MSDN Magazine

People building serious MS apps, the kind where you have to figure out just what "volatile" really means, must subscribe. This is the map to the world they live in. There are lots of ads, covering just about every add-in, add-on, API, component, and service you can imagine, plus some. Do you need to know the difference between clusters, multiprocessor board, multicore, hardware multithreading, and application multithreading? You need this. UI, I18N, .NET, COM compatibility sooner or later, it's all here.

However, not all of us work as MS app developers. If you live outside that world, you'll find just about nothing of interest.

//wiredweird

Great magazine. Covers the full range of .NET technologies. Every issue is packed with windows, web, and xml development articles plus industry news and a lot more. High recomended.

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I have subscribed to MSDN Magazine for years now, and it really is quite good. Unlike most Microsoft publications, it is not "sales-pitchy" in that the articles are usually applicable to resolving common development issues, and there is very little subliminal verbiage geared toward buying other MS products that you don't need.

One thing to note is that they are very big on emerging technologies. This has its pros and cons...for example, they had tons of Visual Studio 2005 articles well before it was released, so it's nice to know how to use what's coming down the pike. And now (Sept 2007), there are a lot of Orcas (VS 2008) articles.

However, there is usually a large gap between when a platform is released and when you actually use it...so those articles most likely won't be useful to you until you actually have a reason to use it (i.e. when you employer adopts it). I often find that the most useful articles were written a year or two before I need it.

Another great thing about MSDN is that the entire magazine is available on their site for free, so you don't have to fork over the money if you don't want to. I just subscribe to give my eyes a break from the monitor once in a while.

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You can read this online, but I like to have a physical thing to read. Also, I like to be able to give a little back to keep the content comming. This keeps me on top of some new stuff and give's me some ideas that I might not have considered in the past Like code contracts. I'll keep renewing until it doesn't make sense anymore.

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MSDN magazine is pretty good. There are a wide variety of topics they cover (Windows phone, Azure, etc). Of course they are very biased in favor of Microsoft products, but I think that they're pretty honest about them, considering.