From the category archives:

Clarity

CLARITY: Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO)

August 3, 2008 Clarity

After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give [...]

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CLARITY: Office Business Applications (OBA)

July 26, 2008 Clarity

Office Business Applications is a term getting bandied about a fair bit these days. What is it exactly? Well, answers differ, and you’d be forgiven if you thought it was as simple as using Office to build Applications for use in Business. The purpose of this post is to try to get some simple high [...]

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CLARITY: SQL Server 2008

June 15, 2008 Clarity

One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There’s no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft’s products are no different. Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online – there’s no special insight here. Rather, I’ve just simply tried to distill a [...]

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CLARITY: CRM Live becomes CRM Online

March 27, 2008 Clarity

The main interest in this article from Mary Jo is not about CRM (who cares about a name change after all) but rather how Microsoft are clarifying their terms: Live: Consumer focus Online: Business & Enterprise focus, hosted by Microsoft Hosted services: hosted by Microsoft partners And don’t miss the revenue sharing snippet at the [...]

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CLARITY: VSTS, VSTO, VSTA, VSX

February 2, 2008 Clarity

Seems like Microsoft is having a V Day, every day. Here's a run down of the main V technologies/tools: VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) Firstly, Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2008 (the current version) is Microsoft's IDE for building .NET based applications, be they Web, Desktop, Device or Microsoft Office based. Visual Studio comes in a [...]

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CLARITY: Thin, Thick and Smart clients

January 10, 2008 Clarity

The term Smart Client is probably the most often misused of the three, and there always seems to be a little bit of confusion as to where Thick stops and Smart begins. But, yet again, The Architecture Journal (Issue 14, p10) guides us with a simple and helpful summary. Some will no doubt disagree (since [...]

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CLARITY: Flash versus Flex versus Silverlight

November 28, 2007 Clarity

Summary: Flex is to Adobe as Silverlight is to Microsoft Silverlight is often referred to as Microsoft's version of Flash, however it is more correct to say it is Microsoft's version of Flex. You could say the following… Silverlight 1.0 = Flash Silverlight 2.0 = Flex [UPDATE: Silverlight 1.1 has been re-branded as Silverlight 2.0] [...]

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CLARITY: SharePoint – WSS versus MOSS

November 26, 2007 Clarity

There's still plenty of confusion out there about SharePoint, particularly around what is included in WSS versus MOSS. Part of the problem is that there is soooo much information about SharePoint that the simple details get lost… So, let's go through the various options, comparing WSS with MOSS Standard and MOSS Enterprise as simply as [...]

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CLARITY: Microsoft is a marketing company

November 24, 2007 Clarity

Not wanting to be too much of 'well duh' post, but I thought it was worth reminding ourselves that in software we need to be focusing extensively on marketing and sales. It all too easy to get caught up in the development, to the detriment of the marketing. I've (finally) finished 'Partnering with Microsoft' by [...]

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CLARITY: SaaS versus S+S

November 23, 2007 Clarity

If, like me, you'd just assumed that Software + Services (S+S) was Microsoft's way of trying to take over and re-brand an existing concept – namely Software as a Service (SaaS) – then the following diagram is a helpful corrective. It's taken from page 18 of Issue 13 of the Architecture Journal (download here), and [...]

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SEO: Jargon list

August 4, 2007 Clarity

Useful: A Complete Glossary of Essential SEO Jargon (from SEOmoz) My favorite: Google bowling Maliciously trying to lower a sites rank by sending it links from the “bad neighborhood” – Kind of like yelling “Good luck with that infection!” to your buddy as you get off the school bus – there is some controversy as [...]

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