 is the Windows 7 taskbar. 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. This month's column describes the benefits and methodologies of usability testing. In this column, the author lays out some guiding principles that you should follow when working with the ASP.NET MVC framework. 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. In this month's column, we’ll explore the pros and cons of both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. This month we show you how to use F# to perform HTTP request-response testing for ASP.NET Web applications. This month's column answers frequently asked questions about implementing REST. In this column, the author lays out some guiding principles that you should follow when working with the ASP.NET MVC framework. 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. 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. 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. Danny Simmons explores some anti-patterns you should look out for when building n-tier applications with the Entity Framework. Microsoft Velocity exposes a unified, distributed memory cache for client application consumption. We show you how to add Velocity to your data-driven apps. We demonstrate creating a peer-to-peer processing platform where multiple players function together for a common purpose: getting your work done. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Jeremy Miller continues his discussion of persistence patterns by reviewing the Unit of Work design pattern and examining the issues around persistence ignorance. This month we demonstrate how easy it is to use IronPython to test .NET-based libraries. 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. 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. We use the new Asynchronous Agents Library in Visual C++ 2010 to solve the classic Dining Philosophers concurrency problem. 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. .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. Here we examine the typical cloud platform architecture and some common architectural patterns, along with their implementation on the Windows Azure offering from Microsoft. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. In this article, we cover some of the best practices for assembly binding and loading using the CLR. 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. 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. 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. Mike Calligaro shows you the basics of using XNA Game Studio 3.0 to write games for Zune. Custom field types provide a powerful way to define a reusable SharePoint column definitions. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. Udi Dahan explains how his team identified and overcame unforeseen problems while developing a large-scale software + services trading application. 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. We show you how .NET Services within the Azure Services Platform makes it easy to bring workflow apps to the cloud. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Jon Flanders demonstrates creating and consuming Web feeds with Windows Communication Foundation and AtomPub. 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. This month we look inside the Windows 7 beta to examine the Virtual Disk API and the Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. 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. 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. This month we examine the Microsoft translation Web service and show you how you can incorporate translation services into your own Web application. Internet Explorer 8 sports some exciting new features including Web Slices, Accelerators, and search suggestions along with AJAX navigation and DOM storage. In this article, you’ll learn how to avoid problematic tight coupling by applying the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in Silverlight 2. Here we summarize a number of best practices for developing SharePoint solutions. This article describes features introduced in the GDR for Visual Studio Team Server Database Edition. Acceptance testing verifies that the system under development meets the customer’s requirements. Learn the benefits here. Find out here how you can use MSBuild to better manage and control large build projects in Visual Studio. An economic downturn is no time to stop moving forward. Remember the core goals of your business and forge ahead. This month we look at rich data Web controls for AJAX, HTTP traffic analysis, and more. See how to get the most out of isolated storage in Silverlight to keep your applications safe. Thanks to selectors and function chaining, jQuery allows you to write compact, cross-browser code. See why you need to be a polyglot programmer and what mixing and matching languages can do for your projects. This month we describe techniques for automating UI testing in Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Learn the numerous ways in which you can rewrite URLs to defend against common Web vulnerabilities. The combination of the ASP.NET Chart Control and the data querying power of LINQ lets you build flexible charts. Learn how here. As a Web platform, Silverlight should be fast. Don’t keep your users waiting by not heeding these performance tips. 