Creating a Simple Report with Visual Studio 2008

Report Services, Analysis Services, and Integration Services are the three pillars of Business Intelligence in Microsoft's vision that continues to evolve. Reporting is a basic activity, albeit one of the most important activities of an organization because it provides a specialized and customized view of the data of various forms (relational, text, xml etc) that live in data stores. The report is useful in making business decisions, scheduling business campaigns, or assessing the competition. The report itself may be required in hard copy in several document formats such as DOC, HTML, PDF, etc. Many times it is also required to be retrieved in an interactive form from the data store and viewed on a suitable interface, including a web browser. The Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, popularly known by its acronym SSRS, provides all that is necessary to create and manage reports and deploy them on a report server with output available in several document formats. The reader will greatly benefit from reading the several articles detailed in the author's Hodentek Blog. The content for the articles were developed using VS 2003, VS 2005, SQL 2000 and SQL 2005.

Creating a Text Logo in Blender

In this tutorial by Jonathan Williamson, we are going to examine the process behind creating a text-based logo in Blender. We will be looking at some modeling techniques mixed with several modifiers to create a background for the logo, and then we will move on to creating the actual text. Following that we will set up the lighting and render settings to produce our final image.

Creating a Tumblr Theme

In this article by Jose Argudo Blanco, we will discuss how to design our own customized themes.

Creating a View with MySQL Query Browser

MySQL Query Browser, one of the open source MySQL GUI tools from MySQL AB, is used for building MySQL database queries visually. In MySQL Query Browser, you build database queries using just your mouse—click, drag and drop!

When you’re creating a query for non-technical users and you don’t want them to see the complexity of the query, you can create a view from the query. Your users can then use the view as a table; for example, they can double-click the view, which will effectively execute its complex query behind the scene.

In MySQL Query Browser, you have two ways to create a view, which Djoni Darmawikarta will demonstrate in this article:

• From an existing query
• Writing from scratch manually

Creating a WCF Service, Business Object and Data Submission with Silverlight 4

Packt are due to launch a new Enterprise brand, into which future Silverlight titles will be published. For more information on that launch, look here.

In this article by Frank LaVigne, author of Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development, we shall:

• Create a WCF service and business object for receiving data
• Submitting data to the server

Creating a Web Page for Displaying Data from SQL Server 2008

This article by Jayaram Krishnaswamy describes how you may connect to SQL Server 2008 and display the retrieved data in a GridView Control on a web page. Trying to establish a connection to the SQL Server 2008 is not possible in Visual Studio 2008 as you will see soon in the tutorial. One way to get around this, as shown in this tutorial, is to create an ODBC connection to the SQL Server and then using the ODBC connection to retrieve the data.

Visual Studio 2008 Version: 9.0.21022.8 RTM, Microsoft Windows XP Professional Media Center Edition, and SQL Server 'Katmai' were used for this tutorial.

Creating Accessible Tables in Joomla!

Tables got a bad review in accessibility circles, because they used to create complex visual layouts. This was due to the limitations in the support for presentational specifications like CSS and using tables for layout was a hack—that worked in the real world—when you wanted to position something in a precise part of the web page.

Tables were designed to present data of all shapes and sizes, and that is really what they should be used for.

This article by Joshue O Connor, shows how to build a simple table using Joomla! and the features contained within the WYSIWYG editors that can make the table more accessible.

Creating an Administration Interface with Django 1.0

The administration interface is a universal feature needed in any web application that stores and manages data. For this reason, Django comes with a fully fledged administration interface ready to be used. This administration interface is considered one of the coolest features in Django because it's easy to use, and yet is powerful and flexible. This article is based on the updated version- Django 1.0. The previous article on Creating an Administration Interface was on the older version of Django.

In this article by Ayman Hourieh, you will learn how to:

• Activate the administration interface
• Use the administration interface to manage content

Creating an Analysis Services Cube with Visual Studio 2008 - Part 2

As noted in Part 1, OLAP presents Business Intelligence via what is known as a CUBE. A Cube has many dimensions and it provides a faster method to access the intelligence compared to the structured querying where the overhead of 'Joins' makes it inefficient. Taking the example of a 'Sales' Cube having everything related to sales we can identify the dimensions as the Sales Outlet, The Customers , the Products and the time period over which sales are being audited or looked into. We also notice that there are certain measures that we are interested related to these 'dimensions' like 'Store Sales', 'Cost of Products, 'number of units sold' etc. The Analysis Services analyzes these intricate relationship that exist in a cube. In this part we will see the process of creating a Cube in VS 2008.