SharePoint: Collaborate via a Blog

Creating a team communication space. Blog provide a very efficient method for teams to collaborate on ideas. To illustrate this tool, I’ll begin by creating a blog using the Site->Actions menu. I’m given the ability to name my new blog, provide a web address, as well as more options which I won’t use for this…

SharePoint: Active Alerts

Enable active notifications to automate business processes. Within any business process there are many different types of lists acted upon by team members. I will illustrate how to set automatic notifications on lists so that team members are notified when an action is awaiting their attention. To begin, on a task list, I’ll select the…

SSRS: 2008 Updates

New features and updates to the latest version of Reporting Services. Here are just some of a few of my favorite improvements made to the 2008 release of SSRS. The most noticeable to me was the absence of the “Data” tab within the designer. Instead of having to click back and forth between tabs when…

SSRS: Custom Functions

Implementing custom logic within a field. To illustrate how to apply specifying formatting based on values, I’ll begin where my Calculation – Field Formatting article left off. As you can see viewing the resultset, the Salaried Flag column displays True/False values which isn’t very intuitive. To translate these values at runtime to more helpful Yes/No…

SSRS: Conditional Font Color

Denoting data trends by applying logic-controlled formatting, for example, employees with the most amount of accumulated Sick Leave. To illustrate how to apply specifying formatting based on values, I’ll begin with a dataset that returns employee data. By viewing the resultset, it’s difficult to discern any distinguishable trends in the data. To denote those employees…

Design Patterns: Singleton

Please see my other Design Pattern articles. Ensuring single instance use during instantiation. Every so often in development, a business rule dictates that instantiation of a certain type produce only one instance during the lifetime of the application. The Singleton design pattern, one of the Creational Patterns, ensures that regardless of many instantiations of a…

Design Patterns: Service Locator

Please see my other Design Pattern articles. Completing the IoC Design Pattern. In my Design Patterns: Inversion of Control article, I illustrated how to decouple classes from having dependencies – the CustomerPayment class contained a dependency on the IPayment interface. Any class which has intimate knowledge of another is tightly-coupled to that class. By implementing…

Design Patterns: Inversion of Control

Please see my other Design Pattern articles. Providing flexibility into the domain by abstracting implementation. Using abstraction between concrete and class implementation, avoid tightly-coupled classes, which leads to changes in once class to ripple throughout your application. One method of doing this is the Inversion of Control design pattern which allows the class calling the…

Design Patterns: Factory

Please see my other Design Pattern articles. Providing flexible object-instantiation. In this example, I’ll illustrate a method by which a SalesAssociate object may be instantiated that is more flexible than the traditional way – using a constructor. Instead I’ll implement a factory design pattern to create the instance. There are two advantages to this approach:…

Design Patterns: Adapter

Please see my other Design Pattern articles. Exposing class behavior from another class. Sometimes you might need to access and use functionality defined from one class from within your own class. To illustrate this pattern, I’ll begin with a simple class that contains one method I wish to invoke from within my other class –…