Protecting Your Children From Online Threats
Posted 2/22/2012 by Kenny Young, Director, Cloud Coumputing & Development
When I grew up there was no Internet, my computer was a commodore 64 which wasn’t connected to anything … or anyone. In those days we had outdated encyclopedia sets at home (if we were lucky) or we went to the library to complete homework. There was no quick way to search; it was a manual process. Then along came the Internet, allowing us to connect with people in ways we never could have imagined. But like any good thing there are those who exploit it with ill intentions.

What is a SharePoint Administrator?
Posted 2/17/2012 by Tim Van Hammond, Director, Enterprise Portals
The role of the SharePoint Administrator is often a topic that comes up when beginning to plan out a SharePoint implementation, as it should. The various roles and responsibilities should be clearly defined upfront, but I often receive the initial feedback from customers that we should be able to just tell them what those responsibilities are. The problem with that philosophy is that the organization, management, goals, and skill sets of every organization are not the same.

An Overview of .NET Threading and Tasks
Posted 2/16/2012 by Greg Levenhagen, Senior Software Engineer
With the release of .NET 4, Microsoft added a new namespace under the System.Threading namespace called System.Threading.Tasks. All of the previous threading abilities are still available, but the new additions provide a different way to work with multi-threaded constructs. With the evolution of multi-threaded capabilities within the .NET framework, things can get a little confusing. Here is a brief history with some notes.

Make Your Website More Accessible to Mobile Devices with a Single Line of Mark-up
Posted 2/13/2012 by Keith Burnell, Senior Software Engineer
I have been working a lot with MVC sites lately and experimenting with how to make them "usable" on mobile browsers. This post is about the single line of mark-up you can add to your site's Master Page, or in this case your _Layout.cshtml. 

Strategy for Unit Testing of Legacy Application Code
Posted 2/10/12 by Steve Nelson, Senior Software Engineer
The advent of unit testing frameworks within the past few years has given the development community valuable tools that can help to create high-quality systems. Systems built using rigorous unit testing during the development cycle tend to generate fewer defects found during integration testing. A unit testing framework allows a developer to create tests that can be executed against their code to ensure that it functions correctly. The unit testing framework that is included with VisualStudio is one such example. 

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Introducting Agile Principles to a Waterfall Project
Posted 2/9/12 by Eric Hyland, Senior Software Engineer
I know that introducing Agile principles to a Waterfall project is something that is usually not recommended, but I see some value! I'm presently working on a development project using waterfall methodology. We have the usual Microsoft Project plan, a set of milestones, and loose project management oversight with respect to the five week development cycle.

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SharePoint Predictions for 2012
Posted 2/7/12 by Eric VanRoy, Senior Portal System Engineer
I recently ran across a blog post where many SharePoint experts were asked their opinions on what they think SharePoint will bring to 2012. After reading the article I had to pause a minute and think about what I think it will bring.

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Building a Partnership Between IT and Your Business
Posted 2/6/12 by Kenny Young, Director, Cloud Computing & Development
IT professionals have long felt that businesses do not understand technology and businesses have long felt that IT does not deliver at the speed of business. Let’s look at that for a minute. We have two teams who do not trust or understand each other – this will never equal success. A project without a business sponsor and an IT team that does not understand the business will also never equate to success. I am not saying all business projects are failures, I am simply stating that with a different approach there can be understanding.

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Using Microdata HTML5 to Attract Visitors from Google and Beyond
Posted 1/24/12 by John Greuel, Creative Director
You might have seen some blips on your radar lately about using Microdata HTML5, but what does it mean for your website and why should you consider it? Microdata is a way of labeling your website content via your HTML code that will help make your content easier to understand for both the Search Engines, and other machines, that may access your website information.

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Office 365 - SharePoint Online Explained
Posted 1/23/12 by Tim Van Hammond, Director, Enterprise Portals
Several months ago I published a brief introduction to Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is a suite of very popular Microsoft products hosted in the cloud which has several features you should be aware of; please refer to that brief introduction at the following here. This article will dig a bit deeper, specifically into the SharePoint Online features of Office 365.

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Learning About and Responding To Security Vulnerabilities
Posted 1/20/2012 by Brian Morgan, Chief Technology Officer
After a recent Microsoft Security Advisory describing a denial of service vulnerability in ASP.NET, a client of ours asked me how Skyline learned about, and was able to respond to, the event so quickly. Since this is not the first time I’ve been presented with this question, I thought I would blog about my response. In this entry I will discuss how we learn about security vulnerabilities at Skyline. In a future entry, I will address our security response strategy.

