William (Bill) Vaughn's Musings

I have asked the Microsoft.Public.PowerPoint list several times to answer this question. I have asked my MVP lead several times. I have received no response. Apparently, he has received no response. Yes, I am an MVP in the US, in Redmond and within 20 minutes of the campus.

This is the Picture Formatting dialog I am attempting to customize. I want to have a way to define a custom picture format and apply it at the click of an icon in the ribbon.

In Word, the style ribbon is fully customizable:

How can this be done in PPT?

The webinars I’ve already recorded (and those I’m going to present) can be found by visiting this site. Look under the “IT” heading to see links to the content. The recorded sessions might be repeated in the future but the recording are available:

Visual Studio, SQL Server & Reporting Services: 6 High Impact Training Sessions
July 21, 22, 23 (part 1) and July 28, 29, 30 (part 2) at 1PM EST.

• This is a set of 6 seminars given in two parts one that focuses on SQL Server, the second on Reporting Services. This high-impact series of training webinars is for anyone who wants to leverage Visual Studio, SQL Server and Reporting Services best practices- learning what works, what doesn't and why. These sessions are for developers, architects and managers who want to know how and (more importantly) when to leverage the power and benefits of SQL Server and Reporting Services.

CLR Executables: Stored Procedures, Functions, Aggregates, & User-Defined Types
(presented May 13, 2009)

• This session will discuss how to create CLR executables in Visual Basic.NET and C#. We'll see how to create CLR stored procedures, functions, aggregates as well as user-defined types. The session demonstrates CLR executable development through use of Visual Studio as well as SQL Server Management Studio.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio & SQL Server Reporting 

(presented April 7, 2009)

• This session discusses how Visual Studio developers can leverage the power of the Report Definition Language to manage and generate client-side reports or launch SQL Server Reporting Services reports. We'll discuss the latest MicrosoftReportViewer control as well as the Business Intelligence toolset exposed in Visual Studio 2008.

Managing and Writing High-Performance SQL Server Stored Procedures
(presented March 12, 2009)

• Stored procedures have been recognized by database administrators and developers as the most efficient mechanism to access and protect SQL Server databases. When written and executed correctly, these server-side blocks of code can significantly improve performance, security and developer efficiency.

IMHO, I think that SQL Server Developer Edition should have a “switch” to permit developers (ideally on a connection-by-connection basis) to “select” which version of SQL Server is being executed. As most of you know the difference between the versions is all done with mirrors as the bits are the same for the most part. I can’t see that it would be that hard to expose that selection switch so a developer could test his application and the server-side executables on the version of SQL Server he or she is targeting.

This has just gone online. While the picture is a bit dated, the subject is not…

Here I talk about using RDL and the ReportViewer to build sophisticated applications with far less code.

http://www.dnrtv.com/

I wrote a sample application that illustrates how the SQL Compact (what Microsoft calls “Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition”) database used with the Local Data Cache gets out of sync (which I would expect it to) with the host database and how the application can get it back in sync. However, it seems that when they are really out of sync, the only thing to do is to clear out the client database and start over.

Peter encouraged me to check out the new Report Builder 2.0. Apparently the folks at Microsoft saw the problems with the “model” approach and created an entirely new Report Design and rendering paradigm for those capable of making their own reports. I’ll be reviewing this new version later this year—hopefully in a SQL Server magazine article.

Peter showed me the new Report Builder in Reporting Services 2008. I agree, it’s far better than the first version. I would like to write a whitepaper on it to reintroduce it to the development community but I have a question.