Anith Gopal

I’ve no doubt it’s an important question to look at – and one that businesses in the UK need to address now if we are to ensure today’s students are skilled effectively.

Finally tonight after a brief break due to a date night and illness , I managed to get a workout in.

In the previous step we created a sandbox and a simple report. The design for the report was stored in the Customers.rdlc file. In this step we will play with Customers.rdlc to learn about the basic features available in the report design surface in visual studio

We’ve talked about RAID , and we’ve talked about the number of drives you need. Now, let’s talk about how to determine the right size drives for you. Getting the right size drives in your new server purchase can optimize the cost of the new server and give you better performance.

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is designed to allow open-ended extensibility.  It is easy to define a contract and load extensions which satisfy the contract.  This is accomplished with a collection import, which can look like this: [ImportMany] public IPlugin[] Plugins { get; set; } Extensions may need to be ordered or prioritized Often, the importer will need a way to sort or prioritize the imported extensions.  If the extensions are displayed in a menu, the importer may want to control what order they appear in.  Or there may be multiple extensions which can be used, and the importer needs to choose the “best” one which can handle a given item.  For example, if extensions are used to provide UI controls for editing fields, there may be a generic editor which can edit all field types but only uses a simple textbox, and a specialized editor which only works on enums but provides a dropdown box for editing.  Both of these extensions could be used to edit an enum, but it is better to use the more specialized one. Defining MEF metadata on an export One way to represent the priority of an extension is with MEF metadata.  The exporter can add metadata using the ExportMetadataAttribute like this: [Export(typeof(IPlugin))] [ExportMetadata("Name", "PluginA")] [ExportMetadata("Priority", 1)] public class PluginA : IPlugin { /* ..

Everybody is talking about clouds these days but really the choice to move to the cloud is not an all-or-nothing proposition. With different types of cloud offerings, you have flexible options about which services to obtain in the cloud and which to keep on site.

10 incredible Imagine Cup teams have begun the race toward the $8,000 cash prize by submitting a Software Design Project . 5 teams have been chosen to represent bring their projects to the US finals in both Software Design and Game Design

LookingGlass is a new technology that Microsoft has developed to make Social Media data (twitter, blogs, Flickr, YouTube, etc.) useful to organisations and to make those conversations happening out on the internet actionable and measurable.  As the social media phenomena snowballs, it will be increasingly valuable to Government to listen to and to make proactive use of this information as a way to measure sentiment about policies and initiatives, forge insights about citizens and better target public services.  We all hear about how social networks are driving more traffic so it is useful to understand how this environment is changing and evolving to get better traction with public service digital marketing efforts.

Action Step Workflow Why this feature is cool! Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0 offers an “approval” workflow, which routes objects to various individuals for document approval based on user specified field values of the transaction in question.  However, organizations typically have additional processes that they follow when creating a master record, such vendors, or when creating transactions, such as Purchase Orders or Quotes.  Microsoft Dynamics GP 2010 includes the added ability to perform an “action step” workflow which helps users take action for a specific business process. These business processes may require the routing of the record for an action that needs to take place before the record can be used or posted within the system.   Often times these actions need to take place outside of Microsoft Dynamics GP.  For example when setting up a new vendor, a user may need to perform a check with the Better Business Bureau.  The action step feature allows for the creation of a workflow task that indicates to the user that they need to perform the check before the vendor can be used in the system

I am in the industry business for almost 20 years (I thought I would never say that!) and the funny thing is that I hear the same stories all over again and again.

My colleague Daniel Good, keeps a directory of all of the Microsoft team blogs – those that are run by, or on behalf of, Microsoft teams.

A growing number of governments, including our own, have started to make the large datsets they maintain available through portals like data.govt.nz .