What does the December MSDN Magazine hold for us? Could it be anything to do with Microsoft technologies? The good news is that there is a lot of C# code.

MSDN Magazine used to be essential reading for anyone programming for the Microsoft environment. It still is up to a point, but it seems to be becoming increasingly general. This is good if you are general programmer but not so good if you work with Windows.

In the December issue we have yet another collection of mostly general standards-based articles with indications of how things work on the Microsoft implementation, but there is also a good collection of C#. It is nice to see the language making a reappearance among the C++ and JavaScript onslaught.

For example the lead article is on Windows 8 and the WebSocket Protocol. The most difficult part of the WebSocket protocol is generally finding a server that supports it. In this case the solution is to use C# to implement an HttpListener but this only works under Win32 and not WinRT. Under WinRT the best you can do is a client using the same technology. The JavaScript implementation of a client gets only a few lines of description and then we move on to a WinHTTP based client for C++. The article is a good introduction to WebSockets but it really just serves to point out that WinRT doesn't support everything that Win32/.NET does.

The remaining articles continue the C# trend with a few excursions into JavaScript and one into T-SQL.

Speech-Enabling a Windows Phone 8 App, Part 2: In-App Dialog is a nice introduction to the Microsoft Speech API and how to use it in from a C# program running under WP8.

Designing Accessibility with HTML5 is a tutorial on using ARIA and at the end a consideration of how to do it with Visual Studio 2012.

The C# Memory Model in Theory and Practice is a detailed consideration of a much overlooked topic - how memory optimization can have an impact on threading. This part one of a two part series and well worth reading

Matrix Decomposition is a look at how to perform some standard matrix operations in C# - the LUP decomposition in particular but it also shows how to use parallel for to make things faster.

Pain-Free Data Access in JavaScript--Yes, JavaScript  a look at the open source Breeze database framework for JavaScript.

Essential Facebook Programming: Authentication and Updates is about what you would expect - building Facebook features into your more general apps. This is basically about using the Facebook SDK in C# for authentication and automatic posting.

Windows Azure Service Bus: Messaging Patterns Using Sessions - is the obligatory Azure article but it manages to rise to being interesting enough for the general programmer.

Graph-Based Shortest-Path Analysis with SQL demonstrates how to write a shortest path finder in T-SQL with the graph data stored in a SQL database.  All I can say is that this is not the way I think of T-SQL or what I would use it for - but it is an interesting example.

A Touch Interface for an Orienting Map  is an interesting look at a diy map interface with Bing maps that maintains its orientation with the real world as the device is rotated.

There are also some online features including

• Top 10 NuGet (Anti-) Patterns
• 3D Sight with Kinect
  and
• MongoDB on Windows Azure for .NET Developers

Scriptjunkie{} also has three new articles:

• TypeScript: Add Productivity and Manageability to your JavaScript Apps
• Introduction to Fabric.js: Part 2
• Authentication with jQuery Mobile

Microsoft programming is today a very strange thing. Once MSDN would have been full of articles explaining Windows APIs but today it explains other peoples technology with a scent of Windows occasionally.