Search Results

Search found 675 results on 27 pages for 'iwork keynote'.

Page 7/27 | < Previous Page | 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14  | Next Page >

• The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials

  - by Ross

  The Apple iPad is the latest new toy, and we’ve put together a comprehensive list of every tip, trick, and tutorial that we could find to help you get the most out of it—and we’re even giving one away to one lucky reader. So read on! Note: We’ll be keeping this page updated as we find more great articles, so you should bookmark this page for future reference. Want Your Own iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away! All you have to do to enter is become a fan of our Facebook page, and we’ll pick a random fan to win the prize. Win an iPad on the How-To Geek Facebook Fan Page Disable the “clicking sound” on the iPad Keyboard Does the clicking sound when you tap the iPad keyboard bother you? Thankfully it’s easy to disable with a couple of taps. How to disable the “clicking sound” on your iPad’s keyboard Enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad By default, Safari doesn’t display the Bookmarks Bar. This tip shows you how to change that. How to enable and add bookmarks to the Safari Bookmarks Bar on your iPad Clear the Cache, History and Cookies in Safari for the iPad You’re probably used to clearing this kind of data right from within the browser. Not so with Safari on the iPad – but here’s how you can. How to clear the cache, history and cookies in Safari for iPad How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock The iPad has four icons in its ‘dock’. Did you know it can hold 6? How to add more Apps to your iPad Dock Convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks ePub is the format that iBooks are in. So for those of you with large eBook collections in PDF, here’s how you convert them to read in iBooks. How to convert PDF files to ePub files to read on your iPad with iBooks How to force your iPad to restart Has an app caused your iPad to freeze up, and you can’t escape? This tip shows you how to force your iPad to restart. How to force your iPad to restart How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC Exporting Keynote presentations from your iPad to your Mac or PC isn’t as straight forward as you might have expected. This tutorial shows you how. How to export Keynote for iPad presentations to your Mac or PC How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad Having trouble getting your presentations onto your iPad? How to import presentations to Keynote on your iPad How to import documents to Pages on your iPad This guide shows you how to transfer documents (MS Word or Pages) from your Mac/PC to your iPad. How to import documents to Pages on your iPad How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF Want to spice up that doc with a picture you just took? This tutorial will show you how – and how to export that document as a PDF. How to insert photos in a Pages document using iPad and share it as a PDF How to lock your iPad If you have kids or co-workers/friends who think it’s funny to mess with your iPad – lock it. How to lock your iPad How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad Does everyone need to know you just sent that email from your iPad? Probably not. This guide shows you how to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature and replace it with your own (or none). How to remove the “Sent from my iPad” signature from outgoing email on your iPad How To Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync This tutorial will show you a workaround on how to sync multiple calendars on your iPad using Google Sync. How to Sync Multiple Calendars to the iPad With Google Sync How to determine the MAC address of your iPad If your network restricts connections via MAC address – this guide will show you how to determine what yours is. How to determine the MAC address of your iPad How to take a screenshot of your iPad Do you need to take a screenshot of your iPad? This quick tip shows you how to do just that. How to take a screenshot of your iPad How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad Anyone who had an iPod Touch or iPhone before they had an iPad won’t need this tutorial. But if you’re new to the experience, this one will help. How to delete apps from your iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad How to determine the iPad ECID on Windows and Mac iPadintosh shows us how to determine the iPad’s ECID code – something you’ll want to have come Jailbreak time. How to grab the iPad ECID in Windows or OS X iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials Enggadget has you covered with reviews of the first slew of iPad specific Twitter and other social networking apps. iPad Apps: Twitter and social networking essentials What does your website look like on an iPad? iPad Peek is a web based tool that allows you to enter any given URL, and it will display that page the same way Safari on the iPad does. Great for web site owners who don’t have access to an iPad. iPadPeek Stream Music and Videos to your iPad Gizmodo reviews the iPad app StreamToMe, which allows you to stream media from your Mac to your iPad across your local network. Their feelings in a nutshell – worth the $3, but not perfect. Review: StreamToMe for the iPad Apple iPad : Change links in Google Reader to point to full HTML webpage How to change links in Safari for iPad so that Google Reader points to a full HTML webpage How to connect an iPad to your existing wireless keyboard This video will show you how to connect your iPad to a wireless keyboard if you’re having any problems – and from the sound of things, quite a few folks are. via TUAW How to get started with the iPad Mashable has a very entry-level guide that will help you set up your iPad for the first time. Mashable’s Guide to Setting up the iPad Essential iPad Apps Downloadsquad gives mini-reviews to 8 iPad apps that you should install as soon as you get your iPad. iPad App Buyers Guide: Essential Apps you should get on day one Videos: The Official iPad Guided Tours From none other than Apple! Great getting started videos for all the included iPad apps. The Official iPad Guided Tours The Official iPad Manual When you buy an iPad, you don’t get a manual. But that’s not to say there isn’t one. Apple provides a 150 guide for your iPad in PDF format. The Official iPad Manual (pdf) How to print from your iPad Sure, it’s actually just an App (PrintCentral – $9.99 USD), but as of right now, it’s the only way. PrintCentral How to make your own iPad Wallpaper A perfectly detailed tutorial on how to make your own wallpaper for your iPad. The author also provides a really nice sample wallpaper, published under the Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. How to make your own iPad Wallpaper Got any more tips? Share them in the comments, and we’ll update the post with the links, or just the tip itself. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Want an iPad? How-To Geek is Giving One Away!Why Wait? Amazing New Add-on Turns Your iPhone into an iPad! [Comic]Clear the Auto-Complete Email Address Cache in OutlookAsk the Readers: Share Your Tips for Defeating Viruses and MalwareStupid Geek Tricks: Tile or Cascade Multiple Windows in Windows 7 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Are You Blocked On Gtalk? Find out Discover Latest Android Apps On AppBrain The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos

  Read the article

• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack.Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while.Self-Service BISelf-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI.This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me:PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.)Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.)One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.)Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.)Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.)This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users.It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations.Collaborative BII have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time.Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people."The Microsoft BI Stack in GeneralA question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years.Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?"Expo HallI had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here.Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions.Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind!Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

  Read the article

• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

  On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (well ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• SOA &amp; E2.0 Partner Community Forum XIII registration is open

