The Visual Studio LightSwitch Training Kit contains demos and labs to help you learn to use and extend LightSwitch. The introductory materials walk you through the Visual Studio LightSwitch product. By following the hands-on labs, you'll build an application to inventory a library of books.

The more advanced materials will show developers how they can extend LightSwitch to make components available to the LightSwitch developer. In the advanced hands-on labs, you will build and package an extension that can be reused by the Visual Studio LightSwitch end user.

The Training Kit includes the following content:
- LightSwitch Overview
- Demo: Introducing Visual Studio LightSwitch
- Hands-on-lab: Simple Book Store Application
- Hands-on-lab: Enhancing the Book Store Application
- LightSwitch Advanced Features
- Demo: Building Your First LightSwitch Application
- Hands-on-lab: LightSwitch Control Extensions
- Hands-on-lab: LightSwitch Data Source Extensions

Microsoft today is releasing the second beta of LightSwitch, a software tool aimed at developers who want to build business applications that run as both native and Web applications.

(Credit: Microsoft)

The new version, which becomes available MSDN subscribers today, and everyone else on Thursday, adds a handful of new features from the previous beta, all aimed at increasing what can be done with the software.

The first is support for publishing applications to directly to Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud services platform. This is joined by a tool for Visual Studio Professional (or higher) that lets users make LightSwitch application extensions. Examples of these include things like data sources, screen templates, and themes, all of which can be thrown in to speed up application development.

Besides the new features, Microsoft has also announced language support for German, which joins English. When the final version of the software hits later this year, Microsoft says, it will be available in an additional eight languages, matching the 10 that are supported in Visual Studio.

Since the release of the first LightSwitch beta back in August, the software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times, according to Microsoft. LightSwitch continues to play a larger part in the company's initiative to let businesses and developers get a taste of the full Visual Studio experience, offering them a chance to bring projects to the more feature-fulled development platform if they outgrow the original intent. A full breakdown of the differences between LightSwitch and Visual Studio Pro can be found here.

Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET

Design Patterns for Decomposition and Coordination on Multicore Architectures
Colin Campbell, Ralph Johnson, Ade Miller and Stephen Toub. Foreword by Tony Hey

A book that introduces .NET programmers to patterns for including parallelism in their applications. Examples of these patterns are parallel loops, parallel tasks and data aggregation with map-reduce. Each pattern has its own chapter. Each chapter includes a description of the problem, an example of where the pattern is applicable, and code that implements the solution. On this site you will find; a preliminary draft of the book, the accompanying code samples and answers to the end of chapter questions.

Order the hardcopy book or buy the eBook from O’Reilly 

• $29.99 for the hardcopy, $23.99 for the eBook.
• Also on Safari Books online and Amazon.com.

Read the book online in the MSDN Library

• Read the book content for free on MSDN!

Download the samples for each chapter in C#, Visual Basic and F# 

• Blog posts about the F# samples

 Watch a video of Patterns of Parallel Programming talk at TechEd 2010

• Source code to an improved version of the demo code is now available

The samples are written in C#, F#  and Visual Basic and use the new parallel programming model  that shipped with Visual Studio 2010. The samples use the parallel features of the .NET Framework version 4, which includes the Task Parallel Library (TPL) and Parallel LINQ (PLINQ).

Nice... Could be well combined with "FT52 Parallel Computing Goes Mainstream" (http://player.microsoftpdc.com/Session/922bb667-796b-44c6-b4f6-aa103b196f71) recent session at PDC

Foundations Of Programming

The Foundation Of Programming Series Free e-book By Karl Seguin is one of my favorites. It is simple, short and sweet. Especially for ‘casual’ programmers, this will give a better thought process – that’ll definitely enable them to code better and think better. This book covers the ALT.NET Philosophy, Domain Driven Development concepts, DI, TDD etc in a nice way. This book is close to my heart.

• Download From Here

Microsoft Application Architecture Guide, 2nd Edition

Published by Microsoft, this is an essential read for any Microsoft.NET developer or Architect to understand the underlying architecture and design principles and patterns for developing successful solutions on the Microsoft platform and the .NET Framework. This guide neatly covers popular architecture patterns, best practices and common challenges you need to understand for developing .NET applications. Get a good grip on developing enterprise applications in .NET.

• Download From Here

Rob Miles C# Yellow Book 2010

A nice action packed book that takes you through C# and .NET concepts. This book explains C# language and .NET library in general – with a clear focus on implementation thought process and best practices.

• Download From Here

Threading in C#

A short, neatly written book from Joe Albahari about Threading in C#. This is a must read for any .NET programmer to understand more about threading in general, thread pooling, synchronization, Non blocking synchronization, etc. In this book, Joe even covers the Parallel Framework Extensions and Parallel programming in .NET

• Download From Here

Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability

This guide is again from Microsoft, and focuses on designing your applications with Performance and scalability in mind. It has sections relevant to architects, developers, testers, and administrators. Following the checklists and guidance in this book will ensure that there won’t be any unpleasant surprises in the end. Read this guide if you develop Enterprise applications in .NET

•  Download From Here

Applying Design Patterns

This is a quick introduction towards the thought process of applying design patterns. The objective of the book is to introduce design patterns in a simple way, so that developers can understand some common patterns and how to apply them. I wrote that some time back ;)

• Download From Here

RefCardz from DZone

DZone has a number of awesome Ref Cardz (Quick reference sheets) on multiple technologies. You can go to DZone –> RefCardz to browse and download them (after getting a free DZone Id). Here are some of my recent favorites

• Getting started with WCF 4.0
• Getting Started With Silverlight + Expression Blend
• Essential F#

 

Also, make sure you read 4 .NET 4.0 libraries you should know better and 6 Visual Studio 2010 Tips to boost your productivity

Some nice suggestions from amazedsaint's .net journal