MSDN Magazine

MSDN Magazine February Issue Preview

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 17:59:20 GMT

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 is "Asynchronous Programming with C++ Using PPL," by Artur Laksberg. This feature looks at the powerful asynchronous talents of C++ and how they can be used to create more efficient and scalable applications. And as Laksberg points out, moving to asynchronous development is a great idea for anyone looking to take advantage of the unique capabilities of Windows Runtime and Windows 8. This piece is also a nice complement to the trio of features we published on asynchrony in C# back in October.

February sees a continuation of a couple ongoing feature series, including the next installment of our Building HTML5 Apps series. John Dyer steps in for Brandon Satrom to pen "Practical Cross-Browser HTML5 Audio and Video," which explores the powerful media handling capabilities of HTML5. In addition to recommending useful libraries, Dyer shows how to work around issues like uneven browser support for HTML5 tags and media types. Also this month we see the latest in our Windows Phone feature series. Cheryl Simmons offers useful guidance in her feature, "Get Your Windows Phone Applications in the Marketplace Faster." The piece shows how to properly optimize Windows Phone apps so they will pass muster in Microsoft's Marketplace assessment process. Finally, we close out the three-part NuGet series, with Clark Sell's feature "Creating a NuGet Gallery."

The February issue touches on a number of strategic Microsoft platforms. In addition to the Windows Phone coverage noted above, this issue includes the feature "Building a Massively Scalable Platform for Consumer Devices on Windows Azure," by Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos. The piece demonstrates the scalability and interoperability of Microsoft's cloud platform, showing how to use Windows Azure-hosted RESTful Web services to stream video to a large number of diverse mobile clients. ASP.NET MVC developers also earn a nod, with Jess Chadwick's "Features and Foibles of ASP.NET MVC Model Binding." As Chadwick writes, the features "will take you deep into the heart of the ASP.NET MVC model binding subsystem, showing each layer of the model binding framework and the various ways you can extend the model binding logic to meet your application’s needs."

Finally, our February feature selection includes "What’s New in Windows Workflow 4.5," by Leon Welicki, an overview of the many changes and improvements in the latest version of WF in .NET Framework 4.5.

The big news in our column lineup this month is the return of John Papa, who until 2009 wrote our popular Data Points column. He returns this month to write the new Client Insight column, which focuses on technologies and issues related to client-side development. HTML5, JavaScript, WPF, Silverlight... if it's relevant to client app development, it's relevant to his column. Given Papa's background in both data and client development, it's fitting that his inaugural column looks at the unique data binding talents of the Knockout JavaScript library. You can also read more about Papa’s return in this months Editor’s Note column.

Speaking of data, Julie Lerman's Data Points column dwells on Entity Framework 4.2 DbContext class, which she describes as a "wrapper around ObjectContext that exposes the most commonly used features of ObjectContext." It also streamlines many frequent-but-complex tasks when coding directly with ObjectContext. Joseph Fultz offers a look at Windows Azure Deployment Domains in his Forecast: Cloudy column this month, while Ted Neward's column The Working Programmer explores Tropo, a free, cloud-hosted, voice-and-SMS solution.

As ever, James McCaffrey is exploring the hard edges of programming in his Test Run column. This month he dives into an "Ant Colony Optimization," an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence techniques based on the pheromone-laying behavior of ants. Seriously. It's the latest in McCaffrey's fascinating explorations of, as he puts it, "optimization algorithms based on the behavior of natural systems."

In our January issue, Charles Petzold's long-running UI Frontiers column appeared under its new name, Touch and Go. The change reflects Petzold's ongoing focus on Windows Phone, mobile and touch-based application development. This month, Petzold shows how to play music files in the background from a Windows Phone 7.5 application and highlights some interesting quirks in the implementation of background audio.

As ever, MSDN Magazine closes with David Platt and his Don’t Get Me Started column. Look for his musings on smartphones and the odd way in which they both pull people together and push them apart.

Got a topic, issue or technology you’d like to see addressed in MSDN Magazine? Please let me know! Leave a comment here or email me at mmeditor@microsoft.com.

A Conversation with Charles Petzold

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 20:17:33 GMT

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 and columnist for the magazine. In this, the second of two blog posts about that column, I follow up our initial conversation with a few additional questions.

Desmond: Earlier you mentioned tablet and phone as a third revolution. Of course, your Touch and Go column (previously, UI Frontiers) focuses on Windows Phone and Windows touch-based devices and applications. Given what you observed with the GUI and Internet/Web revolutions, any thoughts on what might be ahead in the mobile/touch space?

Petzold: Many years ago I read on article in a major news magazine about a new fad that was sweeping Japan. The author of this article was certain this fad couldn’t possibly make it in America because American families would simply not sit around the living room singing songs together while the lyrics flashed by on the TV set. Well, as we know, karaoke did become popular in America, but in a completely different setting -- the bar rather than the living room.

The way in which technology evolves and adapts is very mysterious to me, which is why I stay away from industry punditry. The only expectation I have is of the unexpected.

Desmond: You talked about the importance of social connections between PC Magazine and MSJ/MSDN Magazine. Beyond the obvious shared roots and interests, it seems like physical proximity really sustained those links. Do you believe Internet-borne interaction can sustain the “socializing aspect” that you found so vital to the magazine?

Petzold: I’m on Facebook every day, and it’s fun to exchange thoughts and opinions with friends and “friends.” But Facebook is a very poor imitation of actual human contact. Tony Rizzo once organized a dinner with about 10 MSJ authors and Bill Gates in a private room of a sushi restaurant, and we basically spent a couple hours eating sushi and listening to Bill talk about the computer industry. I don’t see how that experience could possibly be imitated in an online chat room.

What’s most revealing on Facebook is how fragmented the computer industry has become. Everybody seems to be working on something different, and it’s impossible for any one person to be familiar with all these different technologies. We’ve all become specialists. There’s no longer an industry event like Comdex that virtually everybody attends, no longer books that everybody reads, no longer languages that everyone speaks.

Desmond: You know, there was a time, not at all long ago, when we all read the same newspapers and watched the same TV shows (at the same time, even). Those common touch points have faded as the Internet has enabled personalized media delivery and a host of narrowly focused information sources.

But in the arena of software development, I take your point: We live in an era of layered abstraction and vast frameworks. So the question is, where and how can developers sustain a common ground? Is it in the higher level logic and the technique of problem solving, project management and programming methodology?

Petzold: This is a problem, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. But the extreme biodiversity that exists now is perhaps an indication that the art and engineering of computer programming is still in its infancy. And that suggests we need to keep our minds open -- to evaluate new frameworks and programming languages with the thought that they may actually be better than what we’re using now.

I had this experience just recently when working with the new asynchronous file I/O classes in Windows 8. If the best is yet to come, magazines such as MSDN have an obligation to help keep developers informed of the cutting edges of programming technologies.

Rachel Appel's New Web Dev Column

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:16:36 GMT

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 arena of standards-based Web development, with a focus on HTML5 and JavaScript.

Appel's inaugural column focuses on mobile Web development, looking at how HTML5, jQuery Mobile and ASP.NET MVC 4 can be used to target multiple mobile platforms from a single codebase.

Appel is hardly new to Web development. She's been working in Web programming since the days of Classic ASP, and was an early adopter of the .NET Framework, wrangling with the initial alpha versions of the platform. Of late she's been busying supporting Microsoft's efforts with ASP.NET and Web programming in general, and has been engaged with HTML5 as it emerges as an important target for Web development.

Here at MSDN Magazine we're seeing strong reader interest in HTML5 development and related topics, and Appel for one says she isn't surprised. She notes that many developers want to create online games using Canvas, while others are focused on business features such as HTML forms. But all these audiences share a common ground. "The common questions and concerns are cross platform development and Web standards," she says, "and rightfully so, since standards make it easier for everyone."

The Web Development Report will appear on the MSDN Magazine Web site on the 15th of each month (or the first business day after the 15th). Do you have a topic your want Rachel to cover? Email Appel at rachel.appel@microsoft.com, or leave a comment here.

