Editor's Note

In Case You Hadn't Noticed …

Howard Dierking

As you're reading this, you might be thinking "something seems different." And you would be absolutely correct. Over the past few months, we have been working hard to introduce several new elements into the MSDN Magazine experience, both in print and online. For this month's editor's note, I want to step back from my usual technology pontification and instead point out these features so that you can take advantage of them.

The first—and hopefully most obvious—change is that we've updated our look. The table of contents still lives on our cover, but the columns have a little more real estate, making it easier to scan all of our content. Inside, we've lightened up the colors, fonts, and other graphical elements. Our goal with the redesign was to simplify and freshen our print look while also creating a visual link to another major area of change: our online look.

Inside this issue you'll find two of our new special type of sidebar called Insights. The purpose of this type of sidebar is to enable Microsoft product teams to inject additional details on how a feature or technology works "under the hood" or describe the design decisions that went into that technology. You can find the Insights sidebars in Dino Esposito's Cutting Edge column and in Jeffrey Richter's Concurrent Affairs column.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that we have launched a new feature as a part of our online experience—Virtual Labs. When you launch the Virtual Lab, you'll see a split-pane view containing the lab environment in one window and the magazine article in the other. This will enable you to stay in context of the article while working in the code and vice-versa.

Initially, we are hosting Virtual Labs for articles that discuss technologies that are either not likely part of your current toolset or are complex to configure. (For example, articles covering SharePoint development are great candidates for Virtual Labs.) In this issue, we are running a Virtual Lab to correspond to Charles Petzold's Foundations column where you can experiment with the RenderTargetBitmap and WriteableBitmap classes that make your bitmaps responsive to changes within your application. See his column in this issue for more information about the Virtual Lab, or go directly to the lab at go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117105.

We're also featuring a Virtual Lab for Ethan Wilansky's article on automating SharePoint deployment from the May 2008 issue of MSDN Magazine. You can get started by pointing your browser to go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=117106.

I hope that you find the new content additions valuable. As always, please drop us an email at mmeditor@microsoft.com and let us know what think about our new features!

Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Tim Cahill, Patrick Dussud, Muhammed Abd El Aziz, Joseph Fernando, Steve Fox, Matt Gibbs, Bertrand Le Roy, Ade Miller, Dwayne Need, Dave Reed, Gerhard Schneider, Don Smith, Stephen Toub, Clemens Vasters, and Robert Wlodarczyk.