Recently in Visual Basic .NET Category

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.

Progressive Business and Beta V have partnered together to present another series of technical webinars. The current series focuses on SQL Server and Reporting Services and consists of six 90-minute talks given two a day for three days. The next scheduled offerings are September 9-11, October 13-15 and November 2-5th. See the following link for an outline and pricing details. Note that this series includes a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) as well as a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services—once we get them from the publisher…

Visual Studio, SQL Server & Reporting Services: 6 High Impact Training Sessions
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.

Progressive Business and Beta V have partnered together to present another series of developer-centric webinars. The current series focuses on SQL Server and Reporting Services and consists of six 90-minute talks given two a day for three days. The next scheduled offerings are September 9-11, October 13-15 and November 2-5th. See the following link for an outline and pricing details. Note that this series includes a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server (7th Edition) as well as a copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide to SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.

Visual Studio, SQL Server & Reporting Services: 6 High Impact Training Sessions
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.

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:

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.

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 installed VS 2010 Beta 1 over the weekend and since it’s now in public beta I’m free to comment on it. To make a long story short, “It’s not done.”

So, I asked Microsoft to explain why the ConnectionString dialog exposed by the SqlClient .NET Data Provider no longer has the Connection Reset key. They say it was removed. Has anyone heard why? IMHO, this exacerbates the problem with the Close method. That is, when you use the SqlConnection.Close method in ADO.NET, the connection state is maintained until the next time the connection is used or it times out (4-8 minutes later). I think this is dumb. Why not release the connection state on close? Sure, it’s going to take another round-trip to do so but that can be done in the background asynchronously so the client need not care or even notice that the connection they just closed is being cleaned up and the state they left behind is being flushed. It’s like having a hotel that leaves the dirty sheets on the bed and wet towels on the floor until the next guest tries to get into the room. That’s when the open must be delayed to set the room (or the connection) back to the initial state.

Leaving the state behind means that anything allocated to the Connection is left lying around in memory or on disk getting old and useless. Since they killed the Connection Reset option, it can’t even be used by subsequent connections. I certainly hope the default (and now only) state is “True” (clean on open).

Better organization of objects like Stored Procedures, Views, Tables into logical (user-defined) groups: Accounting, Finance, Inventory, Personnel. Some SPs or objects might be in more than one group.

This is a more complex task. While NorthWind has relatively few objects, even Adventureworks (AW) has almost too many tables and objects to manage graphically without some degree of organization. AW deals with this to some extent by clever object naming, but this only applies to tables. When a database has 200 stored procedures it would be great to have these organized by class but consider that some objects may be used in more than one “class”.