Charles Petzold on His 25 Years with MSDN Magazine

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 23:31:41 GMT

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 of 1986, and how much the industry (and Microsoft!) has changed around it. Petzold offered plenty of insight about the early days of MSDN Magazine, as well as some cogent thoughts about where we might be headed. Here is a transcript of our conversation.

Michael Desmond: Charles, you wrote an article for the first issue of Microsoft Systems Journal in October 1986, and MSJ later became MSDN Magazine, which means that you’ve been writing for this magazine for 25 years. Congratulations!

Charles Petzold: Congratulations yourself on the 25 year anniversary.

Desmond: How’d you get started at MSJ?

Petzold: Connections! In 1985-86 I was writing a lot for PC Magazine, and spending a lot of time at the magazine offices, which was about a 20-minute walk from my apartment in New York City. PC Magazine’s editor was Bill Machrone, one of the great publishing geniuses of all time, and he had put together a great staff and a nice group of writers.

At the time, PC Magazine was published by Ziff-Davis, and one of the, I think, Executive VPs at Ziff-Davis was Jonathan Lazarus -- another publishing genius who had pioneered the controlled-circulation free weekly, PC Week, which was essential at the time for understanding what was going on in the computer industry.

Jon was a major fan of the Apple Macintosh, and consequently had great hopes for Microsoft Windows. I had been playing around with Windows programming since Windows was in beta, and then after Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985. It was mostly silly stuff I was doing, but I was having fun, and that’s how I was introduced to Jon -- as somebody doing silly stuff with Windows.

So I think sometime in 1986 Jon Lazarus left Ziff-Davis to publish a magazine contracted by Microsoft through his consulting firm, which was rather whimsically named H. Roark & Associates. Originally the magazine was supposed to be exclusively about Windows programming, but they chickened out because there was no indication that Windows would be successful. They took a safer route that it would be about programming for all Microsoft operating systems. And because Microsoft was always rather enamored of IBM, and IBM published IBM Systems Journal, they called it Microsoft Systems Journal.

Jon began recruiting writers for MSJ that he knew from various places, including me.

Desmond: What were the early days like?

Petzold: I’m not sure how much of the MSJ early days it would be proper to disclose publicly! Jon’s consulting firm -- such as it was -- had an office on, I think, 3^rd Avenue around 42^nd Street. It was a tiny office, and he shared it with an agent who I think specialized in clients who wanted to become newscasters and television personalities, so the office was filled with stacks of videotapes. Jon had hired the talented Michael Longacre to design and lay out the magazine, and for at least a couple years, MSJ was created entirely in PageMaker on Macintoshes, and late-80s Macs at that.

For several years, MSJ was the only magazine that ran articles about Windows programming. Certainly PC Magazine wasn’t ready to go in that direction, which is one reason why I was able to write for both magazines at the same time. There was virtually no overlap. It was through my connection with MSJ that I was recruited by Microsoft Press to write the book that became the first edition of Programming Windows in 1988.

Desmond: You’ve lived through the reigns of several editors. Anyone in particular stand out?

Petzold: At one point, Jon asked me if I’d like to be Technical Editor of MSJ, but I would have made a terrible editor. I don’t even like talking to people on the telephone, let along asking people to do work for me. One of the great things about writing is that you do it by yourself. So I’ve been happy being a writer. I’ve never had ambitions to do anything else.

Eventually Tony Rizzo was brought on as Technical Editor and later Eric Maffei took over the editorship, and both these guys are really sharp, and really good at their jobs, and made much better editors than I would have.

But what I remember most about those early years was the socializing among the editors and writers. We were all friends as well as coworkers. MSJ maintained a social connection with PC Magazine, partially from that early connection with Jon and Ziff-Davis, and perhaps because these were the only two computer magazines published in New York City. That social connection continued for years: PC Magazine people and MSJ people would frequently hang out together at industry events such as Comdex, and get together for parties and dinners in New York City. And sometimes editors would hop from one of the magazines to the other. Tony Rizzo went from MSJ to PC Magazine, and Sharon Terdeman, who works for MSDN Magazine now, I originally knew when she was at PC Magazine.

I always thought of the socializing aspect of magazines to be extremely important, because as we were socializing, we also seemed to develop a lot of ideas and a lot of connections. I guess by the mid-90s, that social aspect of MSJ and PC Magazine had pretty much disintegrated. Or maybe these dinners are still happening and they just stopped inviting me!

Desmond: Did you ever think you’d be writing for the magazine 25 years later?

Petzold: I wouldn’t have believed that the magazine would survive for 25 years. Most magazines don’t last nearly that long. Even so, MSJ went through a name change and ownership changes during that time, so the passage hasn’t exactly been smooth.

Desmond: What about the changes in the industry itself?

Petzold: Gosh, in 1986 there were still people arguing that the personal computer didn’t need graphics! Twenty-five rows of 80 characters of text were just fine for those folks. The graphical user interface was the first big revolution in the PC industry, and I’m proud to have been an early supporter of Windows and later the multimedia enhancements, which brought sound and music and movies to the PC.

The second big revolution over the past 25 years was, of course, the Internet and World Wide Web, and I didn’t see that coming at all! Of course, a lot of us didn’t see it coming, but it brought a profound change to computing from both the user and developer perspectives.

We’re in the middle of a third revolution right now, and that’s the ascendance of computers whose form factor is basically a flat screen that you can hold in your hands. Because we only have two hands, we have two different sizes of these devices. One is small enough for one hand, and the other is comfortable for two hands.

I think that for many users, a phone or a tablet will be their primary computer. For those of us who need an actual keyboard and large screen to write or to code or to do spreadsheets, we’ll probably still need a desktop machine, but I think that multi-touch is going to revolutionize the desktop as much as it’s revolutionized portable computing.

Throughout these revolutions, MSDN Magazine has been in the forefront, but always from a practical coding perspective rather than an abstract theoretical one. The magazine continues to be the primary place for developers to learn about these new technologies, at least as they affect the Microsoft-centric development world.

Desmond: There are a lot of aspiring writers out there. Any advice for people hoping to launch a sustained career as a writer?

Petzold: Do you really want to end on such a depressing topic?

Look, I love writing. I love the challenge, and I love the learning process that comes as a result of organizing your knowledge and thoughts well enough to put it all down in a series of consecutive coherent paragraphs. And on the up side, there have never been more writing opportunities than now. Many online magazines accept contributions, anybody can create a blog, and self-publishing a book has never been easier.

But the tricky part is generating some income from this writing, and that’s often desirable. As we know from basic economics, when you have a lot of people generating product, the worth of this product decreases. Book sales have plummeted over the past couple decades, and the developer market has fragmented so much that it’s difficult to even conceive of a book topic that has more than a few thousand potential readers. Even MSDN Magazine no longer pays its writers what it did in the past.

I’ve been through the ups and downs. I quit my nine-to-five office job in 1985 to pursue a full-time freelance writing career, and for almost 20 years I was able to support myself entirely with book royalties and magazine articles. But now I can’t. Over the past several years I’ve had to supplement my income with consulting, which is fun at times, of course, but I’d rather be writing.

I guess the most important advice is this: Go for it. Write, write, write. It’s a great way to learn, and a great way to share. But don’t give up your day job just yet.

Don't Get Me Started on Higher Education

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:57:50 GMT

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 education has quadrupled since 1982, creating what he calls "an academic bubble" similar to the recent stock market and real estate bubbles.

In fact, Platt is in no mood to mince words about what he sees as a woefully inefficient system that charges too much and does things entirely the wrong way. The first draft of Platt's January column, before it had passed through the sausage grinder here at MSDN Magazine World Headquarters, kicked off like this:

The Internet is set to hammer the higher education industry in the same way it hammered the newspaper industry. I hope that my industry will respond to this challenge with creativity and imagination that will make the world a better place. I expect to find the landscape radically different when my daughters start college, 9 years from now.

As the father of three children, including a high school freshman, I really, really hope Platt is right. So, apparently, do a lot of MSDN Magazine readers, who have responded to Platt's column with opinions and perspectives of their own. As Platt told me, the structural issues in college education have been "festering for a long time." Now those issues have reached a breaking point.

