News
UI Flow
Often, we use wire-framing or mock-up tools (like the good guys at Balsamiq) to help communicate design ideas between developers as well as to clients. However, there is a need for something more efficient to aid communication of possible user interface flows through our emerging application. This communication is for internal use typically and doesn’t [...]
Water Monitoring & Metering CRM
Ogham Engineering Ltd.: A bespoke water metering and monitoring web-hosted application to offer tenants and landlords alike access to up-to-the-minute status on water consumption.
Getting Parallels 7 to play nice with Windows 8
One of the challenges of working in the Mac environment while developing in Microsoft technologies is getting the VM machine working as you want. Being a fan of keyboard shortcuts, it’s a major PITA if the key mappings aren’t set as you’d expect, especially as I move routinely between Mac and Windows PC.
So, with my [...]
SQL Express Local Attach Problem
There’s an issue when you try to attach a local MDF SQL database file to the local instance of SQL Express. VS typically will insert a USER INSTANCE = true into the connection string that it generates when you add the LINQ-to-SQL or ADO.NET Entity modelling to your project.
The connection to the database as attached [...]
Azure – First Steps
My putting a toe in the water of Azure. Love the interface, very slick and well thought out – looks like Scott Gu kicked the team into action. Here’s a few very ‘MS’ tricks that I’ve overcome so far:
Using SSMS (SQL Server Management Studio 2008) isn’t a great place to start. Upgrade to 2008 R2 [...]