[repost from Stephen Forte's Blog] In Part I: When to build your data warehouse we looked at when you should build your data warehouse and concluded that you should build it sooner rather than later to take advantage of reporting and view optimization. Today we will look at your options to build your data warehouse schema. When architecting a data warehouse, you have two basic options: build a flat “reporting” table for each operation you are performing, or build with BI/cubes in mind and implement a “star” or “snowflake” schema. Let’s take a quick look at the first option and then we will take a look at...

In the last blog we looked at creating an OpenAccess domain model to expose to LightSwitch.  In this blog we continue down the path of integrating OpenAccess and LightSwitch.  Today we will set up an OpenAccess Domain Service that can be consumed by LightSwitch. Creating the Service The first thing we need to do is add a new “WCF RIA Service Class Library” to our solution:   This will add a new folder to our solution containing 2 projects, one is the RIA Service library(Demo.OALightSwitch.Web), and the other is a Silverlight client project(which we can ignore for these blogs).    After we add the new projects, we...

Hey everyone! Now that I'm all back and settled in the Boston metro area, it's time to make some resources available to people who attended and for anyone interested in a little bit of Silverlight goodness. First though I've got a tiny side-note as far as the presentations.  Originally in this post I mentioned that we offered three different Silverlight talks to the user groups, but as it turns out nobody picked this one: Building a Unified Experience – Developing with Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 In this session, we will get look into development on both the full Silverlight platform and on Windows Phone...

[repost from Stephen Forte`s Blog] Most developers are scared of “Business Intelligence” or BI. Most think that BI consists of cubes, pivot/drill down apps, and analytical decision support systems. While those are very typical outcomes of a BI effort, many people forget about the first step, the data warehouse. Typically this is what happens with a BI effort. A system is built, usually a system that deals with transactions. We call this an OLTP or on-line transaction processing system. Some time passes and reports are bolted on and some business analysts build some pivot tables from “raw dumps” of data. As the system grows, reports start to slow...

Over the next few blogs we will look at working with LightSwitch and OpenAccess, but first i would like to lay a little ground work. :) What is LightSwitch? LightSwitch is a new Microsoft tool enabling developers, and power users, to create multi-tier applications, quickly and easily.  Those of you familiar with Microsoft Access will find it gives you even more power to create application that are easy to maintain, and easy to distribute. Since the applications made with LightSwitch are Silverlight based, they are easily deployed in browser (3-tier), out of browser(3-tier), or directly to the desktop(2-tier).  What Do I Need? To get...