My work with the iPhone SDK continues, working on three clients to our backend services at the moment. I’m very much looking forward to blogging about this as it’s cleared at work. But as you probably have noticed from my posts, working locally and synchronizing with the back-end is what I believe most iPhone applications are about. Do quick and stuff you need to remember on the iPhone, work out the details from your computer, keep everything in sync. That’s why I’m excited about Google’s data integration. That’s why I’m excited about integrating SQLite. That’s why I spend a lot of time working with SOAP integration. And of course, it’s all good fun. I’m tempted to say that working with a back-end is a lot easier than doing everything local. At least the satisfaction of seeing the work you do on the little screen influencing the real world is a lot better than it just influencing that screen.

One thing I’m miffed about, though, is the NDA. They’ve got a 100,000 downloads, and if 1/20t of this is developers, then that’s still 5,000 developers. Where are they all? I can’t find much going on on discussion boards, forums, mailing-lists or whatever. And Apple is only slowly letting them in to their community. I hope they’ll let us in soon, I want to discuss problems I’m having without having people with briefcases coming after me, I want to know what other people are working on, I want the development to be more social. Right now, it’s mostly a one-man game, and that’ll get old very soon

A food obsessed IT developer writes about setting up visual studio to develop for sharepoint without having sharepoint installed on the development computer. Nice instructions and saved me quite a bit of time.

I was installing a set of templates on a sharepoint server I’m setting up for work, and I came accross these great instruction on how to install them, since I had the same problem as Matthew in the comments. I even learned that the command line has for-loops. I always assumed this shell had absolutely nothing. Now I just believe it’s very limited. zsh for Windows? (without Cygwin?)

Reading more in The Dashboard Spy I found this great table of questions users ask and how you should answer them when it comes to designing dashboard:

Check out the reference whitepaper by PureShare on Best Practices in Dashboard Design. And for that next great UI design, check out 175+ Data and Information Visualization Examples and Resources

Just a quick note on Name Calculations in SSAS, they need to be written in whatever SQL dialect the underlying DB engine (probably MS-SQL) understands. I wanted to make a Sales Margin calculation, and to avoid a Divide by Zero where sale price was zero, my code for this was:
<br /> CASE<br /> WHEN Sale<>0 THEN (Sale-Cost)/Sale<br /> ELSE 0<br /> END<br />
Never before have I needed four lines to do a simple IF.