But just as the music and movie industries both fought tooth and nail against each technological advance, from VCRs to MP3 players, Platt expects universities to struggle for the status quo.

"Well, you know that the academic establishment is going to fight like hell to keep this new model from succeeding, in order to protect their jobs," Platt says, before drawing a parallel. "The academic establishment has lost its control over the delivery channel, as has the newspaper industry. And like the newspaper industry, they cry out that their control is necessary for the benefit of humankind. Too late. Adapt to the new reality or die."

So what might a sea change in university education mean for software engineering? Platt hopes we see a long overdue focus on practical programming skills.

"The academic establishment considers anything practical to be a lesser species of being, a snobbery almost Victorian in its aloofness," Platt says. "And partly it’s because software engineering has not yet managed to split itself off from computer science, as computer science split itself off from mathematics perhaps 30 years ago."

Ultimately, he says, it's up to employers to recognize the benefit of practical software development training. But the flexibility and innovation promised by Internet-fueled higher education promises to at least up end the status quo.

"The new model will succeed if and only if employers accept the new types of degrees," he says. "I think they probably will, and in fact they may even come to value them more than the classic model."

Follow Up: Windows Phone Design Principles

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:15:55 GMT

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 Windows Phone platform. As Smith writes in the article: "Metro not only dictates a visual design standard, but it also has several navigation standards that developers need to grasp if they want to develop applications for Windows Phone."

I followed up with Smith to ask him a few questions about Windows Phone application design.

Michael Desmond: You talk about the iPhone creating its own mobile standards that developers and designers have been quick to emulate. In that respect, is it incumbent on these developers to "unlearn" their assumptions about application design when targeting Windows Phone?

Jeff Smith: It’s not really about unlearning. It’s about thinking more about what users already experience with their operating systems on their phones. Mobile development is very new, and for its short lifespan developers were asked to create applications for iOS. Now with so many different operating systems, developers need to pay attention to the devices for which they are creating applications.

Desmond: What are some of the most common design mis-steps that mobile developers tend to make?

Smith: I think one of the biggest mis-steps mobile developers tend to make is believing that applications can simply be scaled down from desktop to mobile. Most of the experience has to be rethought from the ground up to work properly for mobile.

Desmond: As you note, the Metro UI is based on street and airport signage. Can you provide insight into why these types of signage were used as touchstones for the UI?

Smith: A great resource on Metro UI is the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone available here.

Most people don’t know this but Metro is specifically based on the street signage for Seattle’s King County Metro System. According to Microsoft it is meant to encompass the following five characteristics: 1. Clean, light, open and fast; 2. Content, not chrome; 3. Integrated hardware and software; 4. World-class motion; 5. Soulful and alive.

Desmond: With regard to Panorama and Pivot, can you provide insight into when one might be used over the other? Also, are there any system implications with these controls, such as system resource usage and performance, that might sway decision making?

Smith: Panorama controls are part of the core visual experience for Windows Phone, though they are not required to be used in applications. The main difference is Panoramas show hints of the next category and its contents. Pivot controls simply show you the next category, but not its contents until you swipe. I think Panoramas deliver a great experience and great visual effects, but they may not always be applicable to every application.

You just want to be sure that you use one or the other these controls; the controls are never supposed to be combined because their gesture-based navigation would contradict each other. Microsoft did a great job at creating a high performing OS, so I wouldn’t be swayed to not use either one of these great controls.

5 Questions: Marshal Datkowitz on Mobile UI Design

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:50:26 GMT

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 applications to mobile device form factors are "missing the point." He says developers must commit to simplicity and elegance if they want users to get the most out of their applications.

I caught up with Datkowitz after we had published his article. Here is what he had to say.

Michael Desmond: Do you find that new mobile developers fully appreciate the unique character of handheld platforms like Windows Phone?

Marshal Datkowitz: I think Windows Phone is a whole new ball game for developers. First they need to bone up on Metro, which is very different from anything they have ever seen before. To many, this OS is a totally different paradigm that they need to learn. Secondly the physical challenges and advantages of the device must be learned and embraced. I have found there is quite a learning curve to climb, but once done, developers really excel.

Desmond: How would you compare the transition to mobile app development with previous sea changes in application design and development, such as with the introduction of the GUI and browser-based applications?

Datkowitz: I think it is similar but not as radical. The mobile device is still a GUI but with hardware and human factor differences. This is more evolutionary than revolutionary change.

Desmond: It seems like mobile developers must adopt a less is more approach with a mobile UI. How can developers go about making good decisions when working to pare down the interface so users can get in and out fast?

Datkowitz: In general, less is more in most situations. I have yet to see any application that could not be made more simple and subsequently more elegant. In the mobile space simplicity is more critical; we don’t get a second chance here. We must all be that more focused when it comes to mobile.

Desmond: Is there a particular application you know that has done a great job of mastering the principles you wrote about in your article?

Datkowitz: There are a lot of really good applications coming out. One that I recently took note of is the new Fidelity Investments app. They did a great job of taking an already comprehensive and easy to use Web site and focused on making it work in the mobile space. It doesn’t do everything, but that’s good -- it can’t. But what it does, it does very cleanly.

Desmond: One issue that intrigues me is the challenge faced when you try to port (or at least surface functional elements of) a desktop business application to a mobile platform. It seems there can be so many constraints -- in terms of data presentment, complexity of the targeted task, etc -- that it may be very difficult to really mobile-enable these kinds of apps. Any general thoughts on how developers might start thinking around that problem?

Datkowitz: I have been involved with several projects just like that; I’ve found that trying to move each function over just doesn’t work. The best thing to do is to look at the function and then consider how best it can work on the device. Many functions need to be redesigned from the ground up, others can just never be ported in the first place. Go back to what the user really needs in the environment and re-imagine how it can be accomplished. Think about the hardware, think about the visual space, and think about how best to address users’ needs.

MSDN Magazine December Issue Preview

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 22:23:32 GMT

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 Bill Kratochvil's feature titled The Model-View-Presenter-ViewModel Design Pattern for WPF, which delves into the history of design patterns and explores how the MVPVM pattern can improve extensible enterprise applications. Next in line is Brandon Satrom's monthly HTML5 fix, titled Integrating Geolocation into Web Applications.

Andrew Richards offers help for developers confounded by cryptic memory dumps when troubleshooting applications. His article, Writing a Plug-in for Sysinternals ProcDump v4.0, shows how to interact with the ProcDump utility and underlying DbgHelp API. Speaking of troubleshooting, Adam Tuliper this month kicks off a two-part feature (Hack-Proofing Your ASP.NET Applications) that helps you identify and deal with some of the most common vulnerabilities in ASP.NET applications.

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers are back this month for another quarterly installment of their features series on team development, this time titled Rise of the VM Factory. Brian Blackman, Paul Meyer and Willy-Peter Schaub dive into the VM Factory reference implementation, which shows how to automate the creation of virtual environments using a nearly fully automated and consistent factory strategy. Finally, Adi Shavit offers a change of pace with his feature, Saving and Reusing Video Encoding Settings.

Our columnists are hard at work. Dino Esposito takes on the challenge of implementing a context-sensitive progress bar to report on remote operations in an ASP.NET MVC application -- a problem given the inherently stateless nature of the Web. Kenny Kerr is back with the last of his series of Windows with C++ columns on the Windows 7 thread pool, while Joseph Fultz puts the finishing touches on his series of Forecast: Cloudy columns about the Windows Azure AppFabric Services Bus. Julie Lerman rounds out the front-of-book columns with her Data Points installment titled Handling Entity Framework Validations in WCF Data Services.

The back pages of the December issue of MSDN Magazine include Ted Neward's examination of Parser Combinators in his The Working Programmer column, and Charles Petzold's UI Frontiers column called Video Feeds on Windows Phone 7. Of course, James McCaffrey is on hand with his latest Test Run missive exploring the maximum clique problem, this time using tabu algorithms.

As ever, David Platt gets the last word around here. His Don't Get Me Started column remarks on the passings, just three days apart, of a pair of computing legends -- Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.

