Issue: 2009 - November/December

Cover Headlines: VS 2010, C#, VB, EF, Silverlight, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC

Markus' Post Mortem

If you have not taken a look at Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) yet, you really should. WPF is a great desktop development platform. Granted, all of the tools are not yet in place, but Microsoft is pouring millions of dollars into developing WPF tools. Microsoft now considers Windows Forms a legacy technology and they won’t update it within Visual Studio. These two reasons alone should be enough to convince you that need to start learning WPF right now.While WPF of...fers a new set of development tools, you’ll see a lot that looks familiar. You still have the typical desktop controls like text boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, etc. You still write the same C# or Visual Basic code. The major difference is how you layout the screens, control the look and feel of the controls, and some of the properties are a little different. This article will give you a good introduction to what WPF is all about without diving too deep.See More

SharePoint, while good for many things, is probably better at some than others. One thing companies use SharePoint a lot for is Document Management.

Check out the new features in Visual Basic 10, the latest version of VB coming out with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.

Visual C# version 4.0 offers new features that make it easier for you to work in dynamic programming scenarios.Besides dynamic programming, you have support for optional and named parameters, better COM interop support, and contra-variance and covariance. This article will show you how each of these features work and provide suggestions of how they can be applied to help you be more productive.

Hot on the heels of the groundbreaking release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0, the ASP.NET MVC team at Microsoft has already released the first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of version 2.I have already predicted that Microsoft’s MVC Framework will become the new way to develop Web applications on top of ASP.NET. In this article, I will give a first look at the plans for version 2 and some of the features that already work in the first CTP.

From its earliest beginnings, Silverlight has tried to excite and inspire.Now that Silverlight 3 has shipped, it is time to determine if this is the magical version that every developer should finally take a look at. In this article, I will show you the changes Microsoft has made in hopes of helping you make that decision for your own organization.

The recently-released ASP.NET MVC Framework is a refreshing new way to develop your .NET Web applications.The framework is an implementation of the time-tested Model-View-Controller architectural pattern, and includes plenty of powerful paradigms allowing you to quickly build maintainable applications. Likewise, the Enterprise Library Validation Application Block implements a proven set of best practices that allow you to stop worrying about how to execute validation log...ic and begin immediately delivering real business value. In this article, you’ll discover just how well these two frameworks work together through powerful examples of this natural pairing in action.See More

If you have been working with the ADO.NET Entity Framework, you have probably been extremely eager to get your hands on the next version that is now part of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. Long referred to as “EF Version 2,” this version is now called Entity Framework 4 or EF4, to align with the .NET Framework 4.0 version.

Writing software is hard, particularly when the schedules keep programmers “nose to the grindstone”; every so often, it’s important to take a breather and look around the world and discover what we can find-ironically, what we find can often help us write software better.Philosophy seems a strange partner to the software craftsman, but a brief dip in the waters of abstract thought will often help hone skills later useful to the craft of code, models, and dealing with idiot users.