MSDN Magazine May Issue Preview
Tomorrow afternoon the May issue of MSDN Magazine will go live on our Web site. Here’s what you can look forward to in the upcoming issue.
Craig Shoemaker kicks things off with his feature “Parse JSON Strings in Windows Runtime Components.” The article shows how JavaScript developers can parse JSON strings passed into WinRT components, hydrating strongly typed objects and returning results back to the UI. As Shoemaker notes, “WinRT components have objects with affordances for parsing JSON, but the support is low-level, and more streamlined interaction requires some explicit handling.”
JavaScript gets more attention in Jim Crowley’s feature, “Understanding and Using the SharePoint 2013 REST Interface.” While SharePoint in the past has supported .NET applications and languages via the client object model, the addition of a REST interface in SharePoint 2013 now allows Web languages like JavaScript and PHP to access SharePoint capabilities.
Not that we’re ignoring .NET developers or anything. Jeffrey T. Fritz dives into the Microsoft One ASP.NET concept, which leverages all four ASP.NET frameworks—Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SignalR—to maximize the options available to Web developers. The article walks through building an ASP.NET MVC project that incorporates all four frameworks.
Josh Lane, meanwhile, explores how to leverage familiar .NET libraries in his feature, “Migrating Legacy .NET Libraries to Target Modern Platforms.” He walks through a real-world forward migration of the open source Sterling NoSQL object-oriented database project, enabling support for .NET Framework 4.5, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store apps.
Chris Barker’s “Windows Phone Video Capture: A Best-of-Breed Approach” also looks at how developers can manage the transition to newer versions of Microsoft platforms, as he uses a video capture scenario to illustrate how developers can support both Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8 projects. Barker shows that developers can successfully port software to Windows Phone 8 “while not neglecting Windows Phone 7.5 devices.”
Finally, MSDN Magazine Senior Contributing Editor James McCaffrey wrote a feature this month titled “Shortest-Path Graph Analysis Using a CLR Stored Procedure.” As McCaffrey notes, the task is a bit like the game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon,” finding the fewest hops to travel from a specified graph start node to an end node, while also factoring in the weighted value of graph connections.
Of course, our MSDN Magazine columnists are hard at work in May. Dino Esposito explores social authentication in ASP.NET MVC 4, while Charles Petzold continues his dive into DirectX and XAudio2. Kenny Kerr also has DirectX on the mind, as he introduces the Direct2D 1.1 API. Despite its incremental version number, Kerr says Direct2D 1.1 is a major update that developers need to pay attention to.
Bruno Terkaly and Ricardo Villalobos continue their exploration of the Windows Azure storage system, this time looking at blob storage and how developers can address security requirements. And James McCaffrey provides follow on coverage of his own, as his Test Run column looks into data clustering using McCaffrey’s home-cooked Greedy Agglomerate Category Utility Clustering algorithm.
Oh, and David Platt is around. And he’s got a bone to pick with the way live tiles behave in Windows 8.