MSDN Library: More Windows Phone 7 Guidance

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:31:42 GMT

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 Windows Phone 7 -Silverlight & Media, and as the name implies, it focuses on ways you can integrate media into your WP7 applications. In addition to exploring Windows Phone media formats, the article covers how to play media files using Silverlight controls and how to consume video from external Web site sources, playing that media within an application.

Also posted to the MSDN Library site is Windows Phone 7 Data, which explores the advanced data capabilities of Windows Phone 7 and how you can incorporate them into your applications. In addition to learning to access, store, display and work with data in applications, you'll learn how data binding can be used to build advanced user interfaces with minimal coding.

New Windows Phone 7 Content on MSDN Library

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 19:00:00 GMT

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 a complete Windows Phone 7 application and includes a sample application. You'll learn all the basics, including defining your application, adding images, working with data, and ultimately publishing your application on the Windows Phone Marketplace. The article also uses the example of a simple fuel-tracking application to help you master the basics of Silverlight and Windows Phone development.

Also posted to the MSDN Library site is a pair of gaming focused tutorials. The first is Beginning 2D Game Development, a step-by-step guide for creating a 2D space shooter game called Mars Invasion. The project leverages the XNA Game Studio 4.0 gaming libraries and goes into issues like the main game loop, creating graphics, state machines and collision detection.

Finally, the feature titled Building 3D Games for Windows Phone goes into the challenge of creating 3D games for Windows Phone 7. The sample project leads you through developing a three-dimensional maze game, and helps you master creating and transforming objects in three-dimensional space. Also included is an overview of how culling (also known as backface removal) lets XNA draw closed solids more efficiently.

5 Questions: Imagine That

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:24:00 GMT

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 of the best and brightest young minds in software development. It offered a telling glimpse into the unique human stories behind the entries. I asked David about the column and his experience as a judge.

Michael Desmond: You were a judge at the first-ever Imagine Cup Finals in Barcelona, back in 2003. Clearly the Imagine Cup is much bigger now than it was in 2003. But what else about the competition has changed since then?

David Platt: It reminds me of the Olympics, in a way. You have the very best from all over the world. A relatively small number are in serious competition for the top prizes. The rest are there to celebrate being the best in their own country, to measure themselves against the world’s best, to rub elbows and inhale the atmosphere, to get inspired and bring that inspiration home to spread around.

That last might be the biggest one. My younger daughter is a gymnast, currently Level 4 at the local YMCA. She and her teammates are bouncing off the walls (always dangerous with gymnasts) with plans to watch the Summer Olympics gymnastic this summer. I doubt she’ll ever reach Olympic caliber (though I certainly don’t tell her this). But the inspiration from those top gymnasts teaches her to strive, to take care of herself, to work hard even when it’s difficult, and so on. I’m more proud of her being voted by her teammates as most improved gymnast last year than of damn near anything, Olympic gold included. (Although I’d love to see a college scholarship, but we digress.)

I think that’s the biggest change in the Imagine Cup. Not necessarily the finals themselves. But this larger finals event causes 300,000 budding geeks (up from 1000 at the first Imagine Cup) to think and analyze, to strive for something, to fall and get up again. You can’t see these roots from the treetop of the finals. But by the height of that treetop, you know they must be mighty.

MD: Can you describe your role as an Imagine Cup judge? How do you go about reviewing each team's entry? And what kind of interaction do you have with the teams themselves?

DP: There were only 16 entrants in the first finals, so every judge could view every entry. It made for a busy day, but we each ranked them in order, and the winners were clear. With so many entrants, we now have to split up the judging pool, with each judge randomly assigned 6 entrants. We use normalization and scaling factors to maintain consistency between judges.

We watch video presentations before arriving, then watch live presentations of the teams to which we are assigned. We ask questions at the end of the presentation. We rank them on architecture, on user interface, business model, and presentation. We often deliberate among ourselves, did you see this? How did you like that? And so on. Each judge assigns his or her individual scores, it’s not a consensus thing.

In general, I stay away from all the teams until I’m finished my judging, to avoid any possible appearance of impropriety. I’m happy to talk to them after I’m finished -- what I liked, what I didn’t like, what I think they should do to advance in future rounds, or to move their project towards commercialization. The students tell me that this is interaction is one of their favorite parts of the contest.

The Statue of Liberty/Ellis Island party was fabulous for that -- except they didn’t serve any beer, which always enhances such conversations. All these college students and no beer? Sheesh. I wonder what the drinking age is in Sydney, Australia, which is where next year’s finals are.

I’m honored when students bring me copies of my "Why Software Sucks" book to sign, especially in foreign language translations. I always wonder how much of my original tone comes through the translator.

MD: In the column, you describe both the technical brilliance and youthful naiveté of the teams. What advice might you offer prospective contestants as they embark on an Imagine Cup project?

DP: Know thy user, for he is not thee. Please them, not yourselves, and you will do well in this contest, and this industry, and in life itself. (Are you seeing a pattern in this?)

MD: Having read some of the responses to your October column, it's clear the article struck a chord. What is it about this story that is so compelling?

DP: I’m just such a great writer it’s not even funny. What can I say? ;-)

But seriously, the late sportswriter Red Smith once said, “Writing a column is easy. All you have to do is open your veins and bleed.” October’s vein might have been closer to the surface. Or maybe seeing all these youngsters made me dig the lancet in a little deeper.

MD: Have you heard from anyone from Team Hawk -- Choman, Kosar and Enji -- since the story went live?

DP: Just chatted a little. They were pleased, of course. They study at the American University of Iraq, which is in the northern region, where many people are ethnic Kurds. Might be interesting to teach there some day. I wonder if they have any money.

MSDN Magazine November Issue Preview

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:57:07 GMT

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 applications using the Mango update and tooling, with a focus on local databases, live tiles and Silverlight/XNA integration. Going from small to large, Microsoft’s Mike Wade shows how to deploy LightSwitch applications to Windows Azure, eliminating the need to dedicate resources to infrastructure management.

Brandon Satrom offers his next installment of the ongoing HTML5 feature series, this time focused on new input types in HTML5 that make Web forms easier than ever to create. Meanwhile, Phil Haack writes a feature on leveraging the open source NuGet package manager to manage project libraries. There's also a dive into claims-based security in SharePoint 2010, written by Ivory Feng, Patrick Stanko and Shabbir Darugar.

There are a few independent features in November, including “Developing 3D Objects in Silverlight” by Rajesh Lal, and “Embedding RavenDB into an ASP.NET MVC 3 Application,” by Justin Schwartzenberger, which explores the .NET/Windows-centric document data store solution RavenDB. It’s worth noting that Julie Lerman’s Data Points column courts a little NoSQL love as well, with her exploration of NoSQL document databases and their capabilities.

Speaking of columns, Dino Esposito's next Cutting Edge column is titled Design of a Domain Model, and explores Entity Framework Code First and how it encourages domain-driven design principles in the .NET space. Kenny Kerr’s Windows with C++ column continues his dive into the C++ Thread Pool, looking at callback-generating objects, specifically wait objects.

James McCaffrey this month presents a greedy algorithm as a solution to the graph maximum clique problem, which is to find the largest group of nodes in a graph that are all connected to one another. He explains how to design and test these algorithms to solve the problem. Meanwhile, Charles Petzold finishes his Windows Phone 7 e-book reader project with a Web service that gets the catalog file from Project Gutenberg, and a Pivot control to display a search screen and a list of downloaded books.

As ever, David Platt gets the last word with his back page column. He offers a take on the September BUILD Conference, and finds that Microsoft has produced a level of developer excitement that he hasn’t seen in years, dating back maybe to the launch of Windows 3.1 in 1991.

5 Questions: Development Is Design

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 13:29:00 GMT

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 applications until way too late. I asked David about the column and his thoughts on software application design in general.

Michael Desmond: With BUILD in the books, care to proffer any design advice or insight as it relates to an HTML5 world? What kind of challenges or issues might developers expect to encounter if they work with Metro-style app dev?

David Platt: The main challenge of HTML5, or Metro, or WPF or Silverlight, or raw Windows, or any other UX technology is to recognize that it isn’t some enchanted lotion that you slather over your apps to magically make them good.

