Issue: 2010 - July/August

WPF excels at creating great looking applications.

Excel services is yet another important pillar in Microsoft’s business intelligence offering. Business users really like Excel because it is easy to use and they can add complex formulas to Excel to express their logic.They can do so without involving the IT guy. The problem with this scenario, however, is that it becomes very difficult to share some Excel sheets with their coworkers. Usually users prefer to send workbooks via email, but sometimes the workbooks are too l...arge for email, sometimes they have backend data connections, and sometimes workbooks send via email cause version confusion hell.See More

Since its introduction in 2008, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 has been touted as a platform for rapid application development.We’ve always been hard core C# and ASP.NET snobs, but we were intrigued by the value that Dynamics CRM promised. We set out to build our next generation software product on that platform, and learned a lot about what’s real and what’s not so real. In this article, we will share the rollercoaster ride of our experience developing our software product ...on this new CRM “platform.”See More

A skilled database developer might find it difficult to accept that other tools can increase productivity. When Microsoft released SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS 2005), I did not think that any tool could possibly make me more productive than the C# and T-SQL code I was writing by hand. After some reconsideration (and subtle persuasion from peers), I discovered that SSIS 2005 contained many features that indeed reduced my development time - WITHOUT sacrificin...g flexibility. Microsoft added new functionality in SSIS 2008 to make a strong product even better. In this article, I’ll present 13 different examples that demonstrate the power of Integration Services.See More

July/August2010 Post Mortem by Markus Egger

What is Git? Git is a content-addressable file system wrapped in a version control system.That may sound complicated, but code snippets sometimes speak louder than words:

Writing software is hard, particularly when the schedules keep programmers “nose to the grindstone”; every so often, it’s important to take a breather and look around the world and discover what we can find-ironically, what we find can often help us write software better.Philosophy doesn’t just question the imponderables about the universe; sometimes it shows us the limitations of our own, programming-trained mind, and leaves us to question the approaches we take in buil...ding software for the rest of the human race.See More