DevX has just published Part 1 of my article Building Report-enabled Applications with the Windows Forms ReportViewer. Part 2 (ASP.NET ReportViewer) should be out by the end of February. Reporting is an integral part of every complete application. The Report Viewer controls greatly reduce the development effort required to report-enable .NET applications. Part one of this two-part article shows you how you can leverage the…
As you probably know, the RS 2005 Report Builder lets business users create ad-hoc reports. Behind the scenes, the Query Translator converts the report metadata to the native queries supported by the relational data source (SQL Server and UDM with RS 2005 only). If you want to see the underlying queries, you have two choices: 1. You can use the SQL Server Profiler and examing…
TechEd 2006 Europe will take place in Barcelona, Spain (7 -10 November 2006). Barcelona is one of the cities I always wanted to visit and I hope I will be able to make it. Summer could have been much better for a fiesta, of course ...
My book “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005” book is a bestseller on Amazon! It is currently ranked No 94 for Computers and Internet (as of Jan 23). The book is now in its second printing (it's been available on Amazon since 12/15/2005). Thank you, thank you, thank you!
One of the most outstanding SQL Server 2005 feature is CLR stored procedