Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) has been introduced in .NET Framework 4.0, as part of the parallel programming features. In most scenarios Parallel LINQ is supposed to increase performance but in some cases a sequential operation would be a better option. Read on to learn more...

Microsoft officially announced that a new Kinect for Windows device will be released on February 1st along with a commercial license. How easy is it to code to?

Bipin Joshi provides an overview of some key features of HTML5 from a developer's perspective.

One limitation that website developers often encounter is drawing graphics in the browser. HTML5 does a great job in client side graphic rendering by offering what is known as the canvas. Understanding HTML5 canvas and associated JavaScript objects is important for any ASP.NET developer and this article teaches you just that.

Microsoft's recent Windows 8 announcement makes HTML5 and anything HTML5/JavaScript related an important subject for any Windows developer. To most developers HTML is a "tag" based user-interface specification. However, HTML5 is more than just new "tags". Yoked to, but separate from the HTML5 specification is a specification defining background running scripts called Web Workers.

From an application perspective, LightSwitch is aimed at minimally complex applications with straightforward requirements. In many situations the basic need is to grab some data and throw it up on the screen. You might call LightSwitch the ad hoc developer's tool, although that's probably not what Microsoft had in mind.

XPath is one of the important elements in the W3C's XSLT standard and is often referred as a query language used to help us navigate through attributes, elements and other XML objects. It helps us identify the information and process the data in xml-based data sources in an efficient manner. Read on to learn more...

In making parallel computing more accessible, Microsoft has also made asynchronous execution more accessible. Nowhere is this fact more apparent than in technologies built from the ground up on these new asynchronous capabilities. Take, for example, Reactive Extensions (Rx); a set of libraries built on LINQ and the Task Parallel Library (TPL).

Discover how to use a game pad with your Microsoft Visual Studio XNA applications.

Register and download your free C# reference card.

Version 4.0 of the .NET framework brings us three new language concepts, optional parameters, default values and named arguments. Read along as we delve into these concepts.

The ToString method of the .NET framework object has a solid set of useful features. Every object in the .NET framework has the ToString() method implementation. Read along to learn more about the ToString() method.

Task Continuations allows developers to create interdependencies between tasks. The interdependencies can involve simple execution in response to task completion or aggregated exception handling among tasks. Read along to learn more.

Read along as Vipul Patel discusses how to use Bing Maps control in your Windows Phone 7 (WP7) applications.

Watch this short screencast to learn the tools needed for XNA application development for the new Windows Phone 7 platform. You will also learn how XNA games are organized at the highest level, and see how you can test your games within the phone emulator, part of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone 7.

The new Windows Phone 7 platform isn't restricted to only C# programming. Microsoft recently released development tools targeting Visual Basic developers. This article discusses how to get the tools and walks through a simple Visual Basic Silverlight project for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

Location based services and interactive maps are fast becoming a commodity. As an application developer, you need to learn how to easily bring maps and location based features into your own applications. In this article, you will learn how to integrate Microsoft's Bing Maps into your own Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 applications.

LINQ - Language Integrated Query is one of the most exciting and powerful extensions added by Microsoft to the .NET framework. This article talks about a few ways that can help you improve your classical C# programming using LINQ, whose success relies on the easy way it allows developers to use SQL like syntax to query all kinds of data.

Make use of the Repository Pattern to break the dependencies between your application's domain model and data access code.

Here is another set of C# programming tips and tricks. This set consists of tips that are often neglected workarounds. These tips save developers a lot of the time and will help to make code-writing skills sharper.

Microsoft Visual Studio now sports the ability to debug dumps of managed applications without delving into the notorious world of windbg and sos.dll. This article explains the new simplified dump debugging experience with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

This article discusses the fifth major revision of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) aptly called HTML5. It brings to picture some of the advantages of this new specification along with a side by side comparison with earlier ones and highlights bWhat HTML5 has to offer?b

If you're going to develop applications for the iPhone or iPad, you are probably aware of Objective-C. In this article we'll discuss the myriad of options that are available for iPhone and iPad development, some of which focus on Objective-C, and others which allow you to utilize other programming languages.

Learn the practice of using projections in your LINQ statements to ensure you are not over retrieving data values from your Entity Framework model.