  - by Jürgen Kress

  INVITATION TO THE ORACLE SOA AND E2.0 PARTNER COMMUNITY FORUM Do you want to learn about how to sell the value of Fusion Middleware by combining SOA and E2.0 Solutions? We would like to invite you to become updated and trained at our SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum March on 15th and 16th 2011 in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Keynote: Andrew Sutherland and Andrew Gilboy The Oracle SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum is a wonderful opportunity to: learn how to sell the value of Fusion Middleware bij combining SOA and E2.0 solutions meet with Oracle SOA and E2.0 Product management exchange knowledge learn from successful SOA, BPM, WebCenter and UCM implementations understand Oracle's Fusion Applications Strategy network within the Oracle SOA Partner Community and the Oracle E2.0 Partner Community During this highly informative event you can learn about partner success stories, participate in an array of break out sessions, exchange information with other partners and enjoy a vibrant panel discussion. Additionally to the SOA and E2.0 Partner Community Forum, you can participate in technical hands on workshops on March 17th and 18th. The goal of these workshops is to prepare you for customer implementations. Places are limited, so don't delay and register now by clicking here. Registration takes a few minutes and is free of charge, except in case of cancellation or no show (cancellation fee € 150). For more information, please visit our website. Best regards Jürgen Kress & Hans Blaas SOA & E2.0 Partner Adoption EMEA Agenda March 15th 2011 Welcome & Introduction Keynote Oracle Middleware Strategy and information on Application Grid and Exalogic Andrew Sutherland, SVP Middleware Sales EMEA, Oracle Keynote Managing Online Customer, Partner and Employee Engagement with Oracle E2.0 Solutions Andrew Gilboy, VP E2.0 Sales EMEA, Oracle Partner SOA/BPM Reference Case Partner WebCenter/UCM Reference Case SOA Suite PS3 David Shaffer, VP Product Management, Oracle Why Specialization is important for Partners Nick Kritikos, Hans Blaas & Jürgen Kress, Alliances & Channels, Oracle   Agenda March 16th 2011 Welcome & Introduction Day II Breakout round 1 - SOA Suite 11g PS3 & OSB - Importance of ADF & JDeveloper - SOA Security IDM - WebCenter PS3, Whats new - E2.0 Sales Plays Breakout round 2 - WebCenter PS3, Whats new - Application Management Enterprise manager and Amberpoint - ADF/WebCenter 11g integration with BPM Suite 11g - Importance of ADF & JDeveloper - JCAPS & OC4J migration opportunities for service business Breakout round 3 - BPM 11g: Whats new - Universal Content management 11g - SOA Security Management - E2.0 Surrounding Products: ATG, Documaker, Primavera - Middleware Industry Value Propositions & Sales Play Fusion Application SOA & E2.0 Summary & Closing For registration and additional information, please visit our website. For more information on SOA Specialization and the SOA Partner Community please feel free to register at www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Website Technorati Tags: SOA Community,SOA,SOA Partner Community Forum,SOA Community Forum,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Silverlight Firestarter Wrap Up and WCF RIA Services Talk Sample Code

  - by dwahlin

  I had a great time attending and speaking at the Silverlight Firestarter event up in Redmond on December 2, 2010. In addition to getting a chance to hang out with a lot of cool people from Microsoft such as Scott Guthrie, John Papa, Tim Heuer, Brian Goldfarb, John Allwright, David Pugmire, Jesse Liberty, Jeff Handley, Yavor Georgiev, Jossef Goldberg, Mike Cook and many others, I also had a chance to chat with a lot of people attending the event and hear about what projects they’re working on which was awesome. If you didn’t get a chance to look through all of the new features coming in Silverlight 5 check out John Papa’s post on the subject. While at the Silverlight Firestarter event I gave a presentation on WCF RIA Services and wanted to get the code posted since several people have asked when it’d be available. The talk can be viewed by clicking the image below. Code from the talk follows as well as additional links. I had a few people ask about the green bracelet on my left hand since it looks like something you’d get from a waterpark. It was used to get us access down a little hall that led backstage and allowed us to go backstage during the event. I thought it looked kind of dorky but it was required to get through security. Sample Code from My WCF RIA Services Talk (To login to the 2 apps use “user” and “P@ssw0rd”. Make sure to do a rebuild of the projects in Visual Studio before running them.) View All Silverlight Firestarter Talks and Scott Guthrie’s Keynote WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services Code Samples (including some SP1 samples) Improved binding support in EntitySet and EntityCollection with SP1 (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) Introducing an MVVM-Friendly DomainDataSource: The DomainCollectionView (Kyle McClellan’s Blog) I’ve had the chance to speak at a lot of conferences but never with as many cameras, streaming capabilities, people watching live and overall hype involved. Over 1000 people registered to attend the conference in person at the Microsoft campus and well over 15,000 to watch it through the live stream.  The event started for me on Tuesday afternoon with a flight up to Seattle from Phoenix. My flight was delayed 1 1/2 hours (I seem to be good at booking delayed flights) so I didn’t get up there until almost 8 PM. John Papa did a tech check at 9 PM that night and I was scheduled for 9:30 PM. We basically plugged in my laptop backstage (amazing number of servers, racks and audio devices back there) and made sure everything showed up properly on the projector and the machines recording the presentation. In addition to a dedicated show director, there were at least 5 tech people back stage and at least that many up in the booth running lights, audio, cameras, and other aspects of the show. I wish I would’ve taken a picture of the backstage setup since it was pretty massive – servers all over the place. I definitely gained a new appreciation for how much work goes into these types of events. Here’s what the room looked like right before my tech check– not real exciting at this point. That’s Yavor Georgiev (who spoke on WCF Services at the Firestarter) in the background. We had plenty of monitors to reference during the presentation. Two monitors for slides (right and left side) and a notes monitor. The 4th monitor showed the time and they’d type in notes to us as we talked (such as “You’re over time!” in my case since I went around 4 minutes over :-)). Wednesday morning I went back on campus at Microsoft and watched John Papa film a few Silverlight TV episodes with Dave Campbell and Ryan Plemons.   Next I had the chance to watch the dry run of the keynote with Scott Guthrie and John Papa. We were all blown away by the demos shown since they were even better than expected. Starting at 1 PM on Wednesday I went over to Building 35 and listened to Yavor Georgiev (WCF Services), Jaime Rodriguez (Windows Phone 7), Jesse Liberty (Data Binding) and Jossef Goldberg and Mike Cook (Silverlight Performance) give their different talks and we all shared feedback with each other which was a lot of fun. Jeff Handley from the RIA Services team came afterwards and listened to me give a dry run of my WCF RIA Services talk. He had some great feedback that I really appreciated getting. That night I hung out with John Papa and Ward Bell and listened to John walk through his keynote demos. I also got a sneak peak of the gift given to Dave Campbell for all his work with Silverlight Cream over the years. It’s a poster signed by all of the key people involved with Silverlight: Thursday morning I got up fairly early to get to the event center by 8 AM for speaker pictures. It was nice and quiet at that point although outside the room there was a huge line of people waiting to get in.     At around 8:30 AM everyone was let in and the main room was filled quickly. Two other overflow rooms in the Microsoft conference center (Building 33) were also filled to capacity. At around 9 AM Scott Guthrie kicked off the event and all the excitement started! From there it was all a blur but it was definitely a lot of fun. All of the sessions for the Silverlight Firestarter were recorded and can be watched here (including the keynote). Corey Schuman, John Papa and I also released 11 lab exercises and associated videos to help people get started with Silverlight. Definitely check them out if you’re interested in learning more! Level 100: Getting Started Lab 01 - WinForms and Silverlight Lab 02 - ASP.NET and Silverlight Lab 03 - XAML and Controls Lab 04 - Data Binding Level 200: Ready for More Lab 05 - Migrating Apps to Out-of-Browser Lab 06 - Great UX with Blend Lab 07 - Web Services and Silverlight Lab 08 - Using WCF RIA Services Level 300: Take me Further Lab 09 - Deep Dive into Out-of-Browser Lab 10 - Silverlight Patterns: Using MVVM Lab 11 - Silverlight and Windows Phone 7

