Wade Dorrell's MSDN blog

In Office 2010 you can personalize the ribbon. It’s very easy to do . (And it has the benefit of not being accidentally customized, and easily reset, which was not the case with the toolbars in Office 2003 and prior .) Because “High Importance” and “Low...

Thanks for attending SharePoint Conference 2009 & talking with us about your scenarios, troubles, what you’d like to see us turn the ratchet on, and what you love. I talked with a slice of you about PerformancePoint Services, but also the whole insights...

I’ve left this blog mostly untouched for the past 6 months. Here’s what I’ve been up to: Tightening rivets on Office 2010 wave products. The ship’s looking good! Going through real world scenarios using the latest bits. You probably know Microsoft calls...

Boise Code Camp 2009 is a free, popular (400+ registrants last year) and educational conference on a Saturday (March 28) down at Boise State University. Speakers from our community, and a few respected north-westerners, cover software development, IT...

We announced an update to the Microsoft BI roadmap today. The video by Guy Weismantel, Director of Microsoft BI is the authoritative source on the change at the moment, and I expect there will be press release/FAQ at Microsoft PressPass (I don’t see...

When deploying a dashboard to a document library from PerformancePoint 2007 Dashboard Designer, Dashboard Designer creates each dashboard page .aspx file in a folder named the same as the dashboard:   But what if we don’t want folders? The “Create...

From http://blogs.msdn.com/gpde/ Microsoft’s Global Product Development team in Europe recently completed its Treemap control for visualizing hierarchical data, seen below.  You can read more about it here and leave your feedback. If you are excited...

PerformancePoint Monitoring doesn't have as robust a prescription as Silverlight Blueprint for SharePoint , but yes, PerformancePoint Monitoring & Silverlight can be used together. PerformancePoint dashboards are SharePoint web part pages, so web...

Tim Kent at Adatis did a nice writeup on how to work with the "well-known properties" Name, Description, and Person Responsible of a PerformancePoint Monitoring first-class object (a KPI, a Scorecard, a Data Source, etc.) when calling the PmService...

Ran into this on the tubes this morning: This jQuery plugin generates sparklines directly in the browser using data supplied either inline in the HTML, or via javascript. http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/ In theory you'd be able to use this to sparkline...

Every month folks at NETDUG ask if we're hiring, whether they can give resumes to me, what it's like to work for Microsoft in Boise, are we moving to a larger/nicer building in Boise, etc. You can see all currently available openings on the Microsoft...

Customers often want to set the background color of analytic visualizations such as the ProClarity charts & grids, to match a corporate or dashboard theme. Unlike the ProClarity charts & grids, it's not possible to set the background color of...

Here's the sample code and slides I showed about the PerformancePoint SDK at TechEd. A couple notes: The build OutputDir and xcopy post-build steps assume default locations for PerformancePoint assemblies, the Monitoring Web Service, and SharePoint...

To everyone who attended my sessions and whom I talked to at TechEd 08: thank you! I got some of the PerformancePoint Monitoring SDK feedback I was looking for, both during the sessions, and especially in follow-on talks. I hope they, and the other breakouts...

I'll be facilitating 2 chalk-talks/Q&As in the TLC Interactive Theatre (small audience) at Tech·Ed 2008 Developers about PerformancePoint: BIN03-TLC  "Navigating the Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 SDK" June 3 3:00PM...

I was toying around with FriendFeed and discovered Google's charting engine. Mmm, pie: The engine can render Google Analytics-esque sparklines too. The simplicity and accessibility of this API is impressive... it's all in the URL. Now, I'm a bit agitated...

Kevin Idzi of Microsoft just released a new tool on Codeplex for painlessly moving PerformancePoint (and Excel and ProClarity) BI content between different servers, updating reference & security settings along the way... behold, The BI Report Automation...

One of the great tools Microsoft Office Labs builds is "Community Clips", which makes it easy to record what happens on-screen, along with microphone-in, as a nicely-compressed WMV file. I use the tool primarily as a way to show bugs or design...

If you're a software developer, IT hero, a student interested in code, or a human interested in code, Boise Code Camp, March 8th (Saturday) 2008, is a full day of FREE training & swag! I'll be giving a talk on building gadgets for Windows Sidebar...

Want to get rid of all extraneous site navigation on a dashboard page? When deploying to a SharePoint site you have a couple of options around appearance, one of which is selection of the master page from the site's master page gallery. Both the...

If you can handle it... try the Microsoft PerformancePoint team blog . The latest post is on PerformancePoint Dashboard Designer's ribbon challenges, and a look at how it'll work for final release. (We're one of the first MSFT teams outside Office Client...

We used to call the initial bar chart view you get in ProClarity  " The Big Red One ", because it's a single red bar. (Representing the default cell... all the default members for the current user.) We now call it "The Big Blue One" because in 6.x,...