Issue: 2011 - January/February

Rod Paddock editorial Jan/Feb 2011

Hello, my name is Sahil, and I am a worsening SharePointoholic. SharePoint is built on ASP.NET 2.0 - pretty much like human beings are made up of carbon and water. There is a lot in SharePoint that isn’t in ASP.NET. Not only is SharePoint a complex ASP.NET 2.0 application, it also has numerous concepts for things such as profiles, role providers, authorization etc., that are different from ASP.NET.

Applications can be single threaded or multithreaded. A single-threaded application is one in which the processor executes threads in a sequence, i.e., a thread would be scheduled by the operating system only if the execution of the currently running thread is complete. This approach doesn’t provide much system throughput (a measure of the amount of work done in unit time).

Software developers are good at writing applications. Testers are good at testing applications. In the software development world where separation of concerns is a never-ending quest, it seems logical to apply the rule to the software development cycle. “Let the developers code; QA can be responsible for making sure it works.” It provides an object-oriented management approach where each team is responsible only for what they are best at, and the two teams interface thro...ugh one simple property, each: the result of their logic and expertise. The system is of logical design. It appears to be a logical pattern. Or so it seems. See More

ListBoxes suck. Except that statement is not true anymore. Not in WPF and Silverlight anyway, where ListBoxes have evolved from simplistic controls to true workhorse objects. ListBoxes have been around since the beginning of Windows (and other GUIs) and have served a pervasive yet simple purpose, which can be summed up as “show me a list of labels in a list with a scroll bar.” A premise that has its uses but is not sophisticated enough for advanced data presentation, ...which is why developers often use special controls such as “data grids” or “list views” among others. In WPF and Silverlight, however, ListBoxes are so flexible and powerful that they are the first choice for just about anything. In fact, WPF originally shipped without a data grid control since ListBoxes all but eliminated that need. Developer perception, however, was different and the power of the ListBoxes went largely unnoticed. That is reason enough for me to write an article that displays the ease, flexibility, and power of ListBoxes. See More

LightSwitch is a new development tool and extensible application framework for building data-centric business applications. LightSwitch simplifies the development process because it lets you concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of the remaining work for you. With LightSwitch, an application can be designed, built, tested, and in your user’s hands quickly. LightSwitch is perfect for small business or departmental productivity applications that need to get done fast.

I know what you’re thinking: an article in CODE Magazine about Excel and PowerPivot? Yes, that’s correct; this installment of the “Baker’s Dozen” covers an important new tool to come out of Redmond: Microsoft PowerPivot. In a nutshell, PowerPivot provides some of the business intelligence capabilities that developers are accustomed to seeing in OLAP tools like Microsoft Analysis Services. So why should you and I care? Because these “end-user” tools still require some pro...gramming and configuration. So in this article, I’ll cover the installation of PowerPivot, a brief example of how to use it in Excel - and of course, since this IS CODE Magazine, I’ll show some DAX formula expressions to get the most out of PowerPivot. See More

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about Windows Phone 7. What you may not know is that there are two ways of developing applications and games for this device. Silverlight and XNA are your two choices and in this article, I cover the Games and XNA side of the house.

Jan/Feb 2011 Doc Detective

While the development community has accepted the inevitable future of Line-of-Business RIAs and indispensable role of Silverlight in their creation, many of them have started looking for ways to use Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services in Silverlight applications. It is logical: Reporting Services is reasonably capable and the most-used reporting engine on the market. Millions of developers are Reporting Services professionals and of course they would like to continue... using the tool in their RIAs as well.See More