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. Here Charles Petzold explains several techniques for improving the performance of ItemsControls. Good navigation makes for happy users, and happy users are good for your business. See what makes users happy this month. Why is good API design so difficult when all you really need is perfection? Intrigued? Read on. We give you a gentle introduction to designing and evolving rich domain models as part of integrating Domain-Driven Design (DDD) into your coding efforts. See how IronRuby lets you employ the straightforward Ruby language to create acceptance tests that interoperate with .NET-compliant code. We introduce you to “Oslo” and demonstrate how MSchema and MGraph enable you to build metadata-driven apps. We’ll define types and values in “M” and deploy them to the repository. In this article we explain just how simple it can be to build a WPF application the right way using the MVVM Pattern. Here we wrap up the call center client application we began last month. The techniques we illustrate will help you build real-world enterprise solutions using Silverlight. This article describes some basic practices and techniques that you can use in MSBuild to better manage and control your build projects in Visual Studio. Howard Dierking concludes that the business domain must drive software design—even if the natural paradigm is not what is most comfortable. See how he got there. This month we look at implementing the Active Record Pattern in your .NET application and how aspect-oriented programming yields separation of concerns. There’s a danger in using one-size-fits-all exception handling, and you need to know how to avoid it by being as specific as possible about how you handle errors. Here we build a syndicated news reader application to illustrate the use of isolated storage and data syndication in Silverlight. This month Dino continues his look at managing dynamic Silverlight content by discussing caching and isolated storage. We look at some techniques you can adopt to reduce the amount of housekeeping code you write so you can focus on the essence of the application. New spatial data support in SQL Server 2008 opens the door to mapping and querying geometric and geographic data, allowing you to build exciting new applications. Workflows often define long-running processes and an unhandled failure usually means termination. Avoid this scenario by handling exceptions properly. The Parallel Patterns Library allows you to more easily take advantage of parallelism. See what this and other Visual C++ 2010 features are in store. This month we demonstrate how you can use the ThreadPool to support ordered execution without having to build custom thread pools yourself. OMA Device Management (OMA-DM), based on a dialect of XML called SyncML, can be used to provision and manage mobile devices in an enterprise scenario. We'll show you how. Having that next great innovative idea is only half the battle—getting it heard is the real challenge. We explore some of the key new WCF and WF features in .NET Framework 4.0 as well as the new application server capabilities provided by the “Dublin” extensions. A Security Token Service, or STS, acts as a security gateway to authenticate callers and issue security tokens carrying claims that describe the caller. See how you can build a custom STS with the “Geneva” Framework. Take a walk through the creation of a call center client application to learn how to build real-world enterprise solutions using Silverlight. We show you how to build a location-aware task list application for Windows Mobile devices that uses GPS to remind you of a task when and where it’s appropriate. Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010 introduces product backlog and iteration backlog workbooks and reports that will help agile teams plan and manage releases and iterations. Integrating workflow into ASP.NET applications means communicating with activities via a workflow queue and hosting the runtime in the global application class. We’ll show you how. Here’s a look at a year’s worth of coverage and changes at MSDN Magazine in response to reader requests. Writing your JavaScript code in C# and having it converted, Eric Lippert’s programming blog, and reading up on T-SQL 2008. There are many factors to consider when building your app with both managed and native code. Find out how to employ interop and how to choose the interop that’s right for you. Reflection is useful for debugging and logging and otherwise providing the type information you need. Here you’ll see how to use reflection on COM types. This month Dino tackles the problem of large download size for Silverlight applications, explaining when to use streaming, when to divide the download, and other techniques for better performance over the wire. Here James McCaffrey uses some statistical methods and a technique he calls PERIL to estimate risks to software projects involving timing, costs, and other potential resource shortfalls. We discuss some of the basic tenets of REST as well as present an implementation of a RESTful service using WCF. The Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) threat modeling tool helps you develop great threat models as a backbone of your security process. We'll show you how it works. See how to get the benefits of rerouting while alleviating the risks with this in-depth look at URL rewriting in ASP.NET. Managing state and error recovery using transactions is the topic of this month’s installment of Foundations. Stephen Toub shows you how to add round-robin scheduling support on top of the ThreadPool for more granular processing control. This month our usability experts explain what it takes to create informative, useful error messages. Vikram Dendi looks at how machine translation is poised to change the world and why it is so important to deliver information in multiple languages. See how you can streamline your team projects using Process Templates in Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) The heart of Windows Workflow Foundation is its declarative programming model. Here are some best practices to consider when using WF to realize software solutions in the real world. To introduce you to VSTO Power Tools Office interop API extensions, we’ll walk through the development of an application that automates Outlook, Excel, and Word. Building a data access layer using LINQ to SQL and the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows you to decouple your application from the persistence technology you're using. Here we introduce Microsoft Code Name “Geneva,” the new framework for building claims-based applications and services, and federated security scenarios. At an open spaces conference in Austin, Texas, Editor-in-Chief Howard Dierking realizes that software development and business goals can both coexist and benefit each other. This month we take a look at FxCop and other tools that enforce your design rules, along with jQuery. Getting the performance you want in concurrent applications is not as straightforward as you might think. See how common threading issues can affect your application. Ken Getz shows how the CollectionChanged