CodeGuru Staff

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Mango is expected to become available for consumers this fall, but some folks are unsure why anyone should be excited about Mango? After all, it’s just an update for Windows Phone 7, right? Don’t be so quick to brush Mango off! The Mango update is major, including over 500 new features, […]

Microsoft coined the phrase “eating your own dog food” over 20 years ago, beginning a tradition that showed that not only were Microsoft products good enough for the world, they were good enough for Microsoft themselves to use. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Cloud still has to prove itself good enough to eat. A recent blog from […]

Last week it was reported that the Silverlight 5 Release candidate was available, but it did not include support for Expression Blend. This week Microsoft has announced that the release of Expression Blend Preview for Silverlight 5 is ready to be downloaded. This release includes the ability to create Silverlight 5 projects such as Silverlight […]

Microsoft shipped version 1.0 of Visual Studio LightSwitch in July as both a stand-alone product and an add-on to the full version of Visual Studio. While the product is targeted at quickly creating useful line-of-business applications, it’s quite capable of doing much more. The key to rapid development centers around accessing data and presenting it […]

At last week’s TechEd developer conference, Microsoft global CTO Noram Judah caused more than one developer to raise an eyebrow when he stated that an unknown product called “Active Directory Enterprise Access” provides a key insight into the future of Microsoft. Microsoft spokespersons and public relations weren’t able to clarify, and seemed unaware of any […]

Windows Phone 7 developers realize that having a robust, secure system is just as important for WP7 apps as it is with desktop apps. By using the Forefront Unified Access Gateway as the middle man, Windows Phone 7 users can securely access content on a SharePoint farm. The Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is a secure […]

Introduction In previous articles we worked exclusively with 2D objects; in this article we are going to start dealing with basic 3D objects. While many may be expecting a VB based 3D rendering engine, we will actually be using Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Subsystem that has been available to .NET since Framework 3.0. While […]

After working on Project KittyHawk for almost four years, Microsoft has shipped the final result, which is known as Visual Studio LightSwitch 2011. Some developers feel that LightSwitch is too basic to be very practical, while others believe it will speed up the development process. There is a history of this type of thinking in […]

Google this week released a beta version of its open source API client library for the Microsoft .NET framework. The API library supports .NET 3.5 and 4.0, and also supports Mono 2.6.7 and higher. Mono is the open source implementation of Microsoft’s .NET framework that works on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows, and is […]

Often an application must perform a concurrent background process after some elapsed interval. Developers typically choose a Timer for such an operation. Since .NET‘s inception, Timers have been part of the Framework. Strangely though, Timers haven’t evolved much. Timer mechanisms essentially work the same today as the early .NET days. A developer schedules a Timer, […]

An improved HTML editor is among the upgrades to the upcoming release of ASP.NET in Visual Studio. Although it’s not a major feature upgrade, it is a much needed improvement. The new Smart Tasks feature will allow developers to simplify common tasks while using the editor. Smart Tasks may enable beginning developers to drop a […]

Recently Microsoft has been pushing mobile developers towards its Azure cloud offering for the creation of mobile apps. This week they released new software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS and Windows Phone, positioning Azure as a cloud computing service that cuts across the major mobile platforms. One example company that Microsoft is proud of […]