This month's MSDN magazine is a really mixed bag that is impossible to characterize, but it has now caught up with the momentous happenings that took place at Build - well just a little.

The top article is Building a Mango App which takes a look at the new features of the 7.1 SDK - local database and Linq to SQL, secondary tiles and deep linking and Silverlight/XNA integration. It takes the form of a tutorial using a single example which for me at least made it harder to see the fundamental concepts - especially the Silverlight/XNA integration but you might disagree.

From Mango building to Building HTML5 Applications It is odd to read something about usng an open standard in MSDN magazine but we have to accept that now HTML5 is a first class Microsoft technology and JavaScript ranks alongside C# as a Windows language. In this case the focus is on using HTML5 forms in a general setting. It is a fairly standard account of the news input types and features such as validation. Later there are some notes on ASP.NET forms but over all there isn't much that is Microsoft or Windows specific.

A third "build" something type article is LightSwitch and Windows Azure which also couples two of Microsoft's newest technologies. Using LightSwitch to generate an Azure application which could cost you a lot of money to actually run over its lifetimes doesn't seem like a sensible option to me but it could be useful for rapid prototyping.  

Silverlight 3D for me this article was the star of the show. It is about three different ways to create a rotating 3D cube in Silverlight. After some basic theory it explains how to do the job in Silverlight 4 first using rectangles and projections and then using bitmap images. The third method however is much more satisfactory - using XNA with Silverlight 5. Can't wait for Silverlight 5!

NuGet If you haven't caught up with the NuGet package manager for .NET then this article will fill you in on the details and show you how to manage your project libraries using it.

SharePoint Security is a fairly niche item about implementing a custom claims based security system in SharePoint. If you haven't a clue what claims based security is all about then read the start of this article. 

The final two articles are about NoSQL database - as subject that the Microsoft platform is not well known for.The article NoSQL Document Database explains how to make use of the RavenDB NoSQL database from ASP.NET using MVC style coding - what ever happened to classic ASP.NET Win Forms? To fill you in on the broader ideas the DataPoints column covers What the Heck Are Document Databases? In this case the focus is on general issues with a brief nod in the direction of the Azure Table Storage.

The other regular columns in this months issue are also spread wide. For the computer scientists we have Greedy Algorithms and Maximum Clique. For the C++ programmers we have Thread Pool Synchronization.And for the architects we have Design of a Domain Model.

Charles Petzold has an interesting project  in the form of Finishing the E-Book Reader which he names Phree - free, get it? You can also read more about Phree on his blog. My suggestion is to take it to an open source project very soon.

Finally there are two columns musing on the events at Build we have BUILD: Microsoft's Call to Arms and A Game of Risk. Both are much to sympathetic to the Microsoft point of view and read pretty much as propaganda. At least the editors take mentions Risk even if it is just the game we all love to play.

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