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Editors' Picks
For Home and Office Users
Microsoft Free E-book Offer Has Something For Everyone First Look Microsoft Office 2010, by Katherine Murray Have you downloaded the Microsoft Office 2010 beta? I've been using it for a while and couldn't wait until our First Look Microsoft Office 2010 became available. Although I consider myself to be an intermediate to advanced user of Office applications, I can tell by reading the table of contents that I have a lot to learn about the newest features in Office and using the applications to their fullest extent. I've only had the new e-book for a couple of days, and I've already learned how to use two new tools in Excel 2010. While using the beta, I noticed that the Office team added a couple of cool new features to Excel, one of my favorite programs. Sparklines and Slicers are compelling for analyzing data, but are not easy to use at first. I was thrilled to see that our author covered those features in this book. I followed the step by step instructions and here were my results: Sparklines allow you to create little charts within a cell to help you visually notice patterns in your data. Rather than reading numbers in a row, I can create a Sparkline and see how our book sales are trending. If you want to try this yourself, Kathy gives you the steps in chapter 5.  If you love pivot tables as I do, you're gonna love Slicers. They allow you to slice data and extend pivot tables to show your data in a variety of scenarios. Here's how I used slicers (also covered in chapter 5). Once I created a regular pivot table of my data, I clicked on "Insert Slicer" and chose which field I wanted to use to slice my data. With this feature, I can click on the different topics to filter sales on particular categories.  I can't wait to read the rest of the book and find new tricks for using Office. Tell us how you're using the book by sending a Tweet to MicrosoftPress on Twitter or by writing on our wall on Facebook.
For IT Professionals
Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Administrator's Companion, by Jim Harrison, Yuri Diogenes, and Mohit Saxena from the Microsoft Forefront TMG Team with Dr. Tom Shinder As the first Microsoft Press book focused entirely on the Microsoft Forefront technology, Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) Administrator's Companion helps information technology professionals learn how to design, deploy, and maintain the security software as well as understand TMG's history and design goals. The book includes a foreword by David B. Cross, product unit manager for the Forefront TMG 2010 release. Please enjoy an excerpt from it: Foreword I wish I could summarize the full set of capabilities and potential in a short foreword for this book, but it proved to be impossible. The simple answer comes in the product name itself: Threat Management Gateway. The name deservedly implies the dynamic and integrated nature of the product and its extensible capability as it integrates with the Forefront protection suite. When you put it all together, the product really has six unique value propositions that emphasize our comprehensive approach to network protection: • Enforce network policy access at the edge (Firewall) • Protect users from Web browsing threats (Web Client Protection) • Protect users from e-mail threats (E-mail Protection) • Protect desktops and servers from intrusion attempts (Network Intrusion System) • Enable users to remotely access corporate resources (VPN, Secure Web Publishing) • Simplify management (Deployment) In the end, the quality and the value proposition of the product speak for themselves. Throughout the beta program, we have had more downloads and production deployments than all the other betas of the ISA platform combined. The breadth of the new features has driven new customers and new deployments never possible with the ISA product line. On the firewall side, we have added key components such as VoIP traversal (SIP), enhanced NAT, and ISP Link Redundancy. Combined with our NAP (Network Access Protection) integration with the VPN functionality, the firewall and remote access capabilities are richer than ever. In the Web client protection area, we now have integrated URL filtering, HTTP anti-virus/spyware scanning, and HTTPS forward inspection. The new secure e-mail relay deployment option enables a hardened edge-based anti-virus and anti-spam solution not previously available. And last but not least, the fully integrated and new Forefront Network Inspection System (NIS) has changed the game of network intrusion prevention and detection. Not only does the NIS provide the capability for administrators to provide threat management in the face of zero-day attacks, but it also enables security assessment and responses when deployed in conjunction with the Forefront Protection Suite. This book is a must-have for the Forefront Threat Management Gateway administrator--it embodies the core of the product team development knowledge, the best practices from Microsoft consultants around the world, and the learning from our customer deployments to date, and it distills this all into a one-stop resource kit of knowledge. Jim Harrison is known throughout Microsoft and the broader industry as the foremost ISA--and now TMG--expert. His in-depth understanding of the product internals combined with real-world deployment and operational experience