event lets you reflect changes to your underlying data source in your bound data controls. Choosing the right design pattern for your ASP.NET Web application can help you achieve the separation of concerns between your presentation layer and the layers beneath it. Designing testability into your app means smaller tests that are cheaper to create, easier to understand, faster to run, and much simpler to debug. Because Virtual Server is built upon a set of COM modules, you can automate the creation and testing of virtual machines. Here we use Windows PowerShell to run the tests. With Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you can lay out text on a path, then animate the individual points defining the path and watch the characters bounce around in response. This month we explain how pseudo variables and format specifiers provide a wealth of information for use in debugging. Marcus Perryman explains the correct use of Connection Manager when a Windows Mobile application requires network data. A great user experience is more than just a pretty face. In this new column we’ll look at some of the subtleties of building great user experiences. In this month's installment, James McCaffrey talks about the qualities and skills he looks for when searching for great software testers. Our security experts present 10 vulnerable pieces of code. Your mission is to find the holes (a.k.a. bad security practices) in the code. Bryan Sullivan discusses the new SDL for Web applications and Agile projects with more compressed release cycles. Understanding the ACLs that govern permissions and rights before an operation is allowed to proceed is critical to enhancing security. Download Visual Round-trip Analyzer (VRTA) to uncover the root of your Web page loading problems and identify these 12 common ailments. Find out how to integrate SharePoint and Silverlight by creating a Silverlight media player and deploying it as a SharePoint Web Part. Security measures are highly context driven and change with circumstances. This month Howard Dierking spins a few security yarns to illustrate. This month Scott looks at improving development skills, writing regular expressions, a web scheduling control and a SQL tips blog. The CLR team takes a look inside the System.Globalization namespace to explain how to handle data formats for proper localization and globalization. John Papa tackles questions about calling services from Silverlight 2 applications. This month Dino Esposito explains how the browser interoperability layer in Silverlight addresses a number of your Silverlight / Web page interaction needs. Using threat models to drive your security engineering process helps prioritize the code review, fuzz testing, and attack surface analysis tasks. There is a large body of research on group techniques to determine the best alternative from a set of options. Dr. James McCaffrey outlines five of them. Silverlight is powerful enough to let you easily build an image magnification feature for you web site with very little code, most of which is XAML. Find out how. Matt Milner takes a look at some of the challenges and techniques related to testing Windows Workflow Foundation activities, workflows, and associated components. Brian Randell introduces you to Visual Studio 2008 Team Foundation Server Build (Team Build). Then he creates and runs a team build. Writing is good exercise for developers and software engineers. Richard Ward explains how writing can help you focus your thoughts and communicate more precisely. This article presents an overview of the motivation behind new techniques that decompose problems into independent pieces for optimal use of parallel programming. We take a look at planned support for parallel programming for both managed and native code in the next version of Visual Studio. Here we describe some of the more common challenges to concurrent programming and present advice for coping with them in your software. Here is an ASP.NET AJAX data-driven Web application that takes the best features from server- and client-side programming to deliver an efficient, user-friendly experience. In this article, the author explores how the F# language helps you create asynchronous function libraries that can be called seamlessly from any other .NET-compliant language. Introducing the issue, Howard Dierking points out that you can't simply parallelize your code blindly if you expect to truly reap the benefits that parallelism promises. This month Scott shows how to generate realistic test data, visits Dare Obasanjo's blog, and demonstrates color coding code for better readability. Andrew Dai of the CLR team discusses the Transparency model, which creates a strong isolation boundary between privileged and unprivileged code for Silverlight apps. Learn how to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), XAML, and the deep XML support in Visual Basic to generate user interfaces dynamically. There’s a strong similarity between Web-based Silverlight 2 applications and desktop WPF applications. Enabling easy code reuse between the two is Dino’s focus here. Here are some design patterns that allow you to achieve higher cohesion and looser coupling for more flexible, reusable applications. Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) provides an easy role-based system and a more powerful and complex claims-based API for implementing authorization in services. This month Juval Lowy tackles questions such as when to keep proxies and services in memory for better state management in long-running workflows. See how you can gain efficiency in surprising ways by looking closely at your algorithms, the data they operate on, and the hardware you’re designing for. We show you how to create ink-enabled apps quickly with the Tablet PC SDK and the InkEdit and InkPicture ActiveX controls. This month: memory access issues in multi-core systems and diagnosing and avoiding false sharing in your parallel computing applications. With today's processing power at your disposal, Josh Phillips recommends speculative computation—performing operations ahead of time even if you may never need the results. Here we explain how the new hierarchyID data type in SQL Server 2008 helps solve some of the problems in modeling and querying hierarchical