In Visual Studio Reporting Services BI tools, you can’t. What you can do is first export the report by navigating to the report properties in Report Manager (General tab) click the “Edit” link, and save the report to an RDL file. Next, you have to “Add Existing Item” to the project and point to the saved RDL report. Why can’t the BI tools do the same as Report Builder 2.0?

In Report Builder 2.0 one can choose the Data Source by browsing the Reporting Services catalog.

In Visual Studio Reporting Services BI tools, you can’t. When you create a new BI project the BI tools should prompt for the RS catalog as it does with a CLR project. This way, when a new report project is created the developer could choose from a list of cataloged Shared Data Sources. This would preclude the need to guess at or research the shared data source name when creating a new report project.

The company that hosts my monthly webinars (9-18 hours a month) hires a third-party company that hosts and records the Windows Live Meeting sessions. They and I have been unable to adequately address any of the following issues: (Updated Feb 22)

The company that hosts my monthly webinars (9-18 hours a month) hires a third-party company that hosts and records the Windows Live Meeting sessions. They and I have been unable to adequately address any of the following issues:

I’m working on the labs for a new interactive webinar being hosted by Progressive. It’s tentatively scheduled for late April so I’m heads-down building the courseware. Unlike my “speak-only” webinars where I simply lecture and take questions, this series of six 90-minute sessions will encourage the attendees to work through a series of lab exercises that leverage the lectures and permit them to try to build and test SQL Server databases, SQL queries and reports using VB.NET and Report Builder 2.0.

In the course of creating these labs I’ve run across a number of issues that I would like to see Microsoft address in the next version of Report Builder. Frankly, I would not expect to see any work done on SQL Server 2010/2011 but I would like to see the following issue addressed after that:

“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.

I have just heard from Stella Chan (Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services) that VS2010 ReportViewer control is not designed to work with the current version of RDL in local mode. IMHO it never will be—not as long as the SQL Server team and the Visual Studio teams don’t keep their products in sync any better than they have in the past. I don’t expect the ReportViewer control to work with 3rd generation (2010) RDLc until 2012 (the next release of Visual Studio). By then there will doubtless be a new and improved version of RDL in the wings about to be released that it can’t use for another two years.

If you think this is just wrong vote for the bug I’ve logged in Connect (524610) (if you can find it)…

Sigh.

Want a front-row seat in my next Webinar? If so, I’m accepting applications for the live studio audience. All you need to do is send me an note saying why you would like to attend. I can comfortably sit about four people so get your application in early. Let me worry about the conference $999 fee but if you bring doughnuts for everyone... I’ll pick the audience the Friday before the next talk (which is Tuesday January 19th at 09:00 Pacific time).

What do you think?

Builder Complaint: Bryan Hicks DBA Bryan Hicks Custom Homes, Tuscola, TX

We wish to communicate the issues that my family has had with this local builder for the past three years.  The problems center around warranty issues of the new home we purchased our home in Abilene, Texas from Bryan Hicks in July 2006. The conflict has not come to a resolution despite an exhausting and frustrating number of attempts to communicate and follow the necessary steps to reach a resolution. 

The first hint that there was a problem with the customer service with this builder was evident when he refused to pay the property taxes owed on the home according to the real estate contract. After failing to discuss the matter through the Better Business Bureau we were forced to take this matter to small claims court. When we won the judgment he finally paid the taxes and penalties owed us. 

From this time forward any warranty issues we had on our new home, which were numerous; we were told by letter to contact all individual contractors directly. Some contractors were helpful; others refused to do the repairs or wouldn’t return calls. We tried to get the work done through the contractors for months. All the while keeping Bryan Hicks up to date on the status of the repairs via fax, email, and certified mail we communicated regularly to Bryan Hicks about the repairs that were not getting done. We never had any communications back from Bryan Hicks about how we should proceed. At no point did Bryan Hicks dispute that any of the indicated issues needing repairs were warranty issues, he just failed to get the work on them completed.  