provide a perspective unlike any other expert in the community. Yuri Diogenes and Mohit Saxena have not only been on the frontlines of the top ISA deployments around the world, but have also been on the forefront (no pun intended) of the TMG beta program. Their firsthand guidance and best practices will help you ensure a smooth and easy deployment by avoiding mistakes in advance and suggesting the most secure configuration from the start. Dr. Tom Shinder, a recognized security pundit and widely recognized ISA expert, brings his extended ISA experience to bear as a valued technical reviewer for this book. The availability of this book helps to achieve the goal that we set with the original inception of the TMG project: to enable customers to deploy protection easily, in a cost-effective and manageable way, to achieve their security and application protection requirements in an ever-changing threat landscape. I believe we have achieved that goal with our upcoming release and with security experts such as Jim, Yuri, and Mohit evangelizing the knowledge. David B. Cross Product Unit Manager, Forefront TMG 2010Microsoft Corporation
For Developers
CLR via C#, Third Edition, by Jeffrey Richter Reviewed by Valerie Woolley, Microsoft Press Jeffrey Richter has just finished writing the third edition of CLR via C#. He dedicated much of 2009 to writing and revising a book that will be just as solid as the second edition, and will contain several new topics: Runtime Serialization, Compute-Bound Asynchronous Operations, I/O-Bound Asynchronous Operations, Primitive Thread Synchronization Constructs, and Hybrid-Thread Synchronization Constructs. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction: It was October 1999 when some people at Microsoft first demonstrated the .NET Framework, the CLR, and the C# programming language to me. The moment I saw it, I was impressed and I knew that it was going to change the way I wrote software in a very significant way. I was asked to do some consulting for the team and immediately agreed. At first, I thought that the .NET Framework was an abstraction layer over the Win32 API and COM. But, as I invested more and more of my time into it, I realized that it was much bigger. In a way, it is its own operating system. It has its own memory manager, its own security system, its own file loader, its own error handling mechanism, its own application isolation boundaries (AppDomains), its own threading models, and more. This book explains all of these topics so that you can effectively architect and implement software applications and components for this platform. Personally, I have spent a good part of life focusing on threading, concurrently, parallelism, synchronization, and so on. Today, with multicore computers becoming so prevalent, these subjects are becoming increasingly important. A few years ago, I had decided to create a book dedicated to threading topics. But one thing led to another and I never produced that book. However, when it came to revise this book, I decided to incorporate all the threading information in here. So this book covers the .NET Framework's Common Language Runtime (CLR) and the C# programming language, and also has my threading book embedded inside it (see Part V). It is October 2009 as I write this text, making it 10 years now that I've worked with the .NET Framework and C#. Over the 10 years, I have built all kinds of applications and, as a consultant to Microsoft, have contributed quite a bit to the .NET Framework itself. As a partner in my own company, Wintellect, I have worked with numerous customers helping them architect software, debug software, performance tune software, and work around issues they have with the .NET Framework. All of these experiences have really helped me learn the spots that people have trouble with when trying to being productive with the .NET Framework. I have tried to sprinkle knowledge from these experiences through all the topics presented in this book.
Announcements
Microsoft Press Books Named as Distinguished Winners The Society for Technical Communication (STC) is an international organization of technical communicators whose purpose is to foster quality in print and online technical publications. Microsoft Press entered five books in the 2009 STC Competition--Puget Sound Chapter. We are proud to announce that an amazing four of our five entries received awards, including two Distinguished awards, which is STC's highest level of award! • Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices, the debut title in our new IT Professional Best Practices series, earned a Merit award. • Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity, Sara Ford's book based on her tremendously popular Microsoft blog, earned an Excellence award. • The Best of Windows Vista: The Official Magazine, the visually stunning compilation of the best articles from Windows Vista magazine, earned a Distinguished award. • Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, the technical masterpiece that exceeded its lifetime revenue goal in its first two weeks on the shelves, earned a Distinguished award. Our Excellence and Distinguished winners now qualify for entry in the International STC competition. Congratulations to our authors, planners, and editorial and creative teams--the STC judging standards are rigorous and these books reflect the best in the technical communication community. | |  | January 20, 2010  | |
