This month's MSDN Magazine is full of articles on hot topics and if there is a theme then it seems to be different ways of creating an application - but don't miss swarm optimization, parallel programming past and future and an interview with the creator of F#.

If you have been wondering what value LightSwitch could be to you as a programmer then try reading the two articles included in this issue.  Advanced Programming Made Easy With Visual Studio Lightswitch takes the attitude that LightSwitch is a quick way to generate a framework that you can then customize using your knowledge of programming. It details how to build extensions, custom controls, templates  and generally modify the system.  The second article, Build Business Applications with Visual Studio LightSwitch, is a much lower-level, getting started type, article - but if you haven't tried it yet it is a good place to start.

If you want to use a more traditional approach to building apps try: Building Apps with HTML5: What You Need to Know This is a strange tale of how to use HTML5 with IE9 and the associated developer tools. It doesn't really deliver on exactly how to build apps using HTML5 but I guess you already know how to create a web page.

Another approach to building an app is explained in Build a Ticketing System Using Exchange and Team Foundation Server. This is not an approach that would have occurred to me but on reading it through it makes a certain amount of sense if you already use either or both servers.

The idea explained in Portable Class Libraries: A Primer is that you can build a single Portable Class Library PCL that can be use to generate an assembly for Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, Xbox and Windows. The technique uses dependency injection so it might be an idea to brush up on this topic before trying to read the article.

As my particular interest is in technical programming and AI in particular I thought Particle Swarm Optimization was really interesting. The code is in C# and it demonstrates how swarming behaviour can be used to find the max or min of a complicated function.

My second favourite article is on something that we should all be interested in - The Past, Present and Future of Parallelizing .NET Applications. It is a very readable account of how we might write parallel programs in the very near future - even the references to A Christmas Carol are bearable to find out where things are going.

In among the regulars is an interesting interview, or rather a  question answering session, with Don Syme the creator of F# on, what else, F#. The only complaint is that it has caught the blogger's disease and is far too short. 

Noteworthy among the other regulars is Charles Petzold on solving the  Font Metrics in Silverlight problem in WP7 and  Searching Windows Azure Storage with Lucene.Net by Joseph Fulz - I have to admit that I hadn't noticed that there was a Lucene.Net!

You can read the entire issue at:
MSDN Magazine August 2011.