  Read the article

• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 1 – The birth of the #unicorn…

  - by Chris George

  Still riding the high from the tutorial day, I arrived at the conference venue eager to get cracking with the days talks. The opening Keynote was “Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile” presented by Scott Ambler. The general ideas behind the methodology such as not re-inventing the wheel, and being goal driven, not prescriptive in how you work certainly struck chords with how we are trying to work in my team. Scott made some interesting observations about how scrum is quite prescriptive and is this really agile? I agreed with quite a few of his points on how what works for one team may not work for another. How a team works should be driven by context and reflection, not process and prescription. However was somewhat dubious about some of the statistics he rolled out towards the end. However, out of this keynote was born something that was to transcend this one presentation. During the talk, Scott mentioned on more than one occasion “In the real world”, and at one point made reference to people living in the land of unicorns and rainbows. The challenge was then laid down on twitter for all speakers to include a unicorn in their presentations… and for the most part this happened! It became an identity for this years conference, and I’m sure something that any attendee will always associate with Agile Testing Days 2012! Following this keynote, I attended “Going agile with Automated GUI Testing – Some personal insights” by Jan Zdunek from codecentric on the vendor track. My speciality is test automation, and in particular GUI testing, so this drew me to this talk more than the others. Thankfully, it was made clear from the very start that this was not peddling any particular product (even though it was on the vendor track), and Jan faithfully stuck to that. Most of the content was not new to me, but it was really comforting to hear someone else with very similar experiences to my own. In particular, things like how GUI testing is hard and is not a silver bullet; how record & replay is NOT a good thing to do (which drew a somewhat inflammatory tweet from an automation company when I tweeted that!). Something that I have started hearing around the place, and has certainly been murmuring at work is to push more of the automation coding onto the developers. After all they are the coding experts. I agree with this to a degree, but I personally enjoy coding and find it very rewarding doing so, therefore I’d be reluctant to give it up. I think there are some better alternatives such as pairing with a developer. Lastly, Jan mentioned, almost in passing, that we should consider virtualisation for gui testing for covering configuration combinations. On my project we’ve been running our win32/.NET GUI tests in cloud virtualisation for a couple of years now… I really should write about that! After lunch the second keynote of the day was by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory,”Myths about Agile Testing, De-Bunked”. It started off well… with the two ladies donning Medusa style head bands whilst they disbanding several myths about agile testing! I got the impression that it was perhaps not as slick as they would have liked, but then Janet was suffering with a very sore throat so kept losing her voice. Nevertheless, the presentation was captivating, and they debunked several myths such as : “Testing is dead”, “Testers must write code”, “Agile teams always deliver faster”. I didn’t take many notes for this because it was being recorded, but unfortunately the recordings have not been posted yet so I’ll write more about this when they are. The TestLab was held during a somewhat free for all time during most of the afternoon. It looked intriguing and proved to be one of the surprising experiences of the conference for me. Run by James Lyndsay and Bart Knaack, it consisted of a number of ‘stations’ that offered different testing problems. I opted for testing a mathematical drawing app call Geogebra, the task being to pair up and exploratory test it. After an allotted time, we discussed issues we’d found and decided if we wanted to continue ‘playing’ to which we all agreed! It was fun! The last track talk of the day was “Developers Exploratory Testing – Raising the bar” by Sigge Birgisson. One of the teams at Red Gate have tried Dev or Team exploratory testing a couple of times, and I was really interested to go to the presentation that prompted that. I was not disappointed! Sigge gave a first class presentation, and not only explained what DET was all about, but also how to go about implementing it. Little tips like calling it a ‘workshop’ rather than ‘testing’ I can really see working! Monday evening saw the presentation of the award for the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person go to a much deserved Lisa Crispin. The evening was great, with acrobatics, magic and music. My Takeaway Triple from Day 1:  Some of the cool stuff that was suggested in the GUI Testing talk, we are already doing. I should write about that! Testing is not dead! Perhaps testing will become more of a skill than a specific role, but it is certainly not dead. Team/Developer exploratory testing… seems like a no-brainer assuming you have a team who is willing.  Day 2 – Coming soon…

