Using SQL Reporting Services 2005 and Forms Authentication with the Whidbey/2.0 SQLMembershipProvider

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As you probably know, when the RS Windows-based security doesn’t meet your requirements, you can replace it with custom security. Not many products out there allow you do this. In hist blog, Russell Christopher explains how you can use the Whidbey/2.0 SQLMembershipProvider with custom security.

KPIUtil Tool Released

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Courtesy to the Marco Russo’s blog, I’ve learned that Microsoft released a KPIUtil tool for Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005.The tool allows users to export KPIs from both a Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 server and a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services server.

My Top 10 RS Wish List

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In the spirit of the season, I compiled a list of the top 10 things that I would love Santa to implement in the next release of Reporting Services (although it may look like this won’t happen next year :-). I purposely excluded enhancements to the RS data regions since it should be relatively easily to compile a list of the feature most folks complain about in the public ng. 


  1. Exposing the intrinsic RDL object model to manipulate data regions and items programmatically. It will be great if this works similar to the ASP.NET user controls where controls can be added, changed, or removed at runtime. For example, custom code should be able to reference a table region to add, remove, and bind columns at runtime.
  2. Server-side events, e.g. OnReportRender, OnBodyRender, OnPrint, OnRegionRender, etc.
  3. A supported way to maintain state in custom code.
  4. Exposing the report datasets to custom code to allow programmatic navigation and data retrieval, e.g. looping through the dataset rows.
  5. Decoupling the Report Builder Designer and exposing it as a reusable .NET control which can be embedded in applications. Ideally, a developer should be able to pass the semantic model (or metadata described in a different format) the designer. The output of the WYSWIG manipulation should be returned in the form of RDL.
  6. Enhancing the Report Builder Designer to support custom code and plugging in custom function libraries.
  7. Simplifying CAS security to the three levels supported by SQL Server and SSAS – Safe, External Access, and Unsafe.
  8. Binding server-side reports to ADO.NET datasets.
  9. A conditional page break.
  10. The XML extension should support XML schemas and cast the column types to data types according to the schema.

Please feel free to add to the list and happy holidays!

Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005 is shipping

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My book Applied Analysis Services 2005 is printed and shipped to the distributor. The paper copy can be purchased from the distributor website. Hopefully, it will make it to retailers (Amazon, B&N, etc.) by the month’s end.


 


Happy data analyzing!