MSDN Magazine: October Issue Preview

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.

Comments

• Anonymous
  September 27, 2011
  But before October... there's September! Would it be possible to have the PDF version of the September 2011 issue available on the download page (msdn.microsoft.com/.../ee412244.aspx)? Cheers!

• Anonymous
  September 28, 2011
  Stefano, We publish the PDF versions of the magazine the month following their issue dates. So look for the September 2011 PDF in the next few days.

• Anonymous
  October 03, 2011
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  October 04, 2011
  Yes, 26 minutes is a long time! I tried downloading the September issue from my remote office location just now, to see if perhaps there might be an issue. My download took about a minute, with data rates averaging north of 500 KB/sec. Obviously whatever issue was vexing your download yesterday was not in effect on mine today. Hopefully you won't see a recurrence of the problem.