MSDN Magazine: August 2012

What do you do when marketing comes to you needing a fully functional conference registration system for a show just a month away? You leverage Azure, Silverlight and Windows Phone to build an app with all the social media trimmings, as Microsoft's Mark Kromer details here.
Mark Kromer

Windows with C++:
Lightweight Cooperative Multitasking

Kenny Kerr describes a technique to write asynchronous code in C or C++ without the use of a runtime.
Kenny Kerr

Features

C++: Functional-Style Programming in C++
The new C++ 11 standard greatly improves the language’s suitability for functional-style programming, particularly with its support for lambdas. Learn how you can use functional-style programming in your C++ code.
David Cravey

Windows PowerShell: Build User-Friendly XML Interfaces with Windows PowerShell
Joe Leibowitz explores a way to make reading and editing XML files easier and more convenient, even for nontechnical users, using algorithms that can parse the structure of any given file.
Joe Leibowitz

Building HTML5 Applications: A History (API) Lesson
Don’t know much about history? Clark Sell shows you how to access and manage session state using the new HTML5 History API.
Clark Sell

ALM Rangers: Using the Team Foundation Server Client Object Model
The Visual Studio ALM Rangers introduce the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS) client object model and create the foundation for a new series of articles focused on practical guidance and common coding scenarios with TFS.
Willy-Peter Schaub

Microsoft Azure: CyberNanny: Remote Access via Distributed Components
What do you do when you’re a new dad and want to keep track of your baby at home? You use the Kinect sensor, C++, Azure, and local and cloud-based components to get e-mailed photos upon request, wherever you are.
Angel Hernandez Matos

CLR: .NET Development for ARM Processors
Coding in the .NET Framework means that you don’t normally have to worry about the many differences between ARM and x86-based processors. But there are a few fundamental design differences that may affect your code, as CLR team insider Andrew Pardoe explains here.
Andrew Pardoe

Columns

Data Points
Pitfalls and Pointers for a Base Logging Class in EF Models
An unfortunate use of a base class to provide logging data for all classes in an Entity Data Model creates chaos in the database. Learn why this happens and how to avoid the problem.
Julie Lerman

Cutting Edge
Mobile Site Development, Part 3: Routing Requests
Dino Esposito explains how to route Web site visitors between the desktop and mobile versions of a site so they can easily jump between the two.
Dino Esposito

Forecast: Cloudy
Decoupling the Cloud with MEF
Learn how to use the Microsoft Extensibility Framework to make a cloud deployment a little more manageable and flexible.
Joseph Fultz

The Working Programmer
Cassandra NoSQL Database: Getting Started
Ted Neward explores Cassandra (the NoSQL database software, not the figure from Greek mythology), which is “an open-source, distributed, decentralized, elastically scalable, highly-available, fault-tolerant, tuneably consistent, column-oriented database that bases its distribution design on Amazon’s Dynamo and its data model on Google’s Bigtable.”
Ted Neward

Touch and Go
Viewing a Virtual World from Your Windows Phone
Although we no longer believe that celestial spheres surround the Earth, that’s still a handy concept for programs that let you use a smartphone to view a virtual world. Such a program needs to determine its orientation in 3D space, and Charles Petzold explains how to accomplish this using the horizontal coordinate system.
Charles Petzold

Editor's Note
On Point with Julie Lerman
Michael Desmond profiles Data Points columnist, Julie Lerman.
Michael Desmond

Online-only Features

Web Dev Report: Working with Graphics on the Web: Canvas vs. SVG
In this installment of the Web Dev Report, find out whether to use Canvas or SVG when developing Web graphics.
Rachel Appel

Kinect: Starting to Develop with Kinect
The first in our series of Kinect-themed features shows how you can use the skeleton-tracking capability of the Kinect in a WPF app without writing a single line of code.
Leland Holmquest

Microsoft Azure: Comparing Microsoft Azure Queues and Service Bus Queues
Find out whether Azure queues or Service Bus queues are the best choice for the messaging queues in your application.
Ricardo Villalobos

Leading Lightswitch: Tales of Advanced LightSwitch Client Customizations
Enjoy these tales of creating custom applications that show off the versatility and ease of use LightSwitch offers. You will also get a glimpse of how a real pro works with clients.
Jan Van der Haegen