  Read the article

• Japan Welcomes Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Anand Akela

  Following Oracle’s grand unveiling of Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c at Oracle OpenWorld 2011 in San Francisco, Oracle Japan just completed their launch for the product. Leng Tan, Oracle VP of Products, delivered the keynote with collaboration from a number of key partners in the region. From left to right: Leng Tan, VP of Products, Oracle; Shinyashiki-san, Assistant General Manager, NEC; Fuketa-san, General Manager, HITACHI; Fujii-san, General Manager, Fujitsu; Misawa-san, VP of Alliances, Oracle Japan NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu have been among Oracle’s most active partners in the Japan region. They have received key awards from Oracle Japan for their efforts. NEC received the partner of the year award for 2010 and 2011. Hitachi received the partner of the year award for Oracle Enterprise Manager in 2011. Fujitsu received awards in the areas of Database and Oracle Exadata in 2011. All three partners were active participants in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c beta program. According to Hirai-san, the technical lead at the event, there were over 200 attendees. “The event was so well-attended; there was no room to stand.” Said Hirai-san. Hirai-san demonstrating Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c at the Oracle Japan launch Here’s the highlight of the presentations made by the Oracle partners during this launch. NEC has developed an Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for iStorage (NEC SAN Storage product). Additionally, NEC’s WebSAM Invariant Analyzer management tool is now capable of integrating with Oracle Enterprise Manager HITACHI demonstrated monitoring capabilities for Oracle Exadata through Oracle Enterprise Manager in their JP1 system management tool Fujitsu’s Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g adapter for their SystemWalker tool has now been enhanced to work with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Following a very successful launch in Japan, Oracle’s Total Cloud Control road show and additional Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c launches continue in the EMEA and Asia Pacific regions. This week Sushil Kumar, VP of Product Strategy and Business Development is scheduled to deliver the keynotes at several cities in India. Also this week, Richard Sarwal, SVP of Products, is scheduled to deliver a keynote at the DOAG conference in Nuremburg, Germany. Richard is also delivering the Oracle Enterprise Manger 12c launch event keynote in Paris on November 18th. Check out our event schedule for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c events across the globe! For more information, please go to Oracle Enterprise Manager  web page or  follow us at :  Twitter   Facebook YouTube Linkedin

  Read the article

• Watch the Silverlight 4 Launch event and LIVE QA with ScottGu and others

  Next week on 13-April at 8:00 AM PST Scott Guthrie will deliver a keynote address for the DevConnections conference being held in Las Vegas, NV. Scott will provide updates on the progress made in Silverlight 4 and will provide the details of availability of the developer tools, runtime and other news. Mark your calendars and return to the Silverlight community site to tune into the LIVE event. After the keynote, Channel 9 will be hosting interviews with Scott and other key members of the Silverlight...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• GlassFish Back from Devoxx 2011 Mature Java EE 6 and EE 7 well on its way

  - by alexismp

  I'm back from my 8th (!) Devoxx conference (I don't think I've missed one since 2004) and this conference keeps delivering on the promise of a Java developer paradise week. GlassFish was covered in many different ways and I was not involved in a good number of them which can only be a good sign! Several folks asked me when my Java EE 6 session with Antonio Goncalves was scheduled (we've been covering this for the past two years in University sessions, hands-on labs and regular sessions). It turns out we didn't team up this year (Antonio was crazy busy preparing for Devoxx France) and I had a regular GlassFish session. Instead, this year, Bert Ertman and Paul Bakker covered the 3-hour Java EE 6 University session ("Duke’s Duct Tape Adventures") on the very first day (using GlassFish) with great success it seems. The Java EE 6 lab was also a hit with a full room of folks covering a lot of technical ground in 2.5 hours (with GlassFish of course). GlassFish was also mentioned during Cameron Purdy's keynote (pretty natural even if that surprised a number of folks that had not been closely following GlassFish) but also in Stephan Janssen's Keynote as the engine powering Parleys.com. In fact Stephan was a speaker in the GlassFish session describing how they went from a single-instance Tomcat setup to a clustered GlassFish + MQ environment. Also in the session was Johan Vos (of Mollom fame, along other things). Both of these customer testimonials were made possible because GlassFish has been delivering full Java EE 6 implementations for almost two years now which is plenty of time to see serious production deployments on it. The Java EE Gathering (BOF) was very well attended and very lively with many spec leads participating and discussing progress and also pain points with folks in the room. Thanks to all those attending this session, a good number of RFE's, and priority points came out of this. While this wasn't a GlassFish session by any means, it's great to have the current RESTful Admin and upcoming Java EE 7 planned features be a satisfactory answer to some of the requests from the attendance. Last but certainly not least, the GlassFish team is busy with Java EE 7 and version 4 of the product. This was discussed and shown during the Java EE keynote and in greater details in Jerome Dochez' session. If any indication, the tweets on his demo (virtualization, provisioning, etc...) were very encouraging. Java EE 6 adoption is doing great and GlassFish, being a production-quality reference implementation, is one of the first to benefit from this. And with GlassFish 4.0, we're looking at increasing the product and community adoption by offering a pragmatic technical solution to Java EE PaaS deployments. Stay tuned ! (the impatient in you is encouraged to grab a 4.0 build and provide feedback).

  Read the article

• T-SQL Tuesday : Reflections on the PASS Summit and our community

  - by AaronBertrand

  Last week I attended the PASS Summit in Seattle. I blogged from both keynotes ( Keynote #1 and Keynote #2 ), as well as the WIT Luncheon - which SQL Sentry sponsored. I had a fantastic time at the conference, even though these days I attend far fewer sessions that I used to. As a company, we were overwhelmed by the positive energy in the Expo Hall. I really liked the notebook idea, where board members were assigned notebooks to carry around and take ideas from attendees. I took full advantage when...(read more)

  Read the article

• Oracle Open World – Larry Ellison

  - by Tim Koekkoek

  On 30th September, Oracle Open World 2012 started. Oracle Open World is the world’s largest and most important annual conference for Oracle users, technologists, partners and customers. The conference consists of various trainings, exhibitions, hands-on workshops, networking and of course, keynotes from big names across the IT industry. The keynote of Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, is always one of the highlights of Oracle Open World. Interested in what he said this year? Please see below some highlights of his keynote: For more information about Oracle Open World, check http://www.oracle.com/openworld/index.html!

