Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis in Universal Windows Apps 21 September 2014 Diederik-Krols Universal Windows Apps, Windows Phone, WinRT This article introduces you to speech recognition (speech-to-text, STT) and speech synthesis (text-to-speech, TTS) in a Universal Windows XAML app. It comes with a sample app – code attached at the end- that has buttons for opening the standard UI for speech recognition, opening a custom UI for sp... [More]
Weird localization problem in DAX editor 17 September 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, Excel, Power BI, SQL Server BI One of my students (thanks, Stefan!) discovered during the PowerBI course a bizarre localization issue in the DAX editor of Excel and SQL Server Data Tools, which is easy to replicate: Install Office 2013 or SQL Server data tools on a machine with a locale which uses a comma as decimal separator (I... [More]
Excel Power Query supports Multi-value Lookup columns in SharePoint lists 15 September 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, Excel, Power BI Power Query is a handy tool to load all sorts of data in Excel or PowerBI. One of the supported data types is SharePoint lists. But Power Query does more than the straight-forward loading of data in a single list. If a SharePoint list contains a lookup column referring to another list, Power Query w... [More]
Universal Windows Apps: a Tale of Two Calendars. 31 July 2014 Diederik-Krols Universal Windows Apps It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the server side calendar on the tablet, it was the client side calendar on the smart phone. This article explains two ways of managing appointments in your calendar through a Univers... [More]
Loading data in Azure Machine Learning 24 July 2014 Nico-Jacobs Azure, Business Intelligence, Data Mining, AzureML In July 2014 Microsoft made their cloud-based data mining environment (known as Azure Machine Learning, or AzureML) available to the public. With this platform users can analyze large amounts of data without the need to install and configure special software: A browser and a credit card is all you n... [More]
Why I'm more bullish on Swift than one month ago 15 July 2014 Francis One month ago I was fairly bearish on Swift. Now, with some hands-on development experience & after some recent news I'm updating my rating to "buy into it soon". Here's why:Gradual AdoptionApple has made it very easy to adopt Swift for small parts of existing projects. No need to do a full rewr... [More]
First Steps in Azure Machine Learning 15 July 2014 Nico-Jacobs Azure, Data Mining, SQL Server BI Today Microsoft announces the availability of machine learning (data mining) in Azure. As you can assume, you need an Azure account to get started with this, but there are free trial accounts… you can try before you buy. To get started with the machine learning preview go to http://manage.windowsaz... [More]
Playing sounds in a Universal Windows MVVM app 10 July 2014 Diederik-Krols Universal Windows Apps This article describes how to play foreground and background sounds in a XAML-based Universal Windows app. I know that this sounds easy (pun intended). But I will do this while sticking to the MVVM pattern, which makes it a bit more challenging. I’m not targeting a specific framework here. The descr... [More]
WWDC14 for non-developers (Part 4: Apple's commitment to security & privacy) 10 July 2014 Francis This post has been sitting in my drafts folder for far too long & Luis Abreu beat me to it. His post about IOS8 Privacy Updates is the most extensive guide so far on the implications of Apple's renewed commitment to respecting their user's privacy.Privacy is one of the themes that kept popp... [More]
WWDC14 for non-developers (Part 3: New IOS8 APIs) 09 July 2014 Francis mailto:francis@u2uconsult.com This post provides a high-level overview of the new API's developers use to build apps for IOS8. There's a lot more to explore than can be covered here, so if you have questions about IOS8 development go talk to your favourite developer. Below is a list of the major ne... [More]