Back-end

Technical debt, while over two decades old, is a term very much of the essence in this age of Agile development, Lean startups, Minimum Viable Products and DevOps practices. Technical debt has been a phenomenon since the first mainframe punchcard but with a much broader swath of our economy being dominated by businesses viewing themselves as “software companies” and “product development” referring to software more often than any durable good, an increasingly broad set of stakeholders feel the effects of technical debt.

Thinking of refreshing your website in 2016? Here are the latest trends and cutting edge web tech you need to be aware of.

Working with the Azure AD Graph API. Here are some helpful tips that I recently discovered that can make your development using the Graph API a bit smoother. Take a look!

This is the third post in a series about SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). One of the other important topics of SSRS is adding parameters to a report which lets you filter the data down to a smaller group. As with many things, parameters can be simple selections or can be more complicated with cascading selections that depend on other parameters.

Microsoft Office is a staple for many organizations around the world. People use it every day to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and to manage their email. I am sure there are things you can think of that you would love to be able to do directly in an office application that can’t be done now. Maybe you would like to automatically add content to an email based on content from another system. Maybe you would like to see information from your CRM system about the individual who sent you an email. Or maybe you would like to automatically add html content to an Excel, PowerPoint or Word document. All of these things can be achieved with Microsoft Office add-ins.

In this post we will be taking our list of Sales People and seeing how we can group and sort them in order to make the report more useful. We will also jump into expressions in order to add conditional formatting.

Remember when you were learning how to type on a computer keyboard? I bet you played a game, or several, to hone your skills and learn how to type faster, am I right? Well improving your typing skills isn’t the only thing learning games are used for.

I recently ran into an issue with a WPF application that is a continuous operation Kiosk application. The users log in and are presented with a survey. If the Kiosk is ignored for a time period, a timeout occurs and the screen is reset. However, I discovered that when using MVVM light and View Model (context) injection, even though the view is disposed of, the view model is not. This presented itself when a second user was presented the survey after a timeout had occurred, the survey started on page two or wherever the previous user had left off.

This is going to be the first in a series of blog posts about Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS). SSRS gives you the ability to create and manage reports from a variety of data sources. For us, the most used data source is SQL Server but we have also used SQL Azure and MySQL.

Many developers are familiar with the ASP.Net Web Configuration Manager in Visual Studio to maintain or create users in their SQL databases. The application allows the creation of users, as well as role creation and assignment. However, to my surprise, this functionality is no longer available in Visual Studio 2013.