August Issue of DevProConnections Is Posted!

The August 2011 issue of DevProConnections is now live! Our theme this month is Great Free Tools for .NET Developers, with a cover story that includes a downloadable table listing more than 50 free software developer tools from third-party vendors and the developer community--plus the favorite free tools of some of our DevProConnections authors.

In addition to the free tools article, you will find 11 more articles covering a range of topics of interest to .NET and ASP.NET developers.

Core ASP.NET topics: In every issue, you will find technical articles covering ASP.NET development. In this issue, longtime contributing author Dino Esposito explores the topic of Working with ASP.NET MVC 3 Razor Helpers and Templates, while Bipin Joshi wraps up his two-part article series on creating a simple task-list application using ASP.NET, WCF, and jQuery.

HTML5 articles: HTML5 is a hot topic with DevProConnections readers (in July 2011, it was the third most popular search keyword on DevProConnections.com). This month, look for articles by Dan Wahlin on how to get started using HTML5 Boilerplate and Daniel Egan and Michael Palermo on Three of the Most Important Basic Elements in HTML5.

Software testing: We offer two articles that give expert insights into application testing. Continuing his article series All About Azure, Zoiner Tejada explains the value of using mocking frameworks in testing Windows Azure applications, and Microsoft support engineer Trey Nash shows you how to use Event Tracing for Windows crimson events in performance troubleshooting.

Product and book reviews: In every issue, we cover the latest products for the .NET developer community. this month, Anand Narayanaswamy reviews the  DotNetInvoice billing package and Mike Riley reviews the book 101 Windows Phone 7 Apps; Volume 1: Developing Apps 1-50.

Opinion: Every developer has an opinion, and we offer several strong ones in this issue. Richard Campbell reminds us of the rich free-tool offerings on Microsoft's CodePlex site and then, with Carl Franklin, talks to Michele Leroux Bustamante about why identity management and federated security are still crucial parts of application development. Finally, Jonathan Goodyear explains where he thinks Silverlight is headed, in a column that has already gotten a lot of traffic on DevProConnections: " 50 Ways to Leave Your Standard: Silverlight vs. HTML5 and JavaScript."