August 2017 Issue: No Summer Doldrums at MSDN Magazine

The dog days of summer tend to be the slowest of the year, at least from a productivity standpoint. But here at MSDN Magazine, things are in full tilt. Our August issue includes a dive into creating Visual Studio extensions that work on any version of the IDE from 2012 to 2017, an exploration of Git internals, and an enlightening look at how the Federal Aviation Administration turned to Xamarin.Forms for its new drone flight management app.

Also don't miss Woon Kiat Wong's article on Actionable Messages for Outlook, which enables developers to let users execute actions and complete tasks directly within their Outlook email client. Finally, Joseph Fultz offers insight to Azure shops trying to get a better handle on their data usage and costs, with a serverless Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) batch process that gives developers greater insight and control than they can get from third-party tools.

Our readers may be flocking the beaches, but our columnists are hard at work. C# gets plenty of attention as Mark Michaelis in his Essential .NET column explores tuples in C# 7.0. Meanwhile, James McCaffrey's Test Run column looks at how C# developers can leverage deep neural networks (DNN) to enable machine learning and data-based prediction, in what promises to be the first of at least two columns on the topic of DNN and machine learning.

No surprise, the indefatigable Ted Neward is still at it, regaling us with tales of the MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node.js (MEAN) stack, in a column that tackles the task of upgrading to the latest version of the Angular JavaScript framework. In fact, Ted's The Working Programmer column has been focused on MEAN for two years now--something I comment on in my Editor's Note this month. Want to get caught up? You can check out Ted's first MEAN installment (How To Be MEAN: Getting Started) from August 2015, or get a look at all of Ted's columns at his author page.

Summer may be in full swing, but the days are already growing shorter. Our September issue is less than two weeks out. In it you will find valuable guidance and insight on Microsoft's recently released, cross platform-savvy frameworks and specifications--.NET Core 2.0, ASP.NET Core 2.0 and .NET Standard 2.0. So enjoy the summer while it lasts, because there's always work to do.