William Vaughn's Musings

Just thinking aloud here. So, let’s say you have a team of report developers and you find that more than one report needs to access a common set of routines.

I was getting terrible performance simply trying to open a file stored on a local SharePoint server. I had upgraded it to 2010 from 2007 and discovered that it would not update in place (no 32-bit support) so I had to manually reload the documents from a Colligo backup. Thank the stars for Colligo. Bottom line: I’m done with SharePoint.

These are the issues I faced:

I tried to upload a new Office 2010 PowerPoint document to my SharePoint 2007 server and I kept getting “Fail” on the upload. I installed SharePoint 2010 and after having discovered that you have to install the client Office 2010 software on the server to get it to accept bulk uploads I discovered that it too won’t accept certain PPTx files.

It was brought to my attention that there was some concern that the “amateur” LightSwitch developers would be incapable of writing stored procedures so the tool should not support accessing them—it doesn’t. Here is my response along with a couple of other questions for Microsoft…

Microsoft is gearing up to announce “LightSwitch”, it’s newest data application developer tool. Targeted to developers of “…all skill levels” it’s designed to permit access to local or remote data sources including SQL Server, Azure and SharePoint. I assume this means that amateur developers will have another tool to work with—assuming they can afford it and their IT organization will let them use it.

Frankly, I’ve known about this new offering for some time but until now, I was under NDA and could not reveal any of its details (or even the name). Now that it’s been released, I have a few choice words to add to the drumbeat…

Note to self (and anyone else using RS Scripter to backup/transport a Reporting Services catalog): If you get a permissions error when scripting, try un-checking any User folders that you don’t own. Apparently, it can’t access other user’s reports when scripting.

I’ve been working with the new “2008 R2” Reporting Services BI tools (which generate 2010 RDL) that get installed with the latest release of SQL Server. Ah, I have a pretty good idea why Microsoft chose to release this “sub-release” instead of a “2010” version, but I’ll leave that discussion to another post. At this time (unless its already too late) I would like to provide a few suggestions for the Reporting Services team working on the 2011 version of the BI tools. Sadly, I expect that these tools are cast in stone somewhere on campus or on the other side of the world…