[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...

A great new book called “Pro Telerik ASP.NET and Silverlight Controls” was recently released by Apress. As the name suggests it is aimed at .NET developers working with Telerik’s ASP.NET and Silverlight controls. The author, Jose Rolando Guay Paz, has been a professional developer for more than 15 years and is currently involved in the development of web application using ASP.NET and Silverlight. He has significant experience in the field and was among the first developers to build commercial apps in .NET in Central America. The book provides a complete guide on how to increase your productivity when developing software by...

Telerik is proud to be a Silver Sponsor at Basta 2010 in Mainz, Germany taking place this week. The main conference and exhibition lasts from Tuesday, 21st to Thursday, 23rd. Come by and see all our products brought to you by our divisions Developer Productivity, Team Productivity, Automated Testing and Web Content Management. Our engineers will demonstrate our tools and answer your questions. Furthermore you can join ORM product manager Jan Blessenohl in two sessions on Wednesday, the 22nd: 8:30 am: LINQ-generated SQL: Boon or bane? Learn more about how ORM tools like Entity Framework, OpenAccess and others generate SQL and how different...

The TeamPulse team is very excited to announce the availability of our first service pack! The service pack has taken us a little longer than we had hoped to produce; however, we’re positive it was worth it.  Here is a summary of some of the changes introduced by the Service Pack. Deleting a Project This feature is somewhat self-explanatory – we now give you the ability to delete your projects.  This is a permanent operation and the only way to undo this operation is by restoring your TeamPulse database.