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…
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.
Given the number of people that struggled with the intermediate to advanced topics in my SQL Server and Reporting Services 9-hour series of sessions for Progressive, we've decided to offer the first in a series of introductory webinar courses to be offered each month (for the forseeable future). We're also providing guided labs for this course--as if it's taking place in a classroom. I'll be there to answer questions and if necessary setup a SharedView session with the student to debug their work in real time.
I waited until VS2010 RTM to try to import the (working) VS2008 projects I have that use the ReportViewer. So far all of them fail to convert properly. Some throw exceptions some simply don’t let me access the RV control’s action menu. This is the same problem we had when converting VS2005 to VS2008 SP1 projects.
A third-party report generator (Pebble Reports) sent me this IBM presentation (see page 71) when I asked if their tool supported 2005, 2008 or 2010 RDL (they only support 2005).
“We depend on ReportViewer control for printing purposes and we are as miffed as you are that ReportViewer is always out of sync with ReportServer. Even MS competitors are taking advantage of this situation, for example see slide 71 of this IBM presentation where they talk about Microsoft's version incompatibilities.”
This further adds to the argument that Microsoft is not seen as capable of keeping their various development paradigms and the metadata they support in sync. I pounded on this issue two years ago when Visual Studio 2008 was getting ready to ship. However, two years later Visual Studio BI and ReportViewer developers are facing the same lack of compatibility with the latest RDL (about to ship with SQL Server 2008 R2). Are developers expected to wait another two years before the ReportViewer control will work with RDL 2010 in local mode? By then I expect additional innovations to be out of reach as RDL evolves—leaving the ReportViewer control perpetually one version behind.