All technologies are double-edged. You need to start not with the technology but with your users. Who are they? What problems do they need to solve? What would they consider the characteristics of a good solution? What do they love, what do they hate? What do they hope for, what do they fear? Once you’ve figured this out, how close can you get to that with your fancy new toolkit?

Microsoft sort of, kind of, gets that internally, at least sometimes. The research that they’ve done on the usage of touch, and the design of a touch language, is excellent (see Design Metro Style Apps That Are Touch-Optimized on Channel 9). But Microsoft never, and I mean not once in the 20-plus years I’ve been working with their technology, has made a priority of communicating this information to the developer community. They constantly shout about the technology itself -- “Here’s how to program a color gradient.” They almost never talk about the user at all -- “Here’s how a color gradient affects the user, so here’s where they work well and here’s where they don’t.”

Even the way you phrased the question above shows the orientation towards technology first, rather than the users. That needs to change.

MD: In the column, you focus on UX. What are your impressions of the Metro visual style in Windows 8? I know it’s aimed at consumers, but any thoughts on how elastic this interface framework is for business and enterprise type applications?

DP: These are entirely different environments. Tablets and gadgets are primarily for consuming content. Business and enterprise apps are more about creating content. Tablets and devices are becoming so successful because they’re better for consumer purposes than the general purpose PCs that were shoehorned into those niches.

For hand-held and laptop devices, Metro is fabulous. The next column I’m working on, probably for January, is about how I used a touch-based Kindle reader app on my Android phone, then hated it when I had to use an actual Kindle device which had physical buttons. How primitive, once I’d gotten used to touch. You don’t know what you’ve got 'til it’s gone, all right.

Having said that, I’m not sure I see the application of touch and Metro to desktop or enterprise apps. For writing this blog in Word, for example, my hands are on the keyboard for typing text. I don’t want to have to raise my arm, a low-resolution shoulder movement against gravity, to select text or issue commands. I have a single pixel resolution pointing device (my mouse) just a slight wrist rotation to my right.

MD: Time was, Windows Forms imposed a staid but consistent visual structure, but XAML has kind of blown that up. I hark back to the tin age of desktop publishing, when sudden access to cheap tools inspired some of the ugliest layouts ever put to pulp. Did we see that happen with XAML? Will we see it with HTML5?

DP: First, it wasn’t XAML that blew it up. XAML is not tied to graphical interfaces. XAML is a general-purpose language for describing an object graph, that is, for instantiating a tree full of objects and setting their properties. As it happens, the graphical environments of WPF and Silverlight were the first applications of this application-neutral declarative object language. All the horribleness could have easily been done in C# or VB.

I know we’ll see some awful applications, even those done by alleged professionals. Look at the Boston Globe’s new HTML5 layout (www.bostonglobe.com ). When I hover the mouse over a link, thinking, hmmm, do I really want to click through and read this article, a bright red “Save” button pops up to the right, yanking my eyes away from the title. I'm trying to read the damn paper and this hyperactive golden retriever is slobbering in my lap, shouting "Save? Save? Do you want me to save? I can save you know.” It’s hard to ignore. The color is red, like fire or blood. Popping into view grabs my attention like a car’s brake light flashing on.

How often does anyone want to save a newspaper article? Rarely. Newspaper stories are inherently short lived items, as illustrated by the cliché “yesterday’s news.” This seldom-used bug (I won’t call it a feature) degrades the user’s main interaction pattern with a newspaper, which is casual browsing. Classic example of a developer falling in love with his toolkit and forgetting the main body of his users. And the Globe, which recently put up a paywall, thinks they’re going to charge money for this crap? Please.

MD: Do you have any broad design philosophies or guidance that can help developers make better decisions? Your column certainly urged taking action on design and UX early in the app dev process. Any others come to mind?

DP: Start with the user and work inwards, not from the technology and work outwards. And call me early in the process. Ideally with a large check in hand.

MD: What was the biggest design disaster you were every associated with? How did you deal with it?

DP: Trying to do a touch-screen financial traders station in DOS, back in the 1980s. We never got it to work, the platform was too wimpy, the boss was crooked, and the company went belly-up. I won by fighting the losing battle to the bitter end and being the last guy carried off the field. The client admired that, decided I was the guy they wanted between them and the bad stuff in the computing world, and picked me up as a consultant. I asked them to buy me the Windows 3.0 SDK, and like idiots they did. I bought myself a copy of Petzold’s second edition, stole the C compiler from somewhere, and the rest is history.

Lisa Feigenbaum on Asynchrony and Language Evolution

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:00:51 GMT

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 of a package of three features on asynchrony appearing in this month's issue. I also followed up with Lisa Feigenbaum, program manager in the Visual Studio group, whom I interviewed for my Editor's Note column ("Thinkin' About Async") this month. Here is more of our back and forth on the issue of asynchrony and some of the challenges Microsoft faces when adding important new functionality to its languages and frameworks.

Michael Desmond: Over the past few years we’ve seen C# and VB take on aspects of functional and dynamic programming languages, and now we see support for asynchronous programming. It seems like we’ve come a long way from the days when C# and VB were static, strongly-typed imperative languages. How do the teams ensure that the core identity of each language isn’t undermined in the course of this evolution?

Lisa Feigenbaum: C# and Visual Basic are general purpose programming languages and support a wide range of developers. Each release, we look for ways we can innovate in the languages to better support programmers in the top challenges they face every day. As you’ve described, we’ve certainly looked at different types of programming languages, and incorporated some of the concepts that they do best into C# and Visual Basic. However whenever we add to the C# and Visual Basic languages, we always do so in a way that best fits the style of each language.

This is interesting to observe, when you compare how these features were added to both C# and Visual Basic. For example, dynamic language interop was added to Visual Basic by taking advantage of the late binding constructs that were already part of the language. Furthermore in C# we added a static type, called dynamic.

Speaking of functional programming, when adding lambdas to Visual Basic, we used the familiar keyword syntax with Sub/End Sub and Function/End Function. However for C#, which is less verbose, we used symbols to design the syntax with ‘=>’. These designs help each language preserve its original character and remain familiar to developers as it grows.

MD: In terms of potential value, async looks like an absolute no-brainer. From cloud scenarios to multi/manycore systems, the new functionality seems to address a broad range of scenarios. So my question is, why didn’t we see this earlier?

LF: Language design is a very conservative process, and we don’t add anything to the languages until we know it is just right. We have a very high compatibility bar, and anything we add lives on for many years. To appreciate how high the bar is, we’ve even cut features after they were designed and implemented, because we weren’t happy with how they performed in usability testing!

In the case of async, there were several ingredients involved. For example, the Visual Studio vNext async designs build upon the Task type that was added to the .NET Framework in .NET 4. Using that foundation, as well as additional Framework support that is being added in the next version, we were ultimately able to design a very elegant language syntax that we were happy with for async in Visual Studio vNext. The continued growth of trends like cloud and multi/manycore systems certainly contributed to our focus in this space.

MD: From a developer-relations standpoint, how does Microsoft go about ensuring that the community fully grasps (and ultimately accepts) the new features? And in this particular case, is the challenge mitigated by the streamlined nature of the features?

LF: Driving awareness and training about new language features is certainly an important challenge that we undertake in our community efforts. Different developers learn differently, so we make sure to deliver content in a variety of formats, including samples, presentations, hands on labs, forums, reference documentation, screencast videos, interview videos, walkthroughs and more.

This goal also influences the way we design the product, in that we design the features in a way that can be most easily picked up, and that feels natural and intuitive to the user. For example, the async language feature uses a very simple design, which allows you to essentially decorate your synchronous code with async modifiers and a few targeted changes to make it run asynchronously, rather than completely re-writing your code. This allows for greater up-take of the new feature and was a core principle in its design.

5 Questions: Pause and Play with Await

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 20:33:00 GMT

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 at Microsoft, is the author of one of those features ("Pause and Play with Await"), which explores the workings of the new functionality. I asked Torgersen a few questions about the technology and how developers can best prepare to take advantage of it.

Michael Desmond: How complex a task was it to actually add Async functionality? I'm guessing that there is a lot going on in the compiler, and that you'd have to architect it to manage a lot of scenarios.