Entity Framework Code First Enum
Posted 1/16/2012 by Keith Burnell, Senior Software Engineer
The most requested feature for Entity Framework has been Enum support for a very long time. At TechEd this year it was announced that Enums would be supported in the next version of the Entity Framework and in June the Entity Framework June CTP was released with Enum support as well some other enhancements. 

What's An Intranet and What Can It Do For My Company?
Posted 1/10/2012 by Jonathan Schultz, Senior Portal Software Engineer
An intranet needs to be an information sharing channel in an organization. Almost all organizations use email to communicate to their associates and some still have hard copy newsletters distributed to their teams. An intranet could, and should, be used to centralize all of this information, along with other topics associates need to be made aware of, to excel in their job. An intranet is a powerful communication channel that allows different areas of the company to communicate as a dynamic organization.

Creating Your Own jQuery Plugins
Posted 1/5/2012 by Dan Lorenz, Software Engineer
jQuery is a powerful JavaScript library that can help you write client-side code quickly and efficiently, while being cross-browser friendly. (It’s even somewhat fun to code in!) The jQuery team has created the framework in a way that allows developers to write their own plugins for other developers to use. This post will take you through the steps to create your own plugin.

Silverlight and RIA Services - Concurrent Requests
Posted 12/22/2011 by Jeremiah Billmann, Software Engineer
Recently, I uncovered an interesting little ‘gotcha’ while investigating a performance issue with an application that I was working on using a Silverlight/RIA Services stack. Once I discovered what it was, I was quick to remember why, but I had a little problem on my hands as I had to find a way to resolve the issue without a major change of code.

Tips for Working With International Clients
Posted 12/21/2011 by John Ptacek, Senior Software Engineer
One of the wonderful things about being a consultant in Northeast Wisconsin is there are so many great companies in our area. The beauty of technology and our inter-connected globe means you can have customers and clients anywhere. Not only has my company acquired customers in the Midwest and across the Unites States, but we have gained customers in other countries as well.

Back to Basics - Essential Visual Studio Shortcuts
Posted 12/9/2011 by Berny Zamora, Software Engineer
There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts in Visual Studio, but you don’t need to memorize them all to increase your proficiency. Take a moment to think about how you use Visual Studio every day. I’ll bet there are actions that you perform dozens of times a day. And chances are, to paraphrase from Apple, “there is a shortcut for that”.

Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection ... Distilled
Posted 11/4/2011 by Chris Plate, Software Engineer
The terms "Inversion of Control" and "Dependency Injection" can sound a bit intimidating at first appearance. Even more confusing is the fact that they are closely related concepts. Once you grasp the underlying similarities, however, you'll find that implementing a non-trivial application using them can provide a number of benefits. This post is intended to distill these concepts down into a few takeaways to help you use them effectively.

SQL 2012 and Mobile BI Roadmap Announced
Posted 10/27/2011 by Chris Fleming, Director, Business Intelligence
At the Processional Association for SQL Server (PASS) summit Ted Kummert, Microsoft Corporate VP Business Platform, made several announcements about SQL Denali. For starters, the worldwide announcement of the release date for Denali was made – SQL 2012 will available in the first half of 2012.

Development 101: Delegates
Posted 10/26/2011 by Brian Morgan, Chief Tchnology Officer
Delegates are used “under-the-covers” to implement events (i.e., event handlers are the callback methods). Moreover, anonymous delegates are the basis for lambda expression in .NET. In general, delegates can be used to parameterize functionality that must be dynamically provided at runtime.

SharePoint Can Help Ease the Content Management Burden
Posted 10/12/2011 by Mark Lezotte, Director, Online Marketing
Over the last several years I’ve been hearing that SharePoint is not as user friendly as other content management systems (CMS). When I stand back and look at the challenges I see our content managers encountering, I’ve decided that those challenges are present regardless of the CMS product implemented … SharePoint or otherwise.

Is SharePoint the Next Access?
Posted 10/7/2011 by Mike Lauer, Project Manager
Did you know you can import your Access database into SharePoint (sort of)? Well, this isn’t an article about that. SharePoint has a host of great features that will help you solve your business needs, but this isn’t an article about that either. This is an article that only begins to explore the role of SharePoint in the business and IT community by comparing and contrasting it with a tool seemingly more familiar to all of us … Microsoft Access.

Managing Web.Config Settings for Multiple Environments
Posted 10/4/2011 by Steve Nelson, Senior Software Engineer
Configuration plays an important part of any .NET application. Each application typically contains many settings that are controlled in the application configuration file. Some examples of settings controlled through configuration might be connection strings to database resources, file paths for error logs, urls for webservices, or a custom configuration setting used in application logic. In an ASP.NET web application the web.config file is used to hold the configuration settings that an application may use.