News

Focus 2012:

The digital lifestyle of consumers is spilling into the workplace. Easy to access apps that deploy to your mobile device are now being demanded for the work environment so that the best business decisions can be made quickly, wherever an increasingly mobile and connected workforce is located. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement is growing, and with the consumer mobile app market, employees have high expectations.

 Mobility is the number one tech priority for businesses world-wide in 2012. So delivering Line of Business (LoB) applications with a consistent User Experience (UX), on the PC Desktop and/or in a Web Browser, which can be customised for your PC or device form factor, is a natural business progression. The Graphical User Interface (GUI) on screens and the Natural User Interface (NUI) including touch, voice and gesture, that people are comfortable and familiar with at home and on the move, also make sense for business.

 This 'Consumerisation of IT' requires a scalable n-tier based approach for consuming Rich Internet Application (RIA) services integrated with Microsoft Azure Cloud services and embracing IT as a Service ( ITaaS: Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS)) with a consistent Metro style UI will provide tremendous business benefits. Utilising the new WinRT (Windows Runtime) , the engine that powers the new Metro-style, tablet-friendly user interface in Windows 8.

So, aside from browser rendering, presentation technologies will also avail themselves of XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) on WinRT (a replacement for the deprecated WinAPI (Windows Application Programming Interface). Windows 8 will run on x86/x64, ARM (Advanced RISC Machine based on 32-bit RISC or reduced instruction set architecture) and SoC (System on a chip) designs prmarily from Intel and AMD.

Z A R D O Z has standardised on a MDD (Model Driven Development) approach using Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch 2012 which is integrated into to the Visual Studio suite of products. Being 'data-driven', it uses data tables to create screens and code that can be customised. It is expressly targeted to developing LoB (Line of Business) applications using Microsoft Databases and many other data sources. It's part of a new strategy by Microsoft to catch a wider developer community and encourage them to use its Cloud offerings. LightSwitch builds HTML5 and Silverlight 5.0 applications and creates scalable, multi-tiered, well architected applications based on design patterns such as EF (Entity Framework), RIA (Rich Internet Application) Services and MVVM (Model-View View-Model).

Technologies

Visual Studio 2012 for Microsoft .Net Framework 4.5
Developer Tool for Application Creation.

Expression Blend 5.0 - HTML5 and CSS3 with JavaScript / XAML / Silverlight 5.0
Design Tools for User Interface and interaction.

File Storage / Azure Storage and SQL Server 2012 / SQL Azure
Data and database Management for Data storage and retrieval.

Internet Explorer 10
Web Browser for Web Interface rendering.

Windows Azure
Cloud Services Platform for scalable, back-end provisions in the Cloud.