New Stuff
Resources for Your Developer Toolbox
Marnie Hutcheson
Contents
Analysis and Reporting Solutions
Databeacon Smart Client software allows users to perform data analysis, turning relational data from any data source into online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes that can be explored and manipulated using one of three Databeacon viewers.
The simplest viewer is Databeacon Web Reporter. Next is Databeacon Player, which lets you not only view reports but also explore the data cube more completely. You can isolate a particular group of data, drill down, view DataSets, modify filters, and even save your own flavor of a report. Last and most interesting is Databeacon Insight, which gives you full access to all the report creation and presentation capabilities. Insight has two main windows. The first lets you do analysis, set up data, perform drill downs, and so on. The presentation pane shows you the report that your users will see.
Databeacon Insight and Databeacon Player give you the chance to share your insights with others through static reports (in either table or chart format) or by exporting your data to Microsoft® Excel®. All Databeacon Smart Client viewers provide Microsoft Office integration that lets you print, copy and paste, and e-mail your reports.
You design and build multidimensional OLAP cubes using Databeacon Publisher, a simple and intuitive GUI application that gives you access to the Client OLAP Reporting Environment (CORE). Databeacon Insight is then used to create reports that can be viewed using any of the three Databeacon viewers.
Databeacon Smart Client gives you the three viewers plus Publisher. All three viewers take advantage of .NET-based smart client technology so they can be embedded in a Web page. They install and run automatically as long as the Microsoft .NET Framework is running on an appropriately configured client machine.
Price: $899 per single license.
View, Print, and Markup Formats
Brava! Desktop v1.2, by Informative Graphics, is a multiformat graphics viewer that lets you view, print, and markup formats such as TIFF, CALS, PDF, CGM and HPGL plot files, and native formats from Microsoft Office applications, Visio®, AutoCAD, MicroStation, and SolidWorks.
Brava Desktop also includes the company's own Content Sealed Format (CSF), which gives you a new alternative for content distribution that has several advantages over PDF, which can now be edited, converted, or changed using third-party software. Secure CSF files saved by Brava Desktop or published by IGC publishing products can be viewed with the free Brava Reader, which also views PDF and TIFF files.
Brava Desktop doesn't just let you scroll through page images and CAD drawings; you can also manipulate a document's built-in attributes. For example, in a multilayer document, you select the layers you want to view, and use the measuring tool to pick dimensions off the drawing (even with a scanned document).
Other cool features new in version 1.2 include Dynamic Compare which can overlay two images and highlight the differences and the ability to flip between two drawings or image revisions to compare differences. It also does redaction, which lets you block confidential areas, words, and phrases from being viewed, printed, and searched on in your documents. You can save any document, image, or CAD drawing format type to PDF. It even saves your markup as Adobe annotation elements.
Price: $345 per single license.
Localize Your Apps
Lingobit Localizer version 4.0 supports more than 180 different languages, including various European, Asian, and right-to-left languages.
The Translate Expert helps you to ensure that your application is ready for localization. For example, it examines source code and resource separation, and it will check to see if your code crashes when strings are translated. The Validation Expert recognizes several types of common mistakes like inconsistent format strings, duplicate hotkeys, missing periods, and so on. The Statistics Expert helps you track your progress and pinpoint potential problem areas.
The Professional version includes these Expert features and is probably all you will need for small localization projects. The Enterprise version targets large projects with numerous target languages. It leverages the Experts extensively and includes several additional tools. Both versions come with the Lingobit Localizer Translator and aim to help you "never translate the same string twice."
Price: $895 per single license
(Professional Edition).
Create Help Files
Dr. Explain, by Cognitive Force, presents an automated approach to creating very comprehensive help files quickly. Dr. Explain captures windows from a live Windows®-based application and creates screenshots as you would expect, but then it analyzes the window content, enumerates the screens, and attaches numbered callouts to all the significant elements.
All captured windows are stored in a single project file. You can group them by modules, and when something changes, you can update individual windows, add new screenshots, and update control references. You don't need to recreate the whole sequence of windows.
