Dear Readers,

First up, season's greetings to everyone in advance. We wish everyone a joyful Festival/Holiday Season over the next couple of months. November is a busy month for the Microsoft Dev & IT Pro audiences. Amongst other new releases and updates; Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET MVC 5 and Windows 8.1 have been released, and this month we’ve put together three exclusive articles on the same. Subodh Sohoni talks about developer productivity and how it can be increased using ‘Code Optimization Tools’ in Visual Studio 2013. Raj Aththanayake does a thorough walkthrough of the new IAuthenticationFilter in ASP.NET MVC 5 and demonstrates how we can customize authentication. Sumit Maitra builds a cool Feed Reader app using the new Hub Control in Windows 8.1.

We welcome Craig Berntson as our newest columnist. Craig is a Software Gardener (yes you heard it right) and shares his wisdom about Software and why it is similar to Gardening. It's an interesting read, so do not miss it!

Pravin Dabade introduces Windows PowerShell and showcases how to script SharePoint 2013 using it. Mayur Tendulkar shares his Windows Phone Development wisdom and shows us how to extend it to build Enterprise apps for SharePoint. For our client-side developer audiences, Suprotim shares some power packed performance tips while manipulating HTML Tables using jQuery

In the Interview section, we are excited to talk to a team member of the ASP.NET Team, David Fowler (in his personal capacity). David is the creator of SignalR and we talk to him about some war-stories during the SignalR Development phase, some core SignalR features and the official backing from Microsoft. Do not miss this one!

Once again, we thank our fabulous contributors Craig Berntson, Mayur Tendulkar, Pravin Dabade, Raj Aththanayake, Subodh Sohoni, Sumit Maitra, Suprotim Agarwal without whose time and efforts this edition wouldn't have been possible.

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