General Douglas MacArthur famously said during his 1951 farewell address to the U.S. Congress that “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” A half century later, MacArthur’s statement could just as easily apply to programming languages...

In a few days the February issue of MSDN Magazine should be hitting mailboxes and Web browsers alike. In other words, it's time for an MSDN Magazine issue preview. Here's what's cooking for the shortest month of the year. Our lead feature in February...

Earlier this month I posted a blog post that followed up on the Editor's Note column ( A Quarter Century and Counting ) appearing in the January issue of MSDN Magazine. In the column, I recounted Charles Petzold's amazing 25-year run as a regular writer...

This month MSDN Magazine launches a new online column focused on HTML5 and Web development, called Web Development Report. Penned by Rachel Appel, a Microsoft senior developer evangelist in the New York City area, the new column explores the fast-changing...

In the current January issue of MSDN Magazine, I wrote about MSDN Magazine columnist Charles Petzold and his 25-year affiliation with our publication ( A Quarter Century and Counting ). It's amazing to think how far the magazine has come since the autumn...

This month's Don't Get Me Started column ( Lowering Higher Education ), by the ever-irascible David Platt, looks at the broken system that is higher education in the United States. As Platt notes in his column, the inflation-adjusted price of a college...

Last month Jeff Smith wrote a feature article titled How To Translate Common Design Principles To The Windows Phone . In it, he addresses some of the design principles of the Metro-style UI, which developers must master to create effective apps for the...

Last month Marshal Datkowitz penned a Web feature for MSDN Magazine titled A Mobile Phone Is Not Just a Small Computer . A senior user architect in the User Experience Group at Infragistics, Datkowitz warned that developers who aim to simply shrink PC...

It's been four full days since Thanksgiving, and I'm still recovering from tryptophan poisoning. Fortunately, my drowsiness isn't holding things up at MSDN Magazine, where we soon expect to roll out the December issue. Leading things off in December is...

Last week I mentioned that the MSDN Libraries had posted a few new articles focused on Windows Phone 7 application and game development. Well, there are a couple more Windows Phone-themed how-to articles that you may want to check out. The first is called...

Don't look now, but the MSDN Library features new content focused on Windows Phone 7 application and game development. Leading things off is an article titled Developing a Windows Phone Application from Start to Finish , which walks through building...

In the October issue of MSDN Magazine , Don't Get Me Started columnist David Platt wrote about his experience acting as a judge at the Imagine Cup finals held in New York City. As David recounts, the global competition did more than simply attract some...

The November issue of MSDN Magazine will be hitting the street next week, so it's a good time to offer a preview of what to expect. Leading things off in the feature well is a Windows Phone 7 tutorial by Microsoft’s Andrew Whitechapel on building effective...

In the September issue of MSDN Magazine, Don't Get Me Started columnist David Platt wrote about the challenges of application design ( Development Is Design ), and how too often development projects put off the visual and behavioral character of their...

Last week I posted a Q&A I had with Mads Torgersen, principal program manager on the C# and Visual Basic Language team at Microsoft and author of an October feature in MSDN Magazine titled " Pause and Play with Await ." The article is part...

This month's issue of MSDN Magazine includes three feature articles covering the new asynchronous programming features coming to C# and Visual Basic in .NET Framework 4.5. Mads Torgersen, principal program manager on the C# and Visual Basic Language team...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that the next version of Windows Phone is en route to customers. As Eric Hautala wrote on the Windows Phone Blog: “This morning, at roughly 10 a.m. Pacific time, we began rolling out the Mango update to phones around...

By now, some of you may already have the October issue of MSDN Magazine in hand. Regardless of when you finally receive your issue -- or simply choose to access it at our Web site -- you'll be welcomed by a deep dive into the powerful new asynchronous...

Today we continue the series of MSDN Magazine blog posts offering attendee takes on the recently concluded Microsoft BUILD Conference. In this installment I ask Stephen Chapman, whose Microsoft Kitchen blog focuses on user interface and experience, for...

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) allows extensive control over the messaging functions of an application. MSDN Library has recently published a host of new articles that detail how you can implement and configure the various features available with...

By almost any measure, the Microsoft BUILD Conference was big. As attendees return home and digest all that Microsoft has presented, I’m reaching out to key experts and capturing their impressions. Today, I sit down with Andrew Brust, founder of Blue...

Visual Studio 11 Developer Edition was released with a pre-release version of F# 3.0, the latest version of Microsoft’s functional programming language, designed to, as the F# team put it, let developers “write simple code to solve complex problems.”...

I asked last week whether or not the BUILD Conference could possibly live up to the hype and anticipation that had grown around it. With the formal reveal of Windows 8, the technical detail released around the new Windows Runtime stack, and the release...

Watching Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer cap the Day 2 keynote address at the Microsoft BUILD Conference, I couldn't help but feel a strong sense of déjà vu. Despite the touch-sensitive tablets, the cloud-savvy tool demos...

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Microsoft drops yet another developer preview -- this time a preview version of the F# 3.0 programming language. The Visual Studio F# Team Blog offers plenty of detail on the new preview release...