With the My Extensibility feature, new in Visual Basic 2008, My namespace extensions can be activated or deactivated through the Project Properties Designer, or when an associated reference is added or removed from a project. This capability makes extending...

Many applications are written with almost no thought given to performance. But when the need for high performance does present itself, do you have the knowledge, skills, and tools to do a good job? In the April 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine , Vance Morrison...

Recently, our Editor in Chief Howard Dierking had the pleasure of talking to Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++ , about a host of topics, from his thoughts on languages to general industry trends to his own personal reading list. We feature the interview...

Scott Mitchell in our Toolbox column has covered quite a few free tools you’ll love. Here are some you may have missed from Scott and some of our other authors as well. Check back again for more free tools next time. SubSonic is an application toolset...

Need an interactive voice response application for your organization's phone system? Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 Speech Server introduces a .NET Framework API for creating IVR applications, plus a visual IVR application designer based on Windows...

The Microsoft Windows Imaging Component (WIC) is an extensible framework for encoding, decoding, and manipulating images. WIC supports different image formats using an extensible set of imaging codecs. Each codec supports a different image format and...

The April 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. In the April issue, we take a look at some new technologies like voice apps and Silverlight animations, plus a look back at performance and scaling optimization. We also feature our...

In the March 2008 installment of the Advanced Basics column in MSDN Magazine , Ken Getz shows you how to programmatically interact with the Office Open XML File Formats using Visual Studio 2008, LINQ to XML, and the Community Technology Preview (CTP)...

Office Business Applications (OBAs) bridge the divide between business data in line-of-business (LOB) systems and the information worker. You can think of it as a simple model that includes three major parts: the LOB system, the customized Office client...

Say you want to copy from one stream to another, using only the asynchronous methods on Stream. How can you loop such requests continually in order to process the whole stream? Is that even possible? In the March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine , Stephen...

I'm sure many of you, our readers, have wondered what it takes to get an article published and what a good article looks like. Well, that's a pretty broad topic, but I can shed some light on the kinds of things that spell trouble for an article and...

In Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), graphical objects have been elevated to a status nearly equal to controls, often participating in layout and receiving mouse, keyboard, and stylus input. In addition, these graphical objects are retained by the...

Whether you write your applications in native C/C++, C#, or Visual Basic, Visual Studio Profiler significantly simplifies performance investigations and helps you write faster and more efficient applications. In the March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine...

Windows PowerShell, the new Microsoft command shell and scripting language, is a great platform for several kinds of lightweight test automation. In the March 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine , James McCaffrey shows you how to use Windows PowerShell to create...

A growing number of development shops are adopting Continuous Integration (CI) as a best practice, and many more would get on the wagon if the cost of adoption was lower. It can take a veteran programmer a couple of days to get a basic CI server up and...