Apple for Microsofties 1/2 26 December 2014 Francis In September 2015 I did a short presentation about Apple for developers in the Microsoft ecosystem.H [More]
A Speech Dialog Box for Universal Windows Phone apps 03 December 2014 Diederik-Krols Universal Windows Apps, Windows Phone In this article I present a Universal Control to assist in text-to-speech and speech-to-text use cases on Windows Phone 8.1. The Speech Dialog Box is a templatable custom control in a shared universal project. Its default look is inspired by the Cortana UI: a text block with a microphone button atta... [More]
Integrating Cortana in your Universal Windows Phone app 21 October 2014 Diederik-Krols Universal Windows Apps, Windows Phone This article describes how to register and use voice commands to start your Universal Windows Phone app, and how to continue the conversation within your app. The attached sample app comes with the following features: It registers a set of voice commands with Cortana, it recognizes a simple ‘open ... [More]
Our Apple Swift event 13 October 2014 Peter-Himschoot On september 30th we had an event about Apple development and their new Swift language at the U2U offices, comparing Swift to C# and giving people an idea what Apple development with Xcode looks like. Some people asked if we would make the slides available, so here they are.SwiftEvent.pdf (2.2MB)
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]