information. We introduce you to the benefits of building composite applications with the Composite Application Guidance for WPF from Microsoft patterns & practices. ADO.NET Data Services provide Web-accessible endpoints that allow you to filter, sort, shape, and page data without having to build that functionality yourself. See how routed events and routed commands in Windows Presentation Foundation form the basis for communication between the parts of your UI. Technology changes at a lightning-fast pace. This month Howard Dierking considers how the rapid changes affect developer priorities and magazine focus. This month Toolbox provides help with error logging, finds an app that helps you write LINQ queries, and explores the non-technical side of development. In this installment of CLR Inside Out Gaurav Khanna explains everything you need to know about unhandled exception processing in the .NET Framework. Here John Papa demonstrates how to build a Silverlight 2 user interface that communicates through WCF to interact with business entities and a database. This month Ken digs deeper into the System.Linq.Enumerable class and shows readers how to perform some magic data operations using System.Linq.Enumerable. Learn how to enable an auditing solution for Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 with customized control pages in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007. This month Dino builds a service layer that authenticates users of Silverlight 2 and ASP.NET AJAX services to prevent illegal access to sensitive back-end services. This time James McCaffrey sets up a virtual environment to use for configuration testing to introduce you to software configuration testing with Microsoft Virtual Server In this installment we introduce you to new Web-oriented security guidance and tools straight from the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) team at Microsoft. Windows Presentation Foundation dependency properties don’t always play well with others. Learn how you can compensate for their lack of notification events. The ESP simulation engine, the basis for Microsoft Flight Simulator, handles visual rendering, physics, sound, and other virtual world capabilities. Take a look inside. The goal of the ADO.NET Data Services Framework is to create a simple REST-based framework for exposing and consuming data-centric services easily. We introduce you to the EDI functionality within BizTalk Server 2006 R2, illustrating schema creation, document mapping, EDI delivery and transmission, and exception handling. In this excerpt from his upcoming book, Laurence Moroney explains the basics of Silverlight animation and the animation tools available in Expression Blend. We build a Silverlight 2.0 application using the InkPresenter to let users annotate a pre-defined collection of images, perform handwriting recognition, and save the annotations and recognized text into a server-side database. If you're unfamiliar with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), building that first Silverlight custom control can be a daunting experience. This article walks through the process. Complete freedom in creating the user experience can be a double-edged sword, but a little bit of artistry can transform an application's usability. Serialize and Deserialize Fixed Length and Delimited Files, Scott Allen's blog, inspecting Web Pages, and more. The CoreCLR provides the perfect set of CLR classes and functionality for the Web. Jared Parsons demonstrates a technique to achieve maximum performance from LINQ queries on large sets of data in order to create a responsive user interface. Dino Esposito compares the use of AJAX patterns and DOM manipulations to the use of the ASP.NET partial rendering engine. Object role stereotypes can help you better understand and clarify the responsibilities of the objects in your application. Brian Randell introduces you to some crucial Power Tools for getting the most out of Team System. Matt Milner addresses reader requests for information about safely sharing a persistence database across applications and using lesser-known parts of the framework such as ChannelManagerService. This month's column explains how to use Windows HTTP Services, or WinHTTP, the new, powerful API for implementing HTTP clients. Jeffrey Richter shows you some additional cool features of his AsyncEnumerator class. Learn about mobile device programming through WiMo, a Windows Mobile-powered robot. With the annual Imagine Cup student competition, competitors were asked to imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment, just as Microsoft is doing in its own business practices. Here the author introduces SQL Server Data Services, which exposes its functionality over standard Web service interfaces. Here the author answers questions regarding the Entity Framework and provides an understanding of how and why it was developed. Here we present techniques for programmatic and declarative data binding and display with Windows Presentation Foundation. Systems that handle failure without losing data are elusive. Learn how to achieve systems that are both scalable and robust. Learn how you can peer-enable business applications by allowing them to share state in a serverless peer network. Filling in for Editor-in-Chief Howard Dierking, Ted Neward lends some insight into the state of data collection and manipulation. Host a wiki the easy way, get the screen shots you need and mark them up, and read about LINQ this month in Toolbox. See how Windows Forms applications can be adapted to use the new .NET Add-in framework (System.AddIn) this month. Here we build a solution that fits the Entity Framework into an n-tier architecture that uses WCF and WPF and the MVP pattern. Presented here is the LINQ Enumerable class, which allows you to manipulate data in any class that implements IEnumerable(Of T). Here's a custom branding solution for SharePoint sites that integrates Master Pages and CSS files at the level of the site collection. In this installment, the author provides an enhanced implementation of the BST pattern and compares it to HTM solutions. This month James McCaffrey builds a test harness for WCF applications that really puts them through the paces. In this column the author