  Read the article

• ADF Mobile @ Oracle Open World 2012 - A Look Back...

  - by Joe Huang

  Hi, everyone: It's been a little over two weeks since the end of Oracle Open World 2012, and hope everyone has recovered sufficiently.  We have seen a tremendous amount of coverage on Oracle ADF Mobile during this Oracle Open World.  For starters, ADF Mobile demo booth was positioned in the Oracle Red Lounge in Moscone North, where all new and innovative technologies are being demonstrated.  The booth is liternally out front and the first booth in the area, and we had a lot of interested attendees talking to us.  It feels like ADF Mobile has finally arrived on the big stage. There are numerous sessions and hands on labs that covers ADF Mobile.  Details can be found in Oracle Open World page.   The Oracle Cloud: Oracle's Cloud Platofrm and Application Strategy by Thomas Kurian (Keynote) Near the beginning of the keynote, showing a great analytics application built using ADF Mobile  Oracle Fusion Middleware Strategies Driving Business Innovation by Hasan Rizvi (Keynote) The Future of Development for Oracle Fusion—From Desktop to Mobile to Cloud by Chris Tonas (General Session) Co-presented with Accenture, an ADF Mobile Beta Partner Extend Oracle Fusion Apps to Tablets/Smartphones with Oracle Mobile Technology (General Session) Extend Oracle Applications to Mobile Devices with Oracle’s Mobile Technologies (General Session) Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud (General Session) Mobile-Enable Oracle Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Applications with Oracle ADF (Conference Session) Co-presented with Infosys, an ADF Mobile Beta Partner Develop On-Device iPhone and iPad Apps Without Writing Any Objective-C Code (Oracle Develop Session) Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite (Conference Session) Developing Applications for Mobile iOS and Android Devices with Oracle ADF Mobile (Hands on Lab) This lab was repeated 8 (!) times Build Mobile Applications for Oracle E-business Suite (Hands on Lab) It was an extremely busy Open World for the team, and we were in the middle of trying to release ADF Mobile!   By far, the most memorable event during Open World was the ADF Meett Up at the OTN Lounge, where beers were flowing (for a little while) and familiar names are finally matched with faces.  We also appreciate the opportunity to interview the attendees from New Caledonia - sorry we probably surprised you with the video record, and many thanks for coming through for us. I also want to thank my fellow ADF Mobile and Fusion Middleware team members - from product managers, engineers, and product marketing, everyone worked extremely hard to make this Open World a great success for ADF Mobile. I really enjoyed meeting everyone at Oracle Open World, at the booth, sessions, etc.   Now it's on to release ADF Mobile - for real! Thanks, Joe Huang PS: If this thread shows up on your RSS feed, please keep watching...

  Read the article

• C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism

  - by Daniel Moth

  At AMD's Fusion conference Herb Sutter announced in his keynote session a technology that our team has been working on that we call C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism (C++ AMP) and during the keynote I showed a brief demo of an app built with our technology. After the keynote, I go deeper into the technology in my breakout session. If you read both those abstracts, you'll get some information about what C++ AMP is, without being too explicit since we published the abstracts before the technology was announced. You can find the official online announcement at Soma's blog post. Here, I just wanted to capture the key points about C++ AMP that can serve as an introduction and an FAQ. So, in no particular order… C++ AMP lowers the barrier to entry for heterogeneous hardware programmability and brings performance to the mainstream, without sacrificing developer productivity or solution portability. is designed not only to help you address today's massively parallel hardware (i.e. GPUs and APUs), but it also future proofs your code investments with a forward looking design. is part of Visual C++. You don't need to use a different compiler or learn different syntax. is modern C++. Not C or some other derivative. is integrated and supported fully in Visual Studio vNext. Editing, building, debugging, profiling and all the other goodness of Visual Studio work well with C++ AMP. provides an STL-like library as part of the existing concurrency namespace and delivered in the new amp.h header file. makes it extremely easy to work with large multi-dimensional data on heterogeneous hardware; in a manner that exposes parallelization. introduces only one core C++ language extension. builds on DirectX (and DirectCompute in particular) which offers a great hardware abstraction layer that is ubiquitous and reliable. The architecture is such, that this point can be thought of as an implementation detail that does not surface to the API layer. Stay tuned on my blog for more over the coming months where I will switch from just talking about C++ AMP to showing you how to use the API with code examples… Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

  Read the article

• T-SQL Tuesday : Reflections on the PASS Summit and our community

  - by AaronBertrand

  Last week I attended the PASS Summit in Seattle. I blogged from both keynotes ( Keynote #1 and Keynote #2 ), as well as the WIT Luncheon - which SQL Sentry sponsored. I had a fantastic time at the conference, even though these days I attend far fewer sessions that I used to. As a company, we were overwhelmed by the positive energy in the Expo Hall. I really liked the notebook idea, where board members were assigned notebooks to carry around and take ideas from attendees. I took full advantage when...(read more)

  Read the article

• TechEd North America 2012–Day 2 #msTechEd #teched

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  This is the second day at TechEd North America 2012 and yesterday I had many conversations about PowerPivot and SSAS Tabular. In the evening the book signing at O’Reilley booth has been a big success! I’m writing this post from the speaker’s room. It’s not crowded this morning because the keynote is going on and there are no people also in the hall, everyone is in the keynote room. Today will be a very busy day: I’ll be staffing at Technical Learning Center from 12:30pm to 3:30pm so this is a first chance for joining the conversation about Tabular and DAX. But there is another choice this evening at Community Night starting at 6:30pm until 9:00pm. Join us at this Ask the Expert event! And, well, don’t miss the Many-to-Many Relationships in BISM Tabular from Alberto this afternoon at 5:00 pm in room S330E. Look at my yesterday’s post if you want to look at our full schedule for the week. Enjoy TechEd!

