Over a decade ago, a small team of designers met in a small conference room on the second floor of Building 41 at Microsoft to create a brand-new language, C#. The guiding principles of the language emphasized simplicity, familiarity, safety, and practicality. Of course, all those principles needed to balance against one another; none are...

PivotTables may be Excel's most powerful feature, but Microsoft has estimated that only 15% of Excel users take advantage of them. That's because PivotTables (and their companion feature, PivotCharts) have a reputation for being difficult to learn. Not any more! In this book, Excel legends Bill Jelen...

Contextual computing has been around for several years with a variety of names such as pervasive computation and omnipresent computing. Recently there has been a drive toward making personal digital assistants (PDAs) more aware of their environment. For example, a cell phone may sense that it is in a conference room and reason that it should...

Let’s just look it right in the eye and call it out. We in the IT industries have been barraged with the buzzwords over and over again since we rolled into the new millennium: the transition to utility computing, or grid computing, or cloud computing (depending on the source/exact month/position of the stars in the sky). We’ve...

Learn how to get the most out of all the newest features of Photoshop and improve your images with "Complete Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Digital Photographers." Photoshop is the new darkroom, providing instant results and making professional-level tools accessible even to amateurs. This new edition of the book is filled with brand new...

As Microsoft’s new multipurpose portal technology, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) is a brand new way for SharePoint users to seamlessly access and integrate data from any application or databases within SharePoint 2010. With this...

In the late 1960s racer and businessman Gordon Spice familiarized himself with the Nürburgring using a rented BMW 2002. He went through a couple of sets of tires and three sets of brake pads during the exercise and covered the cost of such consumables by charging folks to ride with him! The rental company was somewhat puzzled by the fact...

The LS family of GM engines represents substantial design changes and performance enhancements as compared to the early generations of what I'll generically refer to as the small-block Chevy engine. The LS2 is based on a 6.0L block and is a great choice for a performance build, able to take advantage of a wide range of performance...

To say that the graphical imagery in video games is very important to the games industry is a bit of an understatement. The graphics in games are so important that they often can make or break a game's success. It is true that all other aspects of a game are important, but the visuals are at times the main selling point along with game...

Prior to the advent of APEX, developing fully interactive web based systems over data...