Building Interactive User Interfaces with Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX 5/9
article Microsoft's ASP.NET AJAX Framework helps page developers design more interactive web pages by streamlining the postback mechanism. In traditional web pages, a full postback involves the browser re-requesting the page, which is then re-rendered. This re-rendered page markup is returned, in its entirety, to the browser for display. Ajax techniques improve the user's experience in two primary ways through the use of partial postbacks: first, a partial postback is asynchronous, meaning that the user can still interact with the page while waiting for the partial postback to complete; second, and more importantly, because a partial page postback updates only a particular region (or regions) of a page, less data needs to be shuttled between the client and the server, resulting in a quicker and smoother experience.

Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework 5/9
article Microsoft Research and the CLR team at Microsoft are on to a winner with their "Parallel Extensions to the .NET Framework," formally known as the "Parallel FX Library." The aim of Parallel Extensions is to help software engineers take advantage of the multiprocessors/multicore hardware that is increasingly common on the desktop and server.

Add-in Edits Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables 5/9
article A new software add-in allows users to edit data directly in a Microsoft Excel pivot table.