MSDN Magazine June Issue Preview

Tomorrow the next issue of MSDN Magazine officially hits the street. Leading off things are a pair of articles in our ongoing Common Language Runtime (CLR) feature series. Immo Landwerth offers a nice overview of the updated BCL with his piece, "What's New in the .NET 4.5 Base Class Library." Alok Shriram, meanwhile, dives into the intricacies of the Managed Extensibility Framework with his feature "An Attribute-Free Approach to Configuring MEF."

A couple other feature series get their due in the same issue. Clemens Vasters pens the second installment of our Internet of Things series ("Using the Windows Azure Service Bus for... Things!"), while Matt Stroshane returns with another exploration of Windows Phone development. His piece, "Behind the Scenes: A Windows Phone Feed-Reader App," details how a group of Microsoft interns developed a robust feed-reader app for the Microsoft phone platform. It's worth a look.

The longest-running series of them all is our popular Building HTML5 Apps series, which kicked off back in August of last year. Clark Sell steps in for Brandon Satrom to show how new CSS properties can help developers save countless hours working with visual effects and animations ("CSS3 Effects, Transitions and Animations").

There's plenty more. Graham Mendick shows how a consistent approach to navigation and data passing in a Web Forms application can pay dividends when building Single-Page Interfaces ("Unit Testing in the Navigation for ASP.NET Web Forms Framework"). Resident Windows Azure gurus Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos return this month ("Democratizing Video Content with Windows Azure Media Services"), with a step-by-step guide to building a scalable, video streaming service using Windows Azure Media Services and a Web-based client. They even show a Facebook implementation to illustrate its utility for consumer application.

Most of you know James McCaffrey as our Test Run columnist, but he gets double billing this month as he also wrote a feature in this issue ("Custom Indexing for Latitude-Longitude Data"). In it, he shows how to create custom indexes for geographical data, with the goal of enabling faster retrieval of real-time data.

As for McCaffrey's latest Test Run column, it's titled "Evolutionary Optimization Algorithms," and details an implementation of a meta-heuristic modeled on the behavior of biological evolution. The solution can be used to find, and I quote, "approximate solutions to difficult or impossible numerical minimization problems."

Not that our other columnists aren’t plenty busy themselves. Dino Esposito's Cutting Edge column kicks off a series in which he looks at the challenge of mobile site development from a different perspective. Julie Lerman's Data Points column, meanwhile, looks at the benefits that Knockout.js brings to client side Web applications, using the framework to perform data binding with OData.

The back of the book kicks off with a series ender, as Ted Neward provides the final installment of a four-part series on creating an F#-based chatterbot modeled on the old ELIZA software. Charles Petzold's Touch and Go column dives into the fascinating challenge of leveraging sensors in Windows Phones. Titled "Getting Oriented with the Windows Phone Compass," Petzold's column shows how to combine sensor inputs for maximum effect.

And don't look now, but David Platt is stirring the Visual Basic 6 pot. His Don't Get Me Started column, titled "The Silent Majority: Why Visual Basic 6 Still Thrives," looks at the enduring phenomenon that is classic VB and why it will no doubt continue to live on.

Is there a topic or technology you want to see covered in the pages of MSDN Magazine? Let us know in the comments section, or email me at mmeditor@microsoft.com.

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  June 01, 2012
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