When building with Visual Studio, you sometimes need to install extensions that provide extra libraries or functionality for your apps.

DBA Julian Fletcher on the key points of good indexing practice in SQL Server.

UX Designer Leanne Dobson rounds up the pros and cons of voice technology and what you should consider when designing for voice interaction.

The SQL Server Query Store feature provides you with insight on query plan choice and performance. It simplifies performance troubleshooting by helping you quickly find performance differences caused by query plan changes.

.NET Standard isn’t a framework or library: it’s a set of APIs that a platform has to implement or a library has to constrain itself to in order to claim to be compliant with the standard.

Aspect-oriented programming is an expansion on the principle of separation of concerns. It aims to extract cross-cutting concerns, such as authorisation or logging, that are often intermingled with other code.

Coding standards are increasingly something we can automate but guidelines, learned through hard experience, direct our craft.

OCC’s knowledge-sharing programme includes an internal technical newsletter, where developers share recommendations and discoveries. Here are a couple of recent tips from software consultants Matthew Clarke and Adam Wiseman.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare has the potential to transform diagnostic techniques and save tens of thousands of lives in the next few decades, according to the UK government.

Social care chatbots will change the way people find the care they need, explains John Boyle.

Insights into updates on Xamarin and Visual Studio App Center mobile development tools.

The TAB’s feedback on JavaScript front-end frameworks and TypeScript Front-end frameworks OCC has been experimenting with feature-rich JavaScript frameworks. One of the current forerunners is React, which we used in our Pegasus project to enable component-based dynamic web UI. For a new ContrOCC web project, we compared React to Vue.js, which is increasing in popularity and offers several advantages over React. However, although Vue.js does solve some of the issues we found using React on Pegasus, this does not outweigh[...]

OCC provides social care software technologies that allow local authorities, service providers and the public to interact efficiently. Over the past 6 years, the emphasis of our research has changed significantly due to social services policy changes. These encourage end-users (the public) to choose and drive activity, with local authorities having responsibility to monitor and manage the situation, allocate budgets, etc. Highly flexible and sophisticated systems are needed to allow individual user to effectively configure different services and workflows to[...]

DBA Julian Fletcher discusses some easy ways to improve database performance As anybody who has worked on projects involving a large amount of in-database processing will know, performance is a top priority. Clients usually consider poor performance to be a bug in much the same way as ‘traditional’ bugs (unhandled errors, getting the numbers wrong, things simply not working, etc). So our product and custom development release cycles include tasks to ensure we get good performance out of new features[...]