With Dr. Explain, you can customize the structure of the menus, screen layout, colors, and callout details. Then you just export the project to HTML. You get instant online help complete with index page, menus, hyperlinked callouts, and professional screens all formatted and ready to upload to your server.
Price: $79 per single license.
The Bookshelf
ASP.NET 2.0 Upgrader's Guide: C# Edition (Murach), by Doug Lowe and Joel Murach, focuses not only on what's new in ASP.NET 2.0 (that's the easy part) but, more importantly, it shows you how and when you can use these new features in the real world.
This book is laid out in an unusual but helpful way. The left hand page presents an explanation and the right hand page offers you guidelines, examples, screen shots, and how-to notes. This makes it very easy to find what you are looking for,understand it, and decide whether its right for your application.
Each chapter deals with a key feature in ASP.NET 2.0 like the SQL Server™ and XML data sources; the GridView, DetailView, and FormView controls; login and site navigation controls; and tools for configuring and deploying new apps.
Price: $39.50, 526 pages.
The Windows Presentation Foundation of the upcoming Windows Vista™ operating system is the graphics subsystem for building vector-based user interfaces. This new approach to UI creation and presentation will let you take advantage of the graphics capabilities built into the latest video cards, and simplifies UI creation with XML support.
In Programming Windows Presentation Foundation: Building Windows XP/Vista User Interfaces (O'Reilly), authors Chris Sells and Ian Griffiths provide a comprehensive look at all the new technologies inside the product. These include an engine that supports 3D graphics and animation, a new XML-based markup language called XAML, and a radical new model for customizing controls—the text boxes, buttons, and listboxes that constitute the building blocks of a user interface. By page two of the book, you will have written your first Windows Presentation Foundation app, and by the end of the first chapter you will be familiar with much of the new framework.
The result is a platform that unifies several services—including 2D and 3D drawing and imaging, document-based rendering, and audio and video services—that developers can use to build rich UIs for both standalone applications and applications blended with a Web site within the browser.
The book introduces you to the powerful set of tools for managing the visual layout of your apps, describes Windows Presentation Foundation features for connecting the UI to underlying data, and shows you how to use styles and control templates to customize UI appearance. There are also chapters on using drawing tools, writing custom controls, and using the framework's animation facilities.
Sells and Griffiths provide plenty of C# code and examples of the new eXtensible Application Markup Language (XAML) for declaring the structure of a Windows Presentation Foundation user interface. The book also includes insightful discussions on the powerful new programming styles, along with a comparison of the features that support interoperability with Windows Forms and other Windows-based legacy applications.
Price: $39.95, 430 pages.
Visual Studio Tools for Office: Using C# with Excel, Word, Outlook, and InfoPath (Addison Wesley Professional), by Eric Carter (who also happens to have created the software) and Eric Lippert, gives readers the first look inside programming with this new toolset. Using Visual Studio® Tools for Office, you can program Microsoft Excel 2003, Word 2003, Outlook® 2003, and InfoPath® 2003 to create your own custom Office-based solutions. Data/view separation, design-time views of Excel and Word documents inside Visual Studio, and rich support for Windows Forms controls in a document are just some of the powerful features the authors explain.
You'll come away with an understanding of the architecture of Microsoft Office programming and the object models behind it, Office automation and add-ins, and the code behind a document. For more advanced coverage, the authors present server data scenarios and explore .NET code security and Visual Studio Tools for Office deployment. They also show the reader how to develop COM add-ins for Word and Excel, and create Outlook add-ins as well.
Price: $49.99, 1008 pages.
Send your New Stuff to newstuff@microsoft.com.
All prices were confirmed at press time and are subject to change.
Marnie Hutcheson is president of Internet Development Associates (Ideva), a firm in Ocala, Florida, that specializes in Internet and intranet Web application design and development. She has published technical papers and books on various computing topics. You can reach her at
marnie@ideva.com.