November 2010

"Hello World!": A Coder’s Guide to Writing API Documentation Creating documentation for your APIs may not be the most interesting part of the development process, but doing it right saves your users from confusion and frustration. We offer some useful tips to help you write effective API docs. Peter Gruenbaum Microsoft Azure Marketplace DataMarket: Introducing DataMarket See how the former Microsoft Project Codename "Dallas" has matured into an information marketplace that makes it easy to find and purchase the data you need to power applications and analytics. Elisa Flasko

Cloud Computing: Synchronizing Multiple Nodes in Microsoft Azure
Learn how to utilize elasticity—the ability to provision resources and remove them on the fly—to take full advantage of cloud computing.
Josh Twist

Cloud Data: Getting Started with SQL Azure Development
SQL Azure provides features similar to a relational database for your cloud apps. We’ll show you how to start developing for SQL Azure today.
Lynn Langit

Task-Based Programming: Scalable Multithreaded Programming with Tasks
Getting the most out of multicore systems means diving head-first into multithreaded programming. Ron Fosner follows up on his previous article by introducing you to a more sophisticated multithreading technique called task-based programming.
Ron Fosner

Cloud Collaboration: Connecting SharePoint to Microsoft Azure with Silverlight Web Parts
There are many ways to integrate Azure applications with SharePoint 2010. We’ll walk you through one example: a Silverlight-based Web Part that consumes data from the cloud.
Steve Fox

Columns

Editor's Note:
Proactive Education
This Florida agency goes beyond talking about the problem of IT education: it’s getting involved in students’ lives.
Keith Ward

Don't Get Me Started:
A Real Pain in the Neck
At a minimum, UI design shouldn’t cause physical pain to readers and users.
David Platt

The Working Programmer:
Multiparadigmatic .NET, Part 3: Procedural Programming
Procedural programming is often seen as “old school,” outdated and useless in modern software design, but the design paradigm still shows up in a surprising number of places—including the compiler and MSBuild.
Ted Neward

UI Frontiers:
The Intricacies of Touch Controls
Charles is intrigued by the Windows Phone 7 touch controls and tries to duplicate them in Windows Presentation Foundation, finding out that good multi-touch coding is a lot harder than it seems.
Charles Petzold

Cutting Edge:
Dynamic Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC
Action filters are a powerful feature of ASP.NET MVC controllers that can help you build aspect-oriented Web solutions. In this issue we dive deeper into creating your own dynamic action filters.
Dino Esposito

Data Points:
Using the Entity Framework to Reduce Network Latency to SQL Azure
Your app may function as expected when you switch to using a cloud database, but profiling and tuning queries to account for the varying effects of network latency can help you boost overall performance.
Julie Lerman

Security Briefs:
Web Application Configuration Security Revisited
Bryan Sullivan follows up on configuration security with some relatively obscure—but important—web.config settings that should be addressed, and discusses a new free tool to help you find potential problems.
Bryan Sullivan

Forecast: Cloudy:
SQL Azure and Microsoft Azure Table Storage
When migrating your applications to Azure, there are several data storage options to choose from. We’ll look at strengths of SQL Azure and Azure Table Storage to help you understand which is the right choice for your app.
Joseph Fultz

Test Run:
Web UI Test Automation with the WebBrowser Control
Modal message boxes generated by a Web application pose a tricky problem for automated testing. We’ll show you a relatively simple technique for creating a test harness for these cases.
James McCaffrey