2012 - November/December
Visual Studio 2012 is finally here! This issue will cover numerous improvements to Visual Studio 2012 including: IDE Changes, .NET Framework enhancements, web development changes. Join is as we uncover features that will make your life better.
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A Windows 8 Look and Feel for WPF, Part 1
Many people will not be able to upgrade to Windows 8 right away for various reasons. However, there is nothing to stop you from designing your WPF applications to have a similar look and feel.
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“Napa” Development Tools for SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013
One of the biggest issues in getting started with SharePoint development are the 2091097 steps you need to go through, and the heavy duty machine you need to invest in, to create a development environment for a SharePoint and Office developer. This is not unlike the fact that creating and running a production SharePoint farm can be extremely time-consuming.
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What’s New in ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012
Microsoft has added an abundance of new features and functionality to ASP.NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012. This article provides an overview of many of those new features and enhancements ranging from improved editors for HTML, CSS and JavaScript all the way through to publishing your work to the web.
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The Baker’s Dozen Doubleheader: 26 Productivity Tips for Optimizing SQL Server Queries (Part 2 of 2)
In part two of this series on optimizing SQL Server queries I’m going to continue with some T-SQL scenarios that pit one approach versus another. I’ll also look at what SQL developers can do to optimize certain data access scenarios. I’ll also compare approaches with temporary tables versus table variables, and stored procedures versus views.
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Tasks and Parallelism: The New Wave of Multithreading
In his article, Miguel Castro explores the evolution of multithreading in .NET, emphasizing the shift toward parallel programming with the introduction of the Task Parallel Library and the async/await keywords. He clarifies the distinction between concurrency and true parallelism, highlighting how modern tools simplify writing efficient, responsive, and non-blocking code, especially for mobile applications. Miguel details the use of the Task and Parallel classes for managing tasks, continuations, cancellation, and data parallelism, and explains how async/await provides syntactic sugar that improves code readability while enabling asynchronous execution without UI thread blocking.
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CODE Framework: Creating Application Themes
In prior articles, I have shown how to create WPF-based client applications using the CODE Framework and the default themes it ships with. This is a great way to create applications quickly yet make them very reusable and maintainable. However, using the default themes is just the tip of the iceberg. CODE Framework’s theming system is completely open and the default options are just that: defaults. And it turns out to be surprisingly straightforward to create your own themes.
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