News report claims well-placed sources gave paper the real scoop on when to expect the launch of WP7 as well as availability of the new WP7 devices.

Now you can write dynamic programs using C# programming's newest version, 4.0. You can also replace complicated .NET framework reflection code with easier dynamic programs. Using dynamics in C# programming, developers can now make interop and COM object's method calls.

Part three of a series that illustrates using WCF to communicate between a Windows service and client application.

It seems as if everyone has a hunch about when Windows Phone 7 will roll out, but Microsoft isn't saying -- and so the rumors fly.

Part one of a series that illustrates using WCF to communicate between a Windows service and client application.

Windows Server AppFabric was released this summer to make it easier for you to deploy and manage Windows Workflow Foundation 4 (WF) workflows. Read this article to learn how to build deployment packages and easily deploy your workflows to AppFabric. We will also look at how AppFabric can help us understand what is happening to our workflow once it has been deployed.

Part two of a series that illustrates using WCF to communicate between a Windows service and client application.

Master your C# programming skills using these short-precise techniques and boost your productivity.

Microsoft tells Windows Phone 7 developers that the tools they'll need to write for the new platform are now final, which means beta tools will no longer work.

Want to develop apps for the iPhone/iPad but don't want to learn Objective C? Read along to learn how to use MonoTouch to build iphone/iPad apps utilizing the power and elegance of the C# programming language.

Coding mistakes can costs dollars and man hours for your projects. Read along to avoid these common mistakes made by C# programmers and help streamline your next project.

Learn to leverage to the power of Microsoft LightSwitch with Brad Jones by creating a simple database, entry screen, and application without writing a single line of C# programming code.

Windows installer has its own way to display installer user interface which is far different from other technologies. MSI supports few controls compared to .Net or other platform. Though it is not very difficult, still it is hard job to develop sophisticated installation package with good user interface, even after using well known installer software. NvnInstaller.MsiDotNet api makes this job easier.

Interest builds among app developers as the final release of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 dev tools gets its release date.

Microsoft has recently released version 1.2 of the Microsoft Azure SDK and Microsoft Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2. They have continued to release updated SDKs and new features on an aggressive pace. In this article we will walk through the new features of the updated tools and SDK.

Moving a Windows Forms app over to either a Mac or Linux machine used to be nearly impossible. With Mono it's almost as easy as recompile and run. In this article we'll take a look at a sample C# programming database application and show it running on both Mac OS X and Linux.

At Worldwide Partner Conference, COO Kevin Turner talks up Microsoft's cloud strategy, takes potshots at competitors such as Google and Apple.

Exception handling can be a costly affair and should be used meticulously as it undoubtedly serves as an integral part of our applications and shouldn't be sidelined for any reason. The common problem in implementing an exception handling mechanism is the dependency on the library after we create a provider. This C# tutorial looks at the possibility of switching the providers easily.

If you're developing using C# programming on Windows and need to make those apps cross platform you'll want to get intimately familiar with Novell's Mono project. Read along as we look at the tools available from Novell to develop and test your applications.

Scott Mitchell shows C# and .NET developers how to extend LINQ's functionality by adding your own custom query operators.

Learn how to leverage BLOBs in your application. Read along as we look at the simplest of those scenarios, simply hosting your public files in a better place than your server.

At times when certain Websites are blocked, or in the case of no internet connectivity, PageGetters serve a mammoth boon. Read along as we overview the use of the .NET Framework to build an easy one in less than an hour and serve yourself as a "PageGetter" to your friends.

Windows management has a prime place in system monitoring and administration irrespective of the technology being used. The suppleness that is achieved using the Windows management native API's are far more than that which could be achieved through other kinds of monitoring and administration application.

Volume 2 of "C# Programming Tips and Tricks" covers some items related to new features of C# 4.0 along with other beneficial tips and tricks. In addition, it mentions some tools that are worth noting.

The Microsoft .NET Framework comes packaged with all the building blocks to implement a keyboard interface in a WinForm application, we'll illustrate and walk through how to extend those building blocks with basic .NET controls, inheritance and custom events to create a consistent keyboard interface.

If you're building Windows Mobile apps FakeGPS could be the answer to your troubleshooting worries. Learn how to test your GPS applications using FakeGPS.