MSDN Magazine December Issue Preview

It's been four full days since Thanksgiving, and I'm still recovering from tryptophan poisoning. Fortunately, my drowsiness isn't holding things up at MSDN Magazine, where we soon expect to roll out the December issue.

Leading things off in December is Bill Kratochvil's feature titled The Model-View-Presenter-ViewModel Design Pattern for WPF, which delves into the history of design patterns and explores how the MVPVM pattern can improve extensible enterprise applications. Next in line is Brandon Satrom's monthly HTML5 fix, titled Integrating Geolocation into Web Applications.

Andrew Richards offers help for developers confounded by cryptic memory dumps when troubleshooting applications. His article, Writing a Plug-in for Sysinternals ProcDump v4.0, shows how to interact with the ProcDump utility and underlying DbgHelp API. Speaking of troubleshooting, Adam Tuliper this month kicks off a two-part feature (Hack-Proofing Your ASP.NET Applications) that helps you identify and deal with some of the most common vulnerabilities in ASP.NET applications.

The Visual Studio ALM Rangers are back this month for another quarterly installment of their features series on team development, this time titled Rise of the VM Factory. Brian Blackman, Paul Meyer and Willy-Peter Schaub dive into the VM Factory reference implementation, which shows how to automate the creation of virtual environments using a nearly fully automated and consistent factory strategy. Finally, Adi Shavit offers a change of pace with his feature, Saving and Reusing Video Encoding Settings.

Our columnists are hard at work. Dino Esposito takes on the challenge of implementing a context-sensitive progress bar to report on remote operations in an ASP.NET MVC application -- a problem given the inherently stateless nature of the Web. Kenny Kerr is back with the last of his series of Windows with C++ columns on the Windows 7 thread pool, while Joseph Fultz puts the finishing touches on his series of Forecast: Cloudy columns about the Windows Azure AppFabric Services Bus. Julie Lerman rounds out the front-of-book columns with her Data Points installment titled Handling Entity Framework Validations in WCF Data Services.

The back pages of the December issue of MSDN Magazine include Ted Neward's examination of Parser Combinators in his The Working Programmer column, and Charles Petzold's UI Frontiers column called Video Feeds on Windows Phone 7. Of course, James McCaffrey is on hand with his latest Test Run missive exploring the maximum clique problem, this time using tabu algorithms.

As ever, David Platt gets the last word around here. His Don't Get Me Started column remarks on the passings, just three days apart, of a pair of computing legends -- Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie.