Magenic Company Blog

Over the past year much has been made of the slide of Nokia’s dominance in the mobile space. For longer than that, tongues have also been wagging about Microsoft’s struggle to become a real player in the mobile space.

We’re continuing our Blogger’s Digest series where we search through the blogs of Magenic consultants and pull out the best technical posts we can find. No politics, religion, or personal matters here, you get enough of that on Facebook and Twitter. This is to simply give you access to some very useful information from some of the best technical minds in the industry.

Whenever the discussion of “size” comes up, it’s easy to start cracking wise and dropping euphemisms and one-liners (Heck, this opening sentence alone is like setting a ball on the tee for wise guys…like me). So let’s not shy away. Let’s take a look the topic of mobile device screen through the “That’s what she said!” lens.

With the abundance of talk centered on Gamification and the metrics that it can bring to an enterprise solution, it is no wonder that Microsoft has introduced a Gamification plugin for Visual Studio. What makes this interesting to me is the leveraging of the Microsoft LIVE account, so that achievements can be tracked and shared as claims in a claims-based authorization/authentication...

Keeping up with the latest software trends is always a challenge. The pace at which things come (and sometimes go) in the software industry can boggle the mind. Not everybody has the luxury of studying the ins and outs of every shiny technology that passes by. Most developers have their comfort zone and they tend to stay in it. However, good developers also pay at least some attention to new technologies, new techniques, and new trends...

Now that the first quarter of 2012 is just about over, and spring is in the air, there’s no better time to take advantage of Magenic’s incredible thought leaders. Take a look at just some of the great things they have been up to lately and what they have in store.

We are coming up to the end of “Launch Month” for SQL Server 2012. On March 7, Launch Day, I published the first five reasons I was excited. In honor of the local SQL Launch in Minneapolis, I thought I would add to the list. So, in no particular order here are five more reasons I am excited about SQL Server 2012 that should excite you as well.

Some of our clients partner with Magenic to build add-ins for Office using the Visual Studio Tools for Office technology. Visual Studio Tools for Office, commonly known as VSTO, is a set of development tools available in the form of a Visual Studio template-based add-in and a runtime that allows Microsoft Office 2003 and later versions of Office applications to host the .NET Framework Common Language Runtime (CLR) to expose their functionality via the .NET type system.

With thundering applause, SQL Server 2012 is released to manufacturing! OK, it may not have been that exciting for most but for SQL Server professionals, a new release event is always an exciting and critical step in the evolution of SQL Server. With each release of SQL Server, we’ve seen great advancements in what is offered as an overall complete and powerful database engine and feature set.

Today I would like to talk about columnstore indexing one of the many new features that stand out in latest release of SQL Server 2012. Columnstore indexes are primarily designed for use in dimensional data warehouses and data marts and are optimized to improve query performance from a star or similar join in some cases boosting execution times up to 100 times faster than a traditional row based index.