Usability in Practice: Strategies for Designing Application Navigation

To better understand how SOA patterns can be applied to Windows Azure deployments, we walk you through a scenario in which a bank moves its services to the cloud.Thomas Erl, Arman Kurtagic, Herbjörn WilhelmsenMSDN Magazine January 2010

Yes, you can run background processes in the cloud. Kevin Hoffman and Nate Dudek use a shopping cart example to demonstrate how to build an application engine as well as implement asynchronous messaging and processing using Azure Storage.Kevin Hoffman, Nathan DudekMSDN Magazine January 2010

Jeremy Miller explains how internal Domain Specific Languages can help you craft code that is easier to read and write. His bag of tricks to improve your programming includes extension methods, fluent interfaces, object extensions and use of the semantic model.Jeremy MillerMSDN Magazine January 2010

Write a simple browser-based request-response test automation using JavaScript that's platform independent and useful when you are working in a highly dynamic environment.James McCaffreyMSDN Magazine January 2010

Building an NHibernate-based desktop application isn't any harder than building a web application, and in many cases NHibernate simplifies elements of session handling and concurrency.Oren EiniMSDN Magazine December 2009

While style and slick visuals are important in Web site design, they shouldn't detract from a site's usability and functionality. Here are some hands-on tips for look and feel, readability, discovery of affordances, and more, with plenty of examples of good and bad design.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine December 2009

This article is an overview of digital signature practices and user considerations necessary to write applications in compliance with ISO/IEC 15408 Common Criteria security. Signing categories are described, including those that are a potential risk to the implied trust association that goes with a digital signature.Jack DavisMSDN Magazine November 2009

In this column, Ambrose Little and Charlie Kreitzberg discuss best practices, design patterns, and other considerations related to implementing a search feature.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine November 2009

This article examines how the new support for functional programming techniques in .NET 3.5 can developers make code more declarative, reduce errors in code, and write fewer lines of code for many common tasks.Jeremy MillerMSDN Magazine October 2009

This article explores techniques developers can use to gather information about and incorporate their users' mental models in their software designs.Ambrose Little, Charles B. KreitzbergMSDN Magazine October 2009