It's a serious challenge, balancing coverage of important new tools and technologies with those developers rely on every day.

Lots of people have lots of questions about Code First and DbContext in Entity Framework 4.2. This month, Julie Lerman shares the answers to some of the most common ones.

There’s a lot of buzz about the “Internet of Things” (IoT) lately, and for good reason. Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg estimates 50 billion devices will be connected to the Web by 2020 (bit.ly/yciS7r [PDF download]). To put this number in perspective, right now there are about 1.5 billion Web-connected PCs and fewer than 1 billion Web-connected phones—50 billion is about seven devices for every human being on the planet! Market research firm IDC in turn estimates that more than 16 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2015 (see Figure 1). Admittedly, some more conservative projections exist as well, but by anyone’s numbers this represents a huge shift in the role of the Internet—from providing information and entertainment to people to supplying the connectivity for an emerging class of device-enabled applications.