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Excel Services offers a number of Business Intelligence features such as:

• Workbooks can be connected to enterprise data sources
• The logic contained in workbooks can be reused in server based code, i.e. don’t have to rewrite code specifically for the server
• Provides real time analysis of data
• Full features UI experience, there is no loss of fidelity when moving to the server.
• Sorting, Filtering and drill down all work the same, no loss of functionality.

It’s worth your time investigating the features offered by Excel Calculation Services

I haven’t had a featured diagram in a little while so here goes:

This doesn’t have all the pretty colours of my last ones.

But this diagram does offer a great insight into how Microsoft recommend integrating the MOSS BDC and InfoPath forms service.

Continuing on with my last post on great diagrams, today I bring you the SharePoint Capabilities Diagram:

These capabilities are:

Collaboration and social computing

Portals

Enterprise Search

Enterprise content management

Business process and forms

Business intelligence

I found this resource which lists the Supported Excel types and UDF arguments:

1. Types are in the System namespace. These are the only supported argument types.

2. The term "All numeric" refers to the following types: Double, Single, Int32, UInt32, Int16, UInt16, Byte, Sbyte. Specifically, Int64 and UInt64 are not supported types.

3. Date/time in Excel is a Double internally, but the representation (algorithm to encode date/time as Double) is different from the .NET Framework representation, and conversion is necessary. Therefore, UDF arguments support DateTime as an explicit type, and Excel Services convert any Excel Double into a .NET DateTime when the argument is of type DateTime (assuming that the Excel Double is actually a date/time value).

4. Scalar object arguments are not supported; only one-dimensional or two-dimensional object arrays are supported (see the "Arrays and Ranges" later in this article). This table row defines only how each cell in the range that is passed into the array is handled.

Like me you might sometimes struggle to describe the breath of the Microsoft stack across all the various products.

I must give credit to the Microsoft people who come up with these great looking diagrams:

Almost all SharePoint developers will know about the U2U CAML Query tool, I just thought I’d throw a little link love their way.

If you live under a rock, this tool provides a nice GUI for you to generate those nasty CAML queries:

This is a fantastic tool, I have no doubt that it will save you plenty of time.

Just remember to remove the <Query> opening and closing tags before you use it in your code.

I've just been reading Foundations of Programming, it's a free e-book from Karl Seguin of codebetter fame.

Well worth the time and the download.

It covers ALT.NET, ORM's, Dependency Injection, Unit Testing and touches on design patterns. It ends with a look at how the CLR manages memory such as boxing, pinning, the heap and stack.

BDC associations allow you to create master / child type relationships with the Business Data List Web Part and the Business Data Related List Web Part.

From the MSDN article, the following points should be followed:

• The entity that defines the association method must be below all of the entities to which it relates within the XML metadata file.
• The association method must have input parameters that map to the identifiers of all the source entities.
• The return parameter of the association method must include the identifiers of the destination entity.

I would recommend watching the associated 10 minute video from the MSDN article as well.