outlines some approaches to threat modeling that can be employed by development teams of any size. This month's column continues the discussion around code access security in WCF and partially trusted services. In this month’s installment of .NET Matters, columnist Stephen Toub answers reader questions concerning asynchronous I/O . Chris Gray discusses custom applications he’s developed for Windows Home Server and explores applications for energy savings. In this article we introduce you to BizTalk Services, new technology that offers the Enterprise Service Bus features of BizTalk Server as a hosted service. Efficient parallel applications aren’t born by merely running an old app on a parallel processor machine. Tuning needs to be done if you’re to gain maximum benefit. Microsoft Robotics Studio is not just for playing with robots. It also allows you to build service-based applications for a wide range of hardware devices. Learn how to create a workflow that uses InfoPath forms and other office documents for passing data to targeted activities and for use in Office documents. In this article, author John Torjo presents a guide to his C++ GUI library called eGUI++ and explains how it makes user interface programming easier. Find out what's new for MSDN Magazine, including a print redesign and the introduction of virtual labs on our web site so you can experiment with our code. This month test your web site on many platforms and browsers without setting up a test environment, use mock objects for unit testing, and visit Raymond Chen. This month CLR Inside Out reveals the secrets behind the Large Object Heap—what’s there, when it’s released, how the garbage collector handles the objects there. AJAX is meant to go beyond mere partial page rendering. Find out where Dino Esposito thinks dynamic pages are headed in the future with ASP.NET AJAX. Extending an existing codebase can be as productive and frustration-free as writing all new code when you employ the Open Closed Principle. We'll show you how. Here we present a deep look into the workings of Windows Communication Foundation routers, exploring the details of pass-through router implementations. Charles Petzold takes an inside look at the flexible bitmap pixel formats offered by the retained-mode graphics features of Windows Presentation Foundation. In this month's installment, Kenny Kerr sings the praises of the new Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, which brings modern conveniences to Visual C++. Here Jeffrey Richter introduces his AsyncEnumerator class, which drives an iterator so that different thread pool threads can execute the same code at different times. We show you the techniques for building adaptable applications that can make the best use of different screens and capabilities on Windows Mobile devices. Surprisingly, cryptography can be applied to the electoral process to allow every individual voter to check the integrity of an election tally. Find out how here. See how to build a document-level Visual Studio Tools for Office customization and integrate it with a content type in SharePoint. Learn how to automate custom SharePoint application deployments, use the SharePoint API, and avoid the hassle of custom site definitions. Kenny Kerr sings the praises of the new Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack, which brings modern conveniences to Visual C++. One-time passwords offer solutions to dictionary attacks, phishing, interception, and lots of other security breaches. Here's how it all works. Here we present a rundown of the various language paradigms of CLR-based languages via short language introductions and code samples. Editor-in-Chief Howard Dierking explains why it's wise to consider Microsoft Office a development platform, even though developers typically don't. This month the Toolbox column takes a look at database logging, Joel Spolsky's blog, printing code projects, and ASP.NET reading. In the second of a two-part series, Vance Morrison delves into the meaning of performance measurements, explaining what the numbers mean to you. The Entity Framework is a hot topic, but how do you know when to use EntityClient, Object Services, Entity SQL, or LINQ? Find out here. This month we begin a look at the Single Page Interface (SPI) model and some design patterns for designing AJAX applications. Did you know you can use Windows PowerShell to perform lightweight request/response testing for an ASP.NET Web app? Here's how. See how to use Word to capture a VBA macro and use Visual Studio Tools for Office to wrap it up into a deployable Word add-in. As we'll show, with just a few lines of JavaScript you can build a general-purpose framework for incorporating page turns into Silverlight 1.0 apps. When building workflows, you must consider the developer experience, available tools, long-term maintenance, and future versioning. In this installment of Security Briefs, James Whittaker explains the rules and the pitfalls of penetration testing so you'll know how to avoid them. Use the Team Foundation Server EventService to create and manage event subscriptions or create a Web service to receive and process events. Rich or reach, rich or thin, thick or fat? Thus went the battle over how much functionality a client should have. Here's how it all turned out. Speech Server 2007 lets you create sophisticated voice-response applications with Microsoft .NET Framework and Visual Studio tool integration. Here’s how. Performance problems can creep into your Web app as it scales up, and when they do, you need to find the causes and the best strategies to address them. Animating with Silverlight is easier than you think. Here we create a 3D app that folds a polyhedron using XAML, C#, and by emulating the DirectX math libraries. Howard Dierking talks to the inventor of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup, about language zealots, the evolution of programming, and what’s in the future of programming. Here the author uses Document Information Panels in the Microsoft 2007 Office system to manipulate metadata from Office docs for better discovery and management. Here is what Howard Dierking has to say about the differences between services and distributed applications and how he has approached services in his projects.