  Read the article

• Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Summary

  - by JuergenKress

  Did you miss the Oracle OpenWorld 2013 – here are the key information from Thomas Kurian’s middleware presentation, our partners presentations and the first impressions on SOA Suite 12c. Thanks to all partners for the excellent presentations and the product management team for the superb demo ground! Oracle OpenWorld General Session 2013: Middleware Watch Full-Length Keynote JavaOne keynote At our WebLogic Community Workspace (WebLogic Community membership required): you can download the presentation slides from Thomas Kurian’s presentation FMWGeneralSessionTKv22.pptx. Download all session slides here. WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea ( OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Technorati Tags: OOW,ORacle OpenWorld,WebLogic 12c training,education,WebLogic,WebLogic Community,Oracle,OPN,Jürgen Kress

  Read the article

• Total Cloud Control for Systems - Webcast on April 12, 2012 (18:00 CET/5pm UK)

  - by Javier Puerta

  Total Cloud Control Keeps Getting BetterJoin Oracle Vice President of Systems Management Steve Wilson and a panel of Oracle executives to find out how your enterprise cloud can achieve 10x improved performance and 12x operational agility. Only Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c allows you to: Accelerate mission-critical cloud deployment Unleash the power of Solaris 11, the first cloud OS Simplify Oracle engineered systems management You’ll also get a chance to have your questions answered by Oracle product experts and dive deeper into the technology by viewing our demos that trace the steps companies like yours take as they transition to a private cloud environment. Register today for this interactive keynote and panel discussion. Agenda 18:00 a.m. CET (5pm UK) Keynote: Total Cloud Control for Systems 18:45 a.m. CET (5:45 pm UK) Panel Discussion with Oracle Hardware, Software, and Support Executives 19:15 a.m. CET (6:15 UK) Demo Series: A Step-by-Step Journey to Enterprise Clouds

  Read the article

• Microsoft BUILD 2013&ndash;Day 1 Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/tmurphy/archive/2013/06/27/microsoft-build-2013ndashday-1-summary.aspx I’m happy to be at BUILD this week, mainly because my flights finally got me here late on Tuesday.  My biggest complaints so far are the flights and the hotel.  It seems that almost every flight into San Francisco were delayed multiple hours.  The Sequester so lovingly forced on America by congress means that the airport was short controllers.   That, along with poor weather and airport construction meant most people were 2-3 hours late arriving.  Add on top of that the fact that the hotel that I picked durring registration is absolutely horrid.  It looks like something out of a ghost hunters show and smells like it too.  I think if Microsoft is going to select a hotel they need to make sure that it is adequate. Rant over! So what happened the first day?  Steve Balmer started off the keynote along with Julie Larson-Green and a cast of others.  We finally found out that there were around six thousand people attending BUILD and that the focus this year would be Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Azure.  For the rest of the keynote I am going to have a separate post. You can’t have a Microsoft conference without some fun.  This year they have a hunt for pins that represent different gestures in Windows 8.  I got all of mine.  Now they just need to pull my name. The sessions I attended were really good. They covered live tiles, what’s new in XAML and building Windows Phone UIs presented by Kraig Brockschmidt, Tim Heuer and Shawn Oster respectively.  These will also be covered in separate posts. The exhibit area was interesting, but somewhat disappointing.  TechEd 2012 I think was better organized and better staffed by the vendors.  It also seemed that the Microsoft teams’ booths were also in need of some organization and staffing. Overall it was a really fun day capped off by all six thousand attendees standing in like to get their Acer 8” tables and Surface Pros.  What a day!  Stay tuned for follow up posts. del.icio.us Tags: BUILD 2013,Windows 8.1,Winodws Phone,XAML,Keynote

  Read the article

• eBay Simple Lister Beta Now Available

  Thats right, the beta of the eBay Simple Lister app is now available in the eBay garden. I am really excited about this application! This Silverlight 4 application was built using Sketchflow, Blend, and Visual Studio 2010. It was designed and developed by Cynergy Systems for eBay with help from several Microsoft folk including Raj Ramabadran, Will Tschumy, Joe Shirey, and John Papa. You likely saw it in the MIX10 keynote or in the Silverlight 4 Launch keynote at DevConnections last week. If you...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

  Read the article

• Rolling With the Punches

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  So I’ve been tweeting the last little while “Rolling with the punches” and I’ve had some people ask me what that meant. Whether you’re running a conference (like I am this week), or a project, or a birthday party for a 2 year old, you need to be ready to handle those things that are unexpected. Risk mitigation can only go so far and its at those times that you need to become resourceful. So let me tell you what the last few days have been like. Today is the first day of Prairie Dev Con Winnipeg, a conference that I run. On Friday I was informed that my keynote speaker had lost his voice, one of my speakers had a family emergency and had to back out, and I got a warning from another that he was travelling over the weekend and if there was a storm or something he may not be able to get back by Monday for his talk. A storm didn’t happen, but their car did break down and he was delayed. Finally, Saturday night I took my printing order to Staples. It was at 5 and they closed at 6, and I had a bunch of surveys to be printed and cut. The girl working said that she’d have it ready by the next day (Sunday). Her intent was to come in the next morning and finish the job. Unfortunately, she had to be hospitalized that night and never made it into work…and never informed anyone of the remaining work. They found out at 3pm when I came to pick it up and there was no way they’d be able to cut everything in time. So how did we roll with these punches? - Miguel, my keynote speaker, was a trooper and was able to do the keynote but asked that his session get moved from Monday to Tuesday. This is why I wait until the last day before printing out schedules, they can change up to the event and even later. - I was able to move some sessions around to accommodate my stranded speaker and fill the empty slot from the speaker that couldn’t make it. - Staples was able to get me half the cut surveys so I took those and my wife will pick up the rest today. I altered how we’d collect session surveys, and actually I think it’ll work better. So all of this is to say, plan but also plan for what you can’t plan for – there will be things that happen that blindside you, that you’re not sure how to handle or solve. Stop, take a deep breath, and don’t feel that you need to limit yourself to the boundaries that you initially set for yourself. Roll with the punch and learn from it so that you can avoid the blow next time. Now, back to the conference! D

  Read the article

• Agile Testing Days 2012 – Day 3 – Agile or agile?

