Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) is a powerful tool that enables you to automate operations in the Microsoft Offi ce applications and in other applications that host VBA. By automating operations using VBA, you can save yourself and your colleagues huge amounts of time and effort. Getting more work done in less time is usually good...

The first author, Said Elnashaie, and his wife, Shadia Elshishini, moved next door to the second author, Frank Uhlig, and his family in 2000. The two families became good neighbors and friends. Their chats covered the usual topics and occasionally included random teaching, departmental, and...

When I first discovered DMVs, I was enthralled because they made many difficult things so easy. It was simple to identify, typically within seconds, the core performance problems that affect SQL Server databases. For example, I could quickly discover which queries were taking the longest time to run, which indexes were missing, and...

TO THOSE OF US WHO PAY ATTENTION to such things, the world of software development has changed a lot in the last few years. In the .NET world, Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010 is undoubtedly the most successful development environment. Since the release of the fi rst .NET version in February 2002, this product has undergone dramatic...

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After being shrouded in esoterica for a long time, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) have become part of everyday life, especially the Global Positioning System (GPS). Having spent 40 years involved with the subject, it became clear to me that it would be useful to have a book about the business aspects of these systems. This...

Gradle is a flexible yet model-driven JVM-based build tool. Gradle acknowledges and improves on the very best ideas from Make, Ant, Ivy, Maven, Rake, Gant, Scons, SBT, Leinengen, and Buildr. The best-of-breed features previously...

I am not an expert. I have never claimed to be an expert at anything (at least not seriously done so), least of all an expert in forensic analysis. I am not an expert in Windows Registry analysis. I am simply, by profession, a responder and analyst with some work and research experience in this area. I have also performed a number...

Yatta, we did it! We wrote a book about Entity Framework! It’s not our first book, but it’s the first one written in English and distributed worldwide. It was a great challenge, but having the opportunity to spread the word about Entity Framework made it worth the effort. Entity Framework is a great tool that speeds up the...

This book is about plugins for JIRA, the popular issue tracker from Atlassian. An issue tracker lets people collaborate better when there are things to be done. You can use an issue tracker for everything from tracking bugs in software, to customer support requests, and beyond. Plugins extend what JIRA can do and can be developed...

Gamification may be a new term, but the idea of using game-thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences isn’t exactly new. The military has been using games and simulations for hundreds (if not thousands) of years, and the U.S. military has been a pioneer in the use of video games across branches. Three...