May 4, 2009
US Company Vertigo have a long track record in the development of showcase solutions for a range of clients, and have been involved in several proof of concept projects for Microsoft going back over the years. Right now they have a very nice Windows Presentation Foundation project available for download called Family Show. The latest version of this has been put together using Visual Studio 2008 and .Net 3.5, and certainly shows off some nice user interface design features. If you are interested in UI design, or indeed if you have an interest in genealogy, this is worth a download.
Here’s a quick screenshot of how it looks (click picture for a better view):
(by the way, it’s not one of my relatives 
)
So if you want to take a look for yourself, the download is available here, and source code is available as a CodePlex project here. Scott Stanfield from Vertigo has also recorded a video demo of Family Show which you can watch here.
Leave a Comment » | 
Technology, Training, Windows, development | 
Permalink
Posted by workerthread
October 24, 2008
I noticed this post on the Microsoft BI blog and thought it was worth passing on. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina have developed a performance dashboard and set of scorecards using PerformancePoint and Windows SharePoint Services, and this can now be accessed on line here. Worth taking a look if you are looking at the monitoring and reporting capabilities of PerformancePoint. The accompanying Microsoft case study says it is a 3 server solution, with a 50GB data warehouse behind it.
This week I also took a look at some of the stuff happening with the Microsoft Citizen Service Platform, which might be a useful resource if you are involved in delivering collaborative solutions into government organisations. There are various online demos around SharePoint and Dynamics CRM, and some templates beginning to appear on CodePlex.
Leave a Comment » | 
Collaboration, Microsoft SharePoint, development | 
Permalink
Posted by workerthread
August 20, 2008
I make a fair amount of screen-capture images, for documentation, training notes and presentations. Until recently was using any one of Alt-PrtScn, screen clippings in OneNote, and the Vista Snipping Tool, depending on which computer I was using and whether I needed to capture a Window or screen area.
A few months ago I spent $49.95 on SnagIt from TechSmith and was very impressed with what it could do – not only capturing windows, areas and menus but also capable of capturing the entire contents of a scrollable Internet Explorer window. More recently I upgraded to Snagit 9.0, which also features an excellent version of SnagIt Editor with an auto-store feature, as you can see below (SnagIt also lets you add the special effects by the way):
This makes it really simple to capture a set of shots for training notes or manuals as the captures can easily be stored and categorised. It’s a real time saver if you are involved in software or web site testing and need to illustrate bugs or other problems while you work through the test plan. Highly recommended.
2 Comments | Web Design, development, web development | Permalink
Posted by workerthread
August 12, 2008
This could be interesting – the UK government is sponsoring a Show Us a Better Way contest. Basically they are running a contest where you can submit ideas to which make better use of public information in the form of mashups, KPIs, visualisations etc. The site points you to a variety of public data which you can use for your prototype and the how-to post gives example of some of the development frameworks you might use, for example Popfly or Yahoo Pipes.
And there’s a £20,000 prize up for grabs! According to the site faqs the closing date is end of September 08.
Leave a Comment » | Mashup, Web Design, asp.net, development, web development | Permalink
Posted by workerthread
Posted by workerthread 
