Jeff Cogswell

I recently started using Microsoft’s new Office 2013 along with its SkyDrive integration. This has allowed me to put SkyDrive through the wringer and see if it works as well as Microsoft claims. I wanted to learn if this cloud-based storage was fast, reliable and, most importantly, was it useful? For starters, let’s talk about […]

Here’s SkyDrive’s Web Interface With a Windows 8 Look SkyDrive can be accessed through a nice Web interface that, like many of Microsoft’s online properties today, has a general Windows 8 look to it. The interface shows you your folders and files. Click on Folders to Access Data Files Within the Web interface, you can […]

In December, I reviewed the new Visual Studio 2012, and I briefly mentioned that it includes a new version of Microsoft LightSwitch. LightSwitch first came on the scene two years ago, and although I felt it had a certain amount of promise, I had serious reservations about suggesting it would take off in sales. Essentially […]

Shifting From Silverlight to HTML 5 When you create a new application, you can choose between the Silverlight-based applications or HTML5 applications. In either case, you can use either C# or Visual Basic. Connecting to Databases Once your application starts, you can either connect to an existing database or design your own database. Here we’re […]

Kognitio has managed to create an affordable cloud-based analytical platform that customers can deploy within a preconfigured Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) image that contains everything they need to get started without having to run post-installation shell scripts. Kognitio Cloud is a specially built version of the Kognitio Analytical Platform that runs as a node […]

Getting Started To get started, you search the AWS marketplace for Kognitio. Here is the AWS Marketplace page in the Web browser. Easy Installation Installation is easy as starting the wizard for the Amazon Machine Image on the marketplace. Setting Up a Server I wanted a bigger server, so I increased it to an M1 […]

Visual Studio 2012 includes many new features, the biggest of which focus on development specifically for the new Windows 8 interface (previously known as “Metro”). I’ve been using Visual Studio since its original form with Visual C++ 1.0 almost 20 years ago. This review will point out the new features, as well as a look […]

Design and Build User Interfaces With Blend The edition of Blend in Visual Studio 2012 includes two project types, both for Windows Store. One is HTML and the other is XAML. The HTML type is limited to the JavaScript language, whereas XAML allows you to code in C#, Visual Basic or Microsoft’s Managed C++. Building […]

In January 2010, I reviewed the new language called Google Go for eWEEK. In that review, I focused mainly on the syntax of the language. Since then, the language has changed and evolved, culminating (finally) this year with Release 1.0 on March 28 and release 1.0.3 Sept. 24. And over the past few months there […]

Go Looks Like Another C The Go language looks like another C-based language, but from a programming perspective, it feels and works more like a modern dynamic language. Advanced Features Go includes a large number of external packages with features such as compression, cryptography, image handling, Web development and operating systems support. Additional Support Recently […]