  - by Chris George

  Another early start for my last Lean Coffee of the conference, and again it was not wasted. We had some really interesting discussions around how to determine what test automation is useful, if agile is not faster, why do it? and a rather existential discussion on whether unicorns exist! First keynote of the day was entitled “Fast Feedback Teams” by Ola Ellnestam. Again this relates nicely to the releasing faster talk on day 2, and something that we are looking at and some teams are actively trying. Introducing the notion of feedback, Ola describes a game he wrote for his eldest child. It was a simple game where every time he clicked a button, it displayed “You’ve Won!”. He then changed it to be a Win-Lose-Win-Lose pattern and watched the feedback from his son who then twigged the pattern and got his younger brother to play, alternating turns… genius! (must do that with my children). The idea behind this was that you need that feedback loop to learn and progress. If you are not getting the feedback you need to close that loop. An interesting point Ola made was to solve problems BEFORE writing software. It may be that you don’t have to write anything at all, perhaps it’s a communication/training issue? Perhaps the problem can be solved another way. Writing software, although it’s the business we are in, is expensive, and this should be taken into account. He again mentions frequent releases, and how they should be made as soon as stuff is ready to be released, don’t leave stuff on the shelf cause it’s not earning you anything, money or data. I totally agree with this and it’s something that we will be aiming for moving forwards. “Exceptions, Assumptions and Ambiguity: Finding the truth behind the story” by David Evans started off very promising by making references to ‘Grim up North’ referring to the north of England. Not sure it was appreciated by most of the audience, but it made me laugh! David explained how there are always risks associated with exceptions, giving the example of a one-way road near where he lives, with an exception sign giving rights to coaches to go the wrong way. Therefore you could merrily swing around the corner of the one way road straight into a coach! David showed the danger in making assumptions with lyrical quotes from Lola by The Kinks “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola” and with a picture of a toilet flush that needed instructions to operate the full and half flush. With this particular flush, you pulled the handle all the way down to half flush, and half way down to full flush! hmmm, a bit of a crappy user experience methinks! Then through a clever use of a passage from the Jabberwocky, David then went onto show how mis-translation/ambiguity is the can completely distort the original meaning of something, and this is a real enemy of software development. This was all helping to demonstrate that the term Story is often heavily overloaded in the Agile world, and should really be stripped back to what it is really for, stating a business problem, and offering a technical solution. Therefore a story could be worded as “In order to {make some improvement}, we will { do something}”. The first ‘in order to’ statement is stakeholder neutral, and states the problem through requesting an improvement to the software/process etc. The second part of the story is the verb, the doing bit. So to achieve the ‘improvement’ which is not currently true, we will do something to make this true in the future. My PM is very interested in this, and he’s observed some of the problems of overloading stories so I’m hoping between us we can use some of David’s suggestions to help clarify our stories better. The second keynote of the day (and our last) proved to be the most entertaining and exhausting of the conference for me. “The ongoing evolution of testing in agile development” by Scott Barber. I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing Scott before… OMG I would love to have even half of the energy he has! What struck me during this presentation was Scott’s explanation of how testing has become the role/job that it is (largely) today, and how this has led to the need for ‘methodologies’ to make dev and test work! The argument that we should be trying to converge the roles again is a very valid one, and one that a couple of the teams at work are actively doing with great results. Making developers as responsible for quality as testers is something that has been lost over the years, but something that we are now striving to achieve. The idea that we (testers) should be testing experts/specialists, not testing ‘union members’, supports this idea so the entire team works on all aspects of a feature/product, with the ‘specialists’ taking the lead and advising/coaching the others. This leads to better propagation of information around the team, a greater holistic understanding of the project and it allows the team to continue functioning if some of it’s members are off sick, for example. Feeling somewhat drained from Scott’s keynote (but at the same time excited that alot of the points he raised supported actions we are taking at work), I headed into my last presentation for Agile Testing Days 2012 before having to make my way to Tegel to catch the flight home. “Thinking and working agile in an unbending world” with Pete Walen was a talk I was not going to miss! Having spoken to Pete several times during the past few days, I was looking forward to hearing what he was going to say, and I was not disappointed. Pete started off by trying to separate the definitions of ‘Agile’ as in the methodology, and ‘agile’ as in the adjective by pronouncing them the ‘english’ and ‘american’ ways. So Agile pronounced (Ajyle) and agile pronounced (ajul). There was much confusion around what the hell he was talking about, although I thought it was quite clear. Agile – Software development methodology agile – Marked by ready ability to move with quick easy grace; Having a quick resourceful and adaptable character. Anyway, that aside (although it provided a few laughs during the presentation), the point was that many teams that claim to be ‘Agile’ but are not, in fact, ‘agile’ by nature. Implementing ‘Agile’ methodologies that are so prescriptive actually goes against the very nature of Agile development where a team should anticipate, adapt and explore. Pete made a valid point that very few companies intentionally put up roadblocks to impede work, so if work is being blocked/delayed, why? This is where being agile as a team pays off because the team can inspect what’s going on, explore options and adapt their processes. It is through experimentation (and that means trying and failing as well as trying and succeeding) that a team will improve and grow leading to focussing on what really needs to be done to achieve X. So, that was it, the last talk of our conference. I was gutted that we had to miss the closing keynote from Matt Heusser, as Matt was another person I had spoken too a few times during the conference, but the flight would not wait, and just as well we left when we did because the traffic was a nightmare! My Takeaway Triple from Day 3: Release often and release small – don’t leave stuff on the shelf Keep the meaning of the word ‘agile’ in mind when working in ‘Agile Look at testing as more of a skill than a role  

  Read the article

• Ajax, Lizard Brain Web Design, JSF, Struts, JavaScript, Mobile Web, Flash, jQuery, GWT, Harmony at I

