A certain Darwinian evolution is taking place at Microsoft. Some product species are more fit, with better chances for survival. You can understand and work with Microsoft's changes, rather than being passively impacted by them.
- By Andrew J. Brust
- 03/01/2012
Implementing one of three interfaces can turn your business classes into self-validating components that seamlessly integrate into WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC applications -- and can be easily extended to other environments.
Readers react to a column discussing the future of Silverlight.
- By Readers of Visual Studio Magazine
- 03/01/2012
Along with Visual Studio 11, betas of the .NET Framework 4.5 and two versions of Team Foundation Server were released.
Storyboarding in Team Foundation Server 11 is a quick and easy way to build UIs with a tool everyone knows -- PowerPoint.
- By Mickey Gousset
- 02/24/2012
Also being released is the beta of the .NET Framework 4.5.
- By Kathleen Richards
- 02/23/2012
Eric Vogel shows you how to use a common software design pattern that allows an app to dynamically pick an appropriate method at runtime.
Was there confusion at Microsoft's Web-focused show? Sure. But from Papa's Perspective, that wasn't a bad thing.
WPF makes it very easy to load non-executable resources at run time -- including a complete UI in XAML. Here's how to leverage that functionality to create applications that you can customize without recompiling.
Eric Vogel covers how to use the Windows 8 local data storage APIs to cache application data.
IntelliTrace can only be used in development environments in Visual Studio 2010 but that changes in the upcoming IDE. Learn how to use the new IntelliTrace in Production features in the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview.
- By Mickey Gousset
- 02/07/2012
You can use your Master Pages just to structure your pages. Or you can integrate them into your application with custom code that your content pages can access.
Chewie is a domain-specific language that uses PowerShell to tame NuGet installations.
You can write cleaner, more efficient code with Yield-Return; the key is knowing the right situations for using the statement.
- By James McCaffrey
- 02/02/2012
The absence of foreign key properties in classes adds some challenges to working in disconnected apps.
- By Julie Lerman
- 02/02/2012
Tired of mapping your classes from one format to another? A convention-based, open source library can help alleviate some of those coding headaches.
- By Patrick Steele
- 02/02/2012
Web Parts and User Controls let you easily build customizable UIs with the same tools you use to create inflexible user interfaces -- and implement an MVC-like pattern in ASP.NET.
When Brett was hired on as a senior analyst, he wasn't surprised to learn that the older platforms were built around Visual Basic 6 (VB6), which was no longer supported by Microsoft.
By responding to potential threats with thoughtfulness, and a zeal to add value, SQL and Big Data could be big business for Redmond.
- By Andrew J. Brust
- 02/01/2012
The latest edition of the control suite for ASP.NET offers almost every kind of control that a developer would need -- with one-third of the controls supporting ASP.NET MVC.