Check Out the April Issue of MSDN Magazine

The April issue of MSDN Magazine is live. This month’s issue leads off with Thomas Petchel’s feature, “A Tour of C++/CX,” which explores the C++/CX language extensions and how they can help developers build better Windows Store apps.

Also this month is part 3 in our ongoing series on Microsoft Office development. Stephen Oliver and Eric Schmidt return to explore data binding and custom XML parts in the new JavaScript API for Office.

The April issue offers a pair of articles aimed at application lifecycle management issues. Thomas LeBrun’s “Building and Validating Windows Store Apps with Team Foundation Service” shows how Windows Store app developers can employ a workaround to use the cloud-based Team Foundation Service. The online version of TFS includes new source code management, collaboration and build service functionality, making it a worthwhile target for Windows Store developers.

The other ALM offering this month is titled “A Treasure Hunt Through ALM Readiness,” by the Microsoft Visual Studio ALM Rangers team. This article explores the design, coding and testing experiences of the ALM Rangers as they build a Windows Store app that serves as a master catalog of the content available to help developers become proficient in ALM practices.

Finally, James McCaffrey presents a compelling argument for adaptive boosting as an effective technique for data classification and prediction. It’s definitely worth a read, especially if you’ve been following his earlier columns on Naïve Bayes, neural network and logistic regression algorithms.

Also be sure to check out our columns. Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos lead off with their introduction to Windows Azure Tables, a NoSQL solution optimized for storing massive amounts of data. Speaking of data, Julie Lerman answers a question she’s been fielding a lot lately: “Why does Entity Framework reinsert existing objects into databases?”

Rachel Appel’s Modern Apps column dives into Windows Azure Mobile Services. Charles Petzold’s DirectX Factor and Dino Exposito’s Cutting Edge columns both continue to explore topics (the DirectX audio subsystem and Facebook widgets and timelines, respectively) from the March issue.

Finally, Ted Neward and David Platt both take a moment to enjoy April Fools Day. Platt looks back at some of the industry nomenclature he’s managed to coin over the years. And be sure to check out Neward’s ruminations on the LOLCODE programming language. Something tells me that somewhere, David Platt’s late cat Simba is looking down at all this and smiling.