The whole world in a SQL Server database 29 January 2013 Nico-Jacobs SQL Server, Integration Services Some people have the whole world in their hand, but last weekend I tried something slightly less ambitious: Getting (part of) the whole world in a SQL Server database. Loads of spatial data from OpenStreetMap I’m always looking for interesting datasets. I was still lacking a large dataset with spa... [More]
Validation sets in SQL Server Data Mining 22 January 2013 Nico-Jacobs Analysis Services, SQL Server BI, Data Mining What are validation sets? Data Mining Data mining analyses historical data to find patterns that might help us better understand how our business works, or might help predict how the business might evolve in the future: Instead of doing ‘traditional BI’, where we pick some attributes and ask for a... [More]
Printing from MVVM XAML Windows 8 Store apps - the final frontier 21 January 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article describes a reusable way of implementing print support in a Windows 8 MVVM-and-XAML based Store app. I noticed on the MSDN forum that many developers have a problem with the XAML version of the official printing sample app. They find it too complex. So I originally wanted to create... [More]
Using Dynamic XAML in Windows 8 Store Apps 08 January 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article describes a couple of techniques that you can apply to dynamically change the look-and-feel of data-bound XAML controls in a Windows 8 Store App. You’ll be introduced to value converters, style selectors, template selectors, and the XamlReader class. I created a light-weight MVVM ... [More]