Mads Torgersen: It was quite complex in the details, and became even more so as we put in work to optimize performance, but the core implementation approach is quite simple. The essential challenge is to be able to pause and resume execution of a given piece of code in mid-flight. Instead of chopping up the generated code into separate bits, we use a technique (that was prototyped with the Axum project) where we “parachute in” to the right place in the user’s code -- using goto’s!

It’s a rock solid strategy because we don’t change the structure of the original source code -- only embellish it a bit. As we’ve extensively tested correspondence between sync and async code, we’ve been confirmed that this works great. We’ve had a surprisingly small bug tail of inconsistencies.

MD: Related question: Can you describe a significant or particularly interesting challenge your team faced in implementing Async, and how you ultimately managed to work through it?

MT: The issue we call “stack spilling” was hard to get right. Execution may get suspended in the middle of the evaluation of an expression, and the parts already evaluated need to get squirreled away for when execution resumes. That proved to be difficult, especially because some temporary results (such as a reference to an array element that you are about to assign to) cannot be stored in an object on the heap. Instead we need to “back up” and store the constituent parts (like the array reference and the index) to simulate that it has been evaluated, when in fact it hasn’t.

Another tricky area has been making sure there are no race conditions between suspension and resumption, especially because resumption involves calling into user defined code.

MD: Whenever a significant feature addition occurs to a programming language, it perks my interest. There is always a strategic push and pull, as teams must weigh the benefit of new features against the dangers of bloat. Did this issue play into the discussion of adding async and, if so, how did it impact the implementation?

MT: We are always worried about bloating the languages, because we can add but never take away. For something like async there was no doubt it was worth its weight, but we still took great care to minimize the syntactic footprint of the feature. There are two new keywords, and believe me, each one was discussed for weeks on end -- is it really necessary and what should it look like!

On the library side there is a different situation, because we are introducing a new asynchronous pattern to the framework and there is a lot of “duplication” needed for existing asynchronous methods to be offered in such a new version. Ultimately, we all decided that it was worth the bloat. It is easier to live with legacy in libraries than language, and the new shape really is a huge benefit to API consumers.

MD: With multi- and many-core systems now the norm and cloud-based applications taking off, Async seems like a strategically important addition to the .NET language toolbox. You get the feeling that you are showing up with this functionality in the nick of time?

MT: I think that is very true. We already introduced the Task types in .NET 4 to raise the level of abstraction for parallel programming, but with async we elevate Tasks to a much needed unifying role that helps coordinate the many kinds of simultaneous activity you can have in a modern-day application in a uniform manner. I think this common abstraction at the API level, combined with the language support for its composition, will prove to be a tremendous foundation for developers as we grow further into the cloud and device spaces in the coming years. I am really excited that we’ve managed to rally so beautifully around one simple core concept here.

MD: Obviously the Async bits are out there for developers to work with. But beyond working with the available pre-release tools, what can developers do to prepare themselves, and their applications, for asynchronous development?

MT: Become Task-based! Even on .NET 4 the Task types are a much better currency for asynchronous activity that the older patterns we have. You still need to be callback-based because you don’t have the language support, but in a more elegant way. And having all your signatures follow the new Task-based pattern will prepare you beautifully for the day when you can consume those with just a simple “await” expression.

A Mango Harvest: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Released

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 17:55:00 GMT

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 the world.”

According to Hautala, Microsoft will be pushing Windows Phone 7.5 to “more than 98 percent” of existing Windows Phone users. You can check the Windows Phone blog for the latest on the deployment.

The next day, Cliff Simpkins on the Windows Phone Developer Blog announced that the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RTW release is available for download on the Microsoft Download Center. As Simpkins noted: "The Release to Web (RTW) release consists of seven additional release languages, final finishing touches to the tooling experience, a handful of bug fixes, and additional upgrade logic to provide a better installation process for users coming from earlier tools."

MSDN Magazine: October Issue Preview

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:54:59 GMT

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 programming features that are to be part of .NET Framework 4.5 and its attendant C# and Visual Basic languages.

Eric Lippert, a principal developer on the C# Compiler team at Microsoft, kicks things off with his introduction to the topic ("Easier Asynchronous Programming with the New Visual Studio Async CTP"), before Mads Torgersen, principal program manager on the C# and Visual Basic Language team, explores the behavior of the new await keyword, in his feature titled "Pause and Play with Await." Finally, Stephen Toub, principal architect on the Parallel Computing Platform team, provides some valuable insight into the potential, and limitations, of asynchronous programming with his feature, "Async Performance: Understanding the Costs of Async and Await."

Also in this issue you'll find feature-length tutorials on securing access to LightSwitch applications, authoring Visual Studio Extension (VSIX) project templates in F# and C#, and building Silverlight applications that interact directly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. Finally, SharePoint developers dive into the new Enterprise Content Management (ECM) capabilities in SharePoint to build flexible, extensible and maintainable information architectures for knowledge-management and Internet/intranet/extranet-facing portal environments.

Among our columnists, Dino Esposito's Cutting Edge column is titled "Objects and the Art of Data Modeling," and looks at some of the unique challenges that occur when different parts of an application employ their own model of data. Back page columnist David Platt, meanwhile, takes us to the Imagine Cup finals code competition in New York City, and offers a glimpse at the unique and inspiring experiences of the international teams that attended.

In October, some columnists are finishing a series of columns on a topic, while others are just spinning theirs up. Joseph Fultz' Forecast: Cloudy column this month kicks off a two-part series, and gets after the rich publish-and-subscribe capability in the new AppFabric Service Bus messaging technology called Topics. Fultz shows how Topics allow developers to broadcast messages, while filtering them appropriately for subscribed receivers. On the flip side, Charles Petzold's UI Frontiers column wraps up his months-long exploration of building a Windows Phone 7-based ebook reader application.

In between is Windows with C++ columnist Kenny Kerr, who continues with the second in his series of columns on thread pools. This month he looks at cleanup groups and how they "make the thread pool’s objects and callbacks more manageable, and this can indirectly help to simplify the cancellation and cleanup of other APIs and resources as needed."

Finally, whenever I read a James McCaffrey column, I always bring the waders, because I know he'll be leading me into the deep water. This month, his Test Run column ("Graph Structures and Maximum Clique") looks at the problem posed by a clique -- a subset of a graph where every node is connected to every other node -- and how it can be solved using a graph data structure type. This is good stuff.

We're always anxious to hear from you about each issue. What did you think of the articles and what topics do you feel might deserve more attention? Leave a comment here or email me at mdesmond@1105media.com.

BUILT: Post-Conference Thoughts on the Win8 UX

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:27:48 GMT

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 his thoughts on the event.

Michael Desmond: Given your background in user experience (UX), what are your impressions of what Microsoft has delivered with the Metro-style user interface(UI)? What are the most compelling aspects of the UI and what elements might be cause for concern?

Stephen Chapman: I love Metro for tablets and phone, but I'm not quite sold on its implementation for desktop and enterprise. For what I like about it, it's very fluid, simple and clean. Making the Metro UI accessible to devs will create a solid, consistent experience for end-users.

Since these are pre-beta bits, my complaints so far should be taken with a grain of salt, but as for elements that might be cause for concern, I just don't yet see someone picking up a Windows 8 tablet in a store and enjoying the experience without first being shown how to navigate the OS properly and how to compensate for all the changes existing thanks to a total overhaul to the Start menu. Certain things feel counterintuitive, such as hiding the Edge UI Start menu. To get it to appear, you simply swipe it in. To hide it, do you simply swipe it out? No. You have to touch the screen somewhere for it to go away.

It's little things like that, that add up in my book. But these are the reasons Microsoft gives early bits to developers and the general populous; they want feedback! Overall, I feel there will be a learning curve to this OS -- even (especially) for seasoned Windows users.

Desmond: What are your thoughts on the Windows Runtime infrastructure and how it enables multiple points of access to Metro-style app development?

Chapman: I love the idea of WinRT. This sort of unification of developers to enrich the Windows app ecosystem is an ambitious goal that I hope plays out well. Only being a hobbyist developer, I don't have much in the way of criticism for the platform. Personally, the specific facet I'm interested in is the notion that a Web developer can now hop over to Windows 8 and create a full-blown Windows application without having to use much of anything they aren't already familiar with code-wise. How cool is that?

