Recently in Development Category

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.

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…

This week I’m transitioning my existing Reporting Services catalog to SQL Server 2008 R2. I’m also building a separate VM where I can demonstrate the differences in “native” vs. SharePoint integration. This blog will serve as a notepad to log the issues I encounter along the way. Incidentally, I had to bump up the VM RAM to 3GB to get this install sequence to run without swapping. I also allocated 3 processors to the VM as it was also CPU bound with only one processor. I noticed that deploy performance was noticeably longer once SharePoint integration was enabled.

They’ve invited me to talk at the local SQL Saturday #47 on June 12th. I’m giving two talks—one on Report Builder 2.0 and another on Visual Studio Local Data Cache.

SQL Saturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This event will be held Jun 12 2010 at THE MIXER on the Microsoft campus, 15255 NE 40th Street, North Commons, REDMOND, WA 98052. Admittance to this event is free, all costs are covered by donations and sponsorships.

Please register soon as seating is limited, and let friends and colleagues know about the event.