Microsoft

Reporting Services 2008 Information Aggregator

Richard Rousseau — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 16:53:42 GMT

Robert Bruckner points out the new MSDN aggregation site for Reporting Services 2008. Looks to be the one stop for a wide range of Reporting Services 2008 information with sections for downloads, white papers, video tutorials, links to blogs, podcasts, etc.

There are also sites for Reporting Services 2005 and 2000, though they are not as rich.

Would you like some Microsoft with your Java?

Richard Rousseau — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:32:57 GMT

While installing a Java update I came across the typical bundled software option and found Sun was promoting the MSN Toolbar. I recall previous Java updates offering the Google Toolbar and was a bit surprised to find a Microsoft product being bundled with a Java update. Aren't Sun and Microsoft competitors? At least their frameworks are (.Net vs. Java).

The install option was selected by default. I took the screenshot after I unchecked it.

Using Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 with Virtual PC 2007...

Richard Rousseau — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 19:24:29 GMT

If you want to use Windows Server 2008 or Vista SP1 as a guest operating system with Virtual PC 2007, you'll need Virtual PC 2007 SP1. Updates for both x86 and x64 clients are available. Not sure if you could get either of these working using a different OS selection in VPC. I'm eager to try out the remoting feature in Powershell v2 and currently these operating systems are they only ones that support Powershell remoting.

Nested Subreport Background Color - SSRS 2005

Richard Rousseau — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:18:00 GMT

I was recently styling a SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 report that contained a subreport as one of its columns. This was a tabular report that needed an alternating background color for each row. The trouble with this is that the subreport cell doesn't expose a BackgroundColor property in the report designer.

No BackgroundColor Property!

For my first attempt at fixing this, I created a parameter on the subreport called BGColor and setup the subreport's text box BackgroundColor property to get its value from the parameter.

Setting the Subreport BackgroundColor via Parameter.

This worked fine as long as the cell containing the subreport remains its original size. However my report had columns that sometimes displayed more than one line of text, which caused the row height to expand by a few lines. This expanded the cell around the subreport, but the subreport did not expand to fill this new area.

Bad Report!

At this point I decided it didn't make sense that the cell containing the subreport didn't have a BackgroundColor property. A quick search for the RDL schema showed that it's legal to have a BackgroundColor element in the Style element of a subreport element. Armed with this new information, I opened the RDL file in Notepad2 and added the following…

                    <Subreport Name="subreport1">
                      <ReportName>SubReport</ReportName>
                      <Style>
                        <BackgroundColor>=iif(RowNumber(Nothing) Mod 2, "Gray", "White")</BackgroundColor>
                        <BorderStyle>
                          <Default>Solid</Default>
                        </BorderStyle>
                      </Style>
                      <ZIndex>1</ZIndex>
                    </Subreport>

The BackgroundColor of the subreport will now fill the entire cell even when the cell is expanded.

Note: The visual studio report designer will not display the background color. You'll need to deploy the report to an actual Report Server to see the full background color.

Good Report!

MSDN Low Bandwidth View

Richard Rousseau — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:00:02 GMT

Jon Galloway posted an article describing a way to view low bandwidth optimized MSDN pages by modifying the URL.

Try it out...

Simply take the URL - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object.aspx

And add "(loband)" just before the ".aspx" - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.object(loband).aspx

The "loband" page provides a link near the top you can use to switch back to full fat version.

Also check Jon's site for a bookmarklet he wrote which you can use to switch this functionality on or off at any time.

This option will be very useful when my laptop's cellular connection has a bad signal (like when on the train). I imagine this will also be helpful to all those smart phone browsers out there. Any smart phone owners care to try it out?

Check out his comments section. The Product Unit Manager for MSDN responded with some insight into what they're doing. It sounds like they might change the way the "loband" option is specified. I was wondering why they didn't just make it a query string item, but I'll bet they've already got some serious url rewriting going on.

My lunch break take on Silverlight...

Richard Rousseau — Thu, 03 May 2007 23:56:44 GMT

I didn't go to MIX, but I did read a few blog posts of people who did. Definately need to dive deeper this weekend. Here is my quick overview of what was announced/released...

DLR

Dynamic Language Runtime
Lets your .net code iteract with dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, Javascript
Lets those languages interact with your .net code! Neat!

CLR on a Mac

A browser plug-in that will run .net 3.x apps
OSX Only
Intel based Macs only?
Safari, Firefox, IE
Subset of the BCL
Rewritten CLR

Silverlight

Lots of classes to make working with media easier.
720p

Some links for further review...
http://www.silverlight.net/
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

Wanna try it?
Get the plug-in. - Quick install. No need to restart computer, but you will have to restart the browser. Definately works in FireFox.
Go to http://silverlight.net/fox/