Desmond: I'm personally wondering about the user experience impact when users switch between Metro and traditional desktop style apps. Does Microsoft face a challenge in helping users manage the visual and interface context switch between these species of apps? Am I overstating the concern here?

Chapman: I agree with your concern one hundred percent, though primarily in relation to touch. It's almost jarring to go from a Metro app to a traditional app right now if you're using touch. I mean, just take a second and marinate on the current app ecosystem in Windows. Think of all the apps out there that don't have touch in mind, or even UI/UX for that matter. Sure, Microsoft demonstrated the relative ease with which one can add touch functionality into an app, but there will need to be more than that to make a traditional app function properly in a touch/Metro world.

Overall, I expect Windows 8 to spend at least a good year or so seeing its app ecosystem update itself. It just feels too jarring to have to go back to the desktop now and use a traditional app. Using a keyboard and mouse setup, though, seems a bit easier to manage where the Metro/traditional differences are concerned.

Desmond: What was the biggest surprise of the show? And what was the biggest disappointment?

Chapman: Personally, the biggest surprise of the show for me was going from completely disliking Windows 8 when I tried it prior to the first day's keynote, to really wanting to get my hands back on it after seeing the keynote. The OS just felt wonky and I had trouble figuring out how to do some of the most basic, core functions to troubleshoot issues and even just use the OS with confidence. I was frustrated with it. Then, I watched Sinofsky and team go at it on stage and I was able to see how best to utilize Metro and the necessary leftovers of the traditional desktop.

The biggest disappointment to me was how poorly-managed the sessions were. Since they kept them locked down until the first day of the event, I (and plenty of others) found myself unable to attend a number of sessions in-person, since they were filled up by the time I got to them. It's great that they recorded all the sessions so that we could watch them after the fact, but that kind of defeats the purpose of actually attending the event in the first place, you know? If they choose to take the same tight-lipped approach for the next big event, I hope they at least have the foresight to provision larger spaces for sessions people are obviously going to want to attend in droves.

Desmond: In the Day 2 keynote, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made it very clear that this is a Windows world, and we all just live in it. Any thoughts on Microsoft's Windows-first strategy and how it will resonate with developers?

Chapman: Developers, developers, developers! Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Personally, I think a wide margin of developers already consider [themselves] living in a "Windows world." Thus, I think Microsoft's Windows-first strategy simply puts a label on a process already taking place, but perhaps with more focus now.

What will be interesting to see is how people take to Windows 8. A pre-Windows 8 "Windows-first" strategy is one thing, but a Windows 8 "Windows-first" strategy is another. I'm not quite sure how quickly developers are going to want to jump on-board and invest into this completely new OS, WinRT, etc. We'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out with developers and end-users alike.

From the MSDN Library: Master WCF for More Advanced Applications

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:26:32 GMT

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 WCF to improve your applications. Find them here.

There’s a ton of useful stuff here. Here’s a rundown of what you'll find:

Workflow Services
Describes how to create and configure workflow services.

Endpoints: Addresses, Bindings, and Contracts
Describes how to control multiple aspects of your service.

Data Transfer and Serialization
Describes how serialization of data can be tailored for interoperation or future compatibility.

Sessions, Instancing, and Concurrency
Describes the instancing and session modes of WCF and how to select the right mode for your application.

Transports in Windows Communication Foundation
Describes how to configure the transport layer, the lowest level of the channel stack.

Queues and Reliable Sessions
Describes queues, which store messages from a sending application on behalf of a receiving application and later forward these messages to the receiving application.

Transactions
Explains how to create transacted operations that can be rolled back if needed.

Windows Communication Foundation Security
Describes how WCF security helps you to create applications that have confidentiality and integrity. Authentication and authorization are also available, as are auditing features.

Peer-to-Peer Networking
Details how to create peer services and clients.

Metadata
Describes metadata architecture and formats.

Clients
Describes how to create a variety of clients that access services.

Hosting
Describes hosting. A service can be hosted by another application, or it can be self-hosted.

Interoperability and Integration
Describes how to use WCF to extend your existing logic rather than having to rewrite it if you have a substantial investment in component-based application logic hosted in COM+.

WCF Web HTTP Programming Model
Describes the WCF Web Programming Model that allows developers to expose WCF service operations to non-SOAP endpoints.

WCF Syndication
Describes support to easily expose syndication feeds from a WCF service.

AJAX Integration and JSON Support
Describes support for ASP.NET Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) and the Javascript Object Notation (JSON) data format to allow WCF services to expose operations to AJAX clients.

WCF Discovery
Describes support to enable services to be discoverable at runtime in an interoperable way using the WS-Discovery protocol.

Routing
Describes the routing service.

BUILT: Post-Conference Conversation with Andrew Brust

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 15:38:50 GMT

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 Badge Insights and a Microsoft Regional Director out of New York City. Andrew is also a columnist for Visual Studio Magazine and chair of the Visual Studio Live! conference.

Michael Desmond: In your recent blog post about Windows 8, you write about Microsoft serving two masters and both the unique value and concerns that come with it. What is the danger to Microsoft with its two-tone OS strategy with Windows 8?

Andrew J. Brust: The biggest danger is that people find the two sides of the Windows 8 coin (Metro style apps and Desktop applications) to be awkward and confusing, rather than versatile. Some people demand choice; others are burdened by it. Given that Apple offers tablet users very little choice and that they will have had a two-year head start on setting the tablet market's expectations, Microsoft could find itself a square peg going into Apple's pre-made round hole.

If Microsoft does this right though, customers won't be faced with two opposing paradigms discordantly competing for their attention, but rather a spectrum of choices in device types and modes of operation. For example, tablet form-factored hardware would most likely be used primarily in Metro mode, but would offer the Desktop mode for occasional use, much as people [who] use Remote Desktop clients to connect to Windows machines on their iPads today. At the other end of the hardware universe would be (physical) desktop PCs, whose users would stay in Windows 8's Desktop mode most of the time. In the middle of the extremes, we can imagine laptops with touch screens that get roughly equal use in each mode; or dockable slates (such as the one that BUILD conference attendees received) that get used in Metro mode when untethered and in desktop mode with a keyboard and mouse when docked.

I think we won't know which way this will go until the machines hit the market and consumers react. And the reality is that no matter what Microsoft and the OEMs do, availability of compelling apps, or lack thereof, will have great influence over customer acceptance.

Desmond: I wonder if Windows Runtime and .NET Framework might put Microsoft developers in a pickle, as some devs may have to track and work with two runtime stacks. Obviously Visual Studio and shared tooling alleviates a lot of the concern, but any thoughts on the burden posed by WinRT/.NET?

Brust: I think my answer here would parallel my thoughts on form factors and associated usage scenarios. In other words, I imagine that LOB (line of business) developers will still focus on the .NET stack for years to come. Whether it be Silverlight on the client or ASP.NET, WCF, WF and AppFabric on the server/in the cloud, .NET has the chops for business applications and that's not really Metro's target, at least not yet.

I think we'll have "app" developers using Metro for consumer and kiosk development and business/enterprise devs using .NET for LOB. Will there be crossover? Will there be some experimentation with Metro in enterprise scenarios? Sure there will, but given the ability to use Visual Studio plus VB/C#/.NET with WinRT and the general affinity between WinRT APIs and .NET APIs, I think that crossover will be very reasonable. Certainly more so than trying to move to Objective C and all of Apple's tooling.

Desmond: Silverlight didn't get much mention in the BUILD keynotes, though Silverlight 5 is on its way. What did you take away from BUILD with regard to Silverlight's future?

Brust: I am now more bullish on Silverlight than ever; I think it's now the strategic Microsoft client technology for the next 3-5 years. Think about it: it could take a year for Windows 8 to come out. Then two years more for enterprise deployment of that new OS, and then at least a year or so for new application development to standardize on Metro. Meanwhile, Silverlight is here now, it's mature, and it uses the same markup language, async programming patterns, deployment model and abbreviated .NET profile that Metro style apps will use. If by no other means than a process of elimination, Silverlight is the winning choice now.