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Web Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 30 sessions on how browser and rich web technologies such as AJAX, DHTML, Mashups, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and Rich UI technologies are making money and gaining market-share for some of the leading businesses in the world. The GIDS.Web track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 21 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Web at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 21 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Web offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Web is led by the leading Java EE and Ajax developer, speaker, and author Marty Hall. The best of India's Java and RIA programmers have learnt the subject from Marty's seminal books Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages (first and second editions), More Servlets and JavaServer Pages, and Core Web Programming (first and second editions) from Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems Press. Marty's keynote address is a comparison of approaches to building rich Internet applications with Ajax. Marty says Ajax development is difficult, and there are several fundamentally different strategies to building Ajaxified Web applications. The keynote address will survey the three most important of these approaches: using an Ajax-enabled JavaScript library such as jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, or Ext/JS; using a Web framework such as JSF 2.0 or Struts 2 that has integrated Ajax support; using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build "pure Java" Ajax applications. The talk will compare and contrast these three approaches, discussing the types of applications that fit best for each option. Over the course of the summit Marty will conduct several more sessions on "Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: A Comparison of the Most Popular JavaScript Libraries", "Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0", "Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0" and "Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library". The second keynote by the head of Adobe's Flash initiative in India, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, explores the state of art in web application development and identify trends that could transform the way we create and use web applications. The talk explains how the Adobe Flash Platform has fuelled this revolution with an integrated set of technologies for delivering the most compelling applications, content and video to the widest possible audience. The Director of Forum Nokia will explain how cloud computing coupled with mobile applications enable consumers to have access to powerful services and improved user experiences never before thought possible. IEEE's 2010 President-Elect Sorel Reisman's afternoon address steps to improve the IT profession in India. Featured talks at GID.Web also include: Web 2.0 Checklist - Deconstructing Modern Websites, Scott Davis Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: Comparison of Popular JavaScript Libraries, Marty Hall Lizard Brain Web Design, Scott Davis Effective Design Processes and Resources for Mobile Web Development, Arabella David NoSQL: The Shift to a Non-relational World, Nosh Petigara Open Source Web Debugging Tools, Matthew McCullough Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4.0, Stephen Forte Hadoop - Divide and Conquer, Matthew McCullough Adobe Flash Catalyst for Agile Interaction Design, Harish Sivaramakrishnan Using jQuery and AJAX to Build Front-ends for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, Pandurang Nayak First Steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part II: .WEB, Simone Brunozzi Building Rich Internet Applications with SL RIA Web Services, Pandurang Nayak Enriching Cloud Applications with Adobe Flash Platform, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan Payments for the Web.future, Khurram Khan and Praveen Alavilli Longevity of Scalable Systems, Nishad Kamat Transform yourself into a Mobile App Developer Using Web Run Time, Balagopal K S Developing Multi Screen Applications on Adobe Flash Platform, Hemanth Sharma Why Harmony and For Whom?, Himanshu Goyal IIS Hosting Solution for ASP.net and PHP Web Sites, Nahas Mohammed Building Pluggable Web applications using Django, Lakshman Prasad Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: Windows Azure Deep Dive, Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

  Read the article

• Status Code from FTPWebRequest GetResponse method

  - by nick

  This is slightly tricky. I am uploading files to FTP asynchronously. After uploading each file I am checking the status of the upload operation for that file. This can be done with StatusCode property of the FtpWebResponse object for that request. The code snippet is as give below. System.IO.FileStream fs = System.IO.File.Open(fileName, System.IO.FileMode.Open); while ((iWork = fs.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length)) > 0) requestStream.Write(buf, 0, iWork); requestStream.Close(); FtpWebResponse wrRet = ((FtpWebResponse)state.Request.GetResponse()); There are about 37 StatusCode values as per msdn. I am unaware as to which of these status code values will assure that the file is uploaded successfully. Some of them I used in my code to check for success are : wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.CommandOK wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.ClosingData wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.ClosingControl wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.ConnectionClosed wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.FileActionOK wrRet.StatusCode == FtpStatusCode.FileStatus But I am unaware of the rest. I need to be sure about these codes because based on the failure or success of the upload operation I have other dependant operations to be carried out. A wrong condition can affect the remaining code. Another thought that crossed my mind was to simply put the above code into a try..catch and not depend on these status codes. With this I would not be depending on the status codes and assuming that any failure will always be directed to the catch block. Kindly let me know if this is the right way. Thanks in advance.

  Read the article

• Microsoft Cloud Day - the ups and downs

  - by Charles Young

  The term ‘cloud’ can sometimes obscure the obvious.  Today’s Microsoft Cloud Day conference in London provided a good example.  Scott Guthrie was halfway through what was an excellent keynote when he lost network connectivity.  This proved very disruptive to his presentation which centred on a series of demonstrations of the Azure platform in action.  Great efforts were made to find a solution, but no quick fix presented itself.  The venue’s IT facilities were dreadful – no WiFi, poor 3G reception (forget 4G…this is the UK) and, unbelievably, no-one on hand from the venue staff to help with infrastructure issues.  Eventually, after an unscheduled break, a solution was found and Scott managed to complete his demonstrations.  Further connectivity issues occurred during the day. I can say that the cause was prosaic.  A member of the venue staff had interfered with a patch board and inadvertently disconnected Scott Guthrie’s machine from the network by pulling out a cable. I need to state the obvious here.  If your PC is disconnected from the network it can’t communicate with other systems.  This could include a machine under someone’s desk, a mail server located down the hall, a server in the local data centre, an Internet search engine or even, heaven forbid, a role running on Azure. Inadvertently disconnecting a PC from the network does not imply a fundamental problem with the cloud or any specific cloud platform.  Some of the tweeted comments I’ve seen today are analogous to suggesting that, if you accidently unplug your microwave from the mains, this suggests some fundamental flaw with the electricity supply to your house.   This is poor reasoning, to say the least. As far as the conference was concerned, the connectivity issue in the keynote, coupled with some later problems in a couple of presentations, served to exaggerate the perception of poor organisation.   Software problems encountered before the conference prevented the correct set-up of a smartphone app intended to convey agenda information to attendees.  Although some information was available via this app, the organisers decided to print out an agenda at the last moment.  Unfortunately, the agenda sheet did not convey enough information, and attendees were forced to approach conference staff through the day to clarify locations of the various presentations. Despite these problems, the overwhelming feedback from conference attendees was very positive.  There was a real sense of excitement in the morning keynote.  For many, this was their first sight of new Azure features delivered in the ‘spring’ release.  The most common reaction I heard was amazement and appreciation that Azure’s new IaaS features deliver built-in template support for several flavours of Linux from day one.  This coupled with open source SDKs and several presentations on Azure’s support for Java, node.js, PHP, MongoDB and Hadoop served to communicate that the Azure platform is maturing quickly.  The new virtual network capabilities also surprised many attendees, and the much improved portal experience went down very well. So, despite some very irritating and disruptive problems, the event served its purpose well, communicating the breadth and depth of the newly upgraded Azure platform.  I enjoyed the day very much.

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14  | Next Page >