Trying to be nice and not bring the State into the problem, we did not contact the Texas Residential Construction Commission (TRCC) (turns out to be a big mistake). Instead WE contacted Better Business Bureau, this time he failed to respond to their inquiry on the matter. Our last resort was to seek legal counsel who told us to go ahead and have the repairs done by other contractors at our cost and ask for reimbursement from the builder Bryan Hicks. We had all repairs done at our cost. Including replacing tile in our kitchen and eating area that was cracking and buckling after less than a year of being installed, repairing a faulty mailbox, painting a garage door, replacing carpet that was originally installed with a manufacturer’s flaw, and repairs to the sheetrock and furniture damaged by a severely leaking roof.  Contact was made to the builder in January of 2008 to request the amount we were out for the repairs.  There was, yet again, no response from Bryan Hicks.

After many more attempts to contact Bryan Hicks, we brought our case, with the aid of our lawyer, to Small Claims court and won judgment for the full amount. Bryan Hicks appeared and at no point disputed that the items we had repaired by other contractors were warranty items on the home.  After the judgment he failed to pay us the amount, instead he hired legal counsel that told him about the TRCC laws that protect builders and require complaints to be filed within 30 days of the warranty expiring in order to have a case against a builder.  In our situation within 30 days of the 1 year warranty we were still communicating via letters with the builder’s contractors to get the work done.  So in essence, we are being punished for giving the builder the benefit of the doubt that he will live up to his contractual requirements to uphold the warranty on the new home that he built and sold to our family.

We have been very careful to keep to the facts in this case so as to spell out our story accurately for others to beware of this man and his business.  The home that we purchased from him was not the quality that it appeared to be at first and his promises to uphold the state-required warranties and his own company’s warranty on the home are empty.  We are still out the thousands of dollars in repairs to our new home and even more in legal costs, in these hard economic times this has really hurt our family. In our opinion, don’t have Bryan Hicks of Bryan Hicks Custom Homes build you a home.

Incidentally, you had better be prepared for the wizard to execute this puppy (not just parse for signature) as the SP gets executed at least once if not several times in the process. I expect this would be a problem if the SP took seven and a half hours to execute…

I also discovered that even when defaults are defined, the wizards don’t properly map the query parameters the first time. Once the Dataset is created you have to go back to the DataSet properties and Refresh Fields. Tacky…

I’m still tracking down why stored procedures are not listed along with the Tables and Views in the Query editor… I expect it might be (another) Windows 7 rights issue.

hth

hth

• Disable Hardware Acceleration on the video card. This is easier said than done in Windows 7 as I’ll explain next. The support pro told me that this solves 90% of the performance problems. It did occur to me that if this is really the case (as it seems to be), why doesn’t WLM just make this change on its own as it starts?
• Use the Content tab to choose just those applications to share—not the entire desktop. Again, this makes it harder to run a smooth demo unless you open up the applications to share ahead of time and add them to the Content tab. However, this can lead to poorer performance as WLM might be overwhelmed by the increased workload. Since I have two monitors and many windows open that should not be shared (including gadgets) I can see how this would help. I would like to see an option where WLM shares applications on a specific monitor. While one can setup a sharing window, I could never get this to work correctly—perhaps if this was fixed…
• Don’t share your screen-cam  Window—it’s okay to get WML to show your video, just don’t include it as one of the shared windows.

Turning off video card hardware acceleration has always been a problem with screen scrapers and application sharing. I should have remembered this trick as we ran across it a decade ago while I was evaluating screen sharing programs at MSTE in the 90’s. My problem is with Windows 7—it seems the dialog to change these video card settings has been disabled for some reason. This means you can’t use the Advanced Settings | Troubleshooting | Change Settings  technique that we could use in XP and Vista to make this change.

Fortunately, I discovered that if you install the DirectX SDK, you can disable hardware acceleration in Windows 7 by clicking on the DirectDraw tab and un-checking the Use Hardware Acceleration checkbox as shown below. The DirectX SDK can be downloaded from here.

hth