Desmond: Any thoughts on what Microsoft has achieved with the Windows Runtime specifically? Do you think it stands a good chance of capturing that large market of HTML/JavaScript developers?

Brust: I do. Metro style apps aren't Web apps that just happen to run out-of-browser; they're true native apps. But developers skilled in HTML, CSS and JavaScript will get productive really quickly in building them, and they will find that they have not just barebones skills but also the ability to refine and polish their apps. There's nothing more empowering for a developer than hitting a new environment and discovering that you're good at it. It provides the combination of confidence building and instant gratification that developers crave.

Desmond: Overall, how did BUILD compare with some of the epic PDCs of years past? Did it live up to the hype?

Brust: They did a very nice job with that BUILD. My closest comparator is PDC 2003, when Yukon (SQL Server 2005), Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005) and Longhorn (before it was Vista-branded and tarnished) were introduced.

That was big. BUILD was bigger. Everyone was there, everyone was nervous about what would be revealed and even if some people had concerns, everyone was excited by what they saw. It probably also helps that everyone got a free tablet with dock, keyboard and a year of AT&T 3G service on it! PDC 2003's t-shirt didn't really pack the same punch.

Learn More About F#

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:58:51 GMT

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.” New to F# 3.0 is F# Information Rich Programming, which includes F# LINQ Queries, the F# Type Provider mechanism, and a set of built-in type providers for enterprise and Web data standards.

Want to know more about F#? Now is a good time to get caught up. The MSDN Library now offers a free online version of Real World Functional Programming by Manning Publications. This book offers an introduction to F# and functional programming and then delves into hands-on learning. You’ll get access to overviews of major topics, followed by tutorials that will help you implement these techniques in your own applications.

BUILT: Post-Conference Conversations After Microsoft BUILD

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 19:14:00 GMT

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 of developer previews of Visual Studio 11 and other tooling, I have no doubt that BUILD lived up to its already high expectations. As Microsoft conferences go, I believe this one will be remembered as an event that helped define the future direction of the company, much the same way PDC 2000 helped define Microsoft in the .NET era.

As we leave the BUILD Conference behind us, and start evaluating the technologies and tooling it introduced, I’ve been catching up with developers and industry experts who attended the event.

Alan Stevens is a Microsoft C# MVP and co-founder and CTO of Wild Endeavour, Inc., where he provides software development consulting, training and coaching services. I asked Stevens about his thoughts on the Windows Runtime (WinRT) implementation in Windows 8 and what developers should be doing to prepare for it.

Michael Desmond: What do you think of Microsoft’s Windows Runtime stack? Is the promise of equivalent support across diverse managed, unmanaged and scripting languages realistic?

Alan Stevens: WinRT is a once-in-twenty years opportunity to correct the sins of the past and prepare for the future. The use of language projections put all languages on an equal footing. I was skeptical of this promise at first, but further investigation revealed that although at its heart WinRT is a C++ API, even C++ has a language projection. I came away very impressed with the work of the WinRT team.

Desmond: Obviously, WinRT-leveraged code has to call to the WinRT. So what's the real HTML5 compatibility story here? Can developers write JavaScript/HTML5 apps that will run on multiple clients and browsers, yet still provide a Metro experience?

Stevens: The story for HTML5 on Metro is less clear than the WinRT story. The simple answer is that, yes, you can run HTML5 on Windows 8 as promised. This is very significant because now developers who considered themselves "Web developers" can just as easily proclaim themselves "Windows developers." This situation is the inverse of what we saw ten years ago when ASP.NET Web forms enabled VB6 Windows developers to leverage their skills to build applications on the Web.

My current understanding is that it is possible to provide a cross-platform HTML5/JS/CSS3 application that provides a full Metro experience, but it will require heavily modifying the layout and JavaScript. Currently, this story feels a lot like "optimizing" my site for Internet Explorer.

Desmond: It seems like Windows 8 is really two OSes in one. We've seen the advantages of this approach, as Microsoft can have its cake and eat it too, supporting the vast .NET community while striking off in new directions. What are some of the challenges of this approach?

Stevens: I agree that Windows 8 is actually two operating systems, but I can't imagine another way to solve the business problems Microsoft is facing. Desktop Windows was built for an earlier time and must be supported for the indefinite future. Metro Windows is Microsoft's response to the current multi-device, multi-language environment.

There is much greater danger for Microsoft in not offering something dramatic and disruptive at this point. As a company, they have plenty of resources to support both application stacks for as long as necessary. Frankly, I'm shocked at how well they've executed this transition. I'm much more accustomed to disappointment at Microsoft's inability to live up to their potential.

Desmond: Any advice for developers trying to make business decisions here?

Stevens: Don't over invest in Windows 8 yet. It is still early and much can change. There is no immediate impact to my business and my clients from the announcements at Build. I'll be following blogs and watching the Build session recordings, but I won't be building any Metro applications for now. I encourage other developers to do the same. Keep calm and carry on.

BUILD: All That is Old is New Again

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:27:00 GMT

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, and the dive into the ASP.NET MVC features in Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5, Ballmer's BUILD comments invoked a profound nostalgia.

Ballmer confirmed the message that Microsoft Windows and Windows Live President Steven Sinofsky had earlier delivered. When it comes to developer strategy at Microsoft, it is Windows first, Windows last, and Windows always. With a slimmed down and composed Ballmer pacing the stage, I felt myself traveling back in time, to an era before .NET Framework, when Microsoft was still the determined underdog in so many attractive markets.

"This year there will be 350 million Windows devices sold," Ballmer told the audience. "There is no phone, there is no tablet, there is nothing on the planet-- there's no operating system on the planet -- that will ship 350 million of anything, other than Windows. And that creates opportunity for developers."

The ghosts of PDCs past are whispering in my ear. The room is thick with the shadows of IBM OS/2 and Novell Netware, vanquished rivals that once held the ground that Apple iOS and Google Android occupy today. And Ballmer -- fit, poised and quietly impassioned -- punches the air with his words. There are markets to be won, contracts to be landed, career opportunities to be seized.

"It's the day and age of the developer," Ballmer intones as his address draws to a close. "It's the day and age of the Windows developer."

It's a strangely shocking statement. There's a confidence in Ballmer's words, almost a swagger, that has been missing in Redmond during the .NET days. Suddenly, Microsoft is no longer the company of broad abstraction and managed code. It’s a company built around a simple idea – Windows everywhere – and the opportunities that idea creates. As Ballmer concludes, his words are direct, focused, native.

"And in the day and age of the Windows developer, I am going to leave you with one last thought. Let's move forward together, and let's seize the opportunity for developers, developers, developers."

Oh yeah, this is the Microsoft I remember.

Microsoft Drops F# 3.0 Developer Preview

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:29:33 GMT

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

F# 3.0 Developer Preview is available for immediate download for MSDN subscribers. The release will be made available to the public on Friday at 10am Pacific Time. The F# compiler will continue to be available as an independent installation, but that configuration is not part of this preview release.

Build Keynote: The ABCs of MVC and TFS

Michael Desmond - MSDN Magazine — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:52:37 GMT

Scott Guthrie may be corporate vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, where he heads up Windows Azure app development, but that didn't stop him from giving an action-packed demo of the new capabilities coming to ASP.NET MVC. Async functionality, WebSocket support, and better mobile tooling in the form of default styles and mobile jQuery were all featured during Guthrie's presentation.

Corporate Vice President of Visual Studio Jason Zander, meanwhile, showed off the powerful 3D development and debugging capabilities of Visual Studio 2011, including a new image editor with alpha blending support and a pixel-level debugging feature for cleaning up 3D scenes.

Zander also showed off Team Foundation Service, the Windows Azure-based version of Microsoft's team development environment, hosted in the Cloud. Attendees were given a one-year subscription to TFS for Windows Azure during the conference.

Yesterday's keynote focused tightly on Windows 8 Metro-style apps and the new Windows Runtime stack that enables them, but today's presentation shows that Microsoft is aggressively refreshing its tooling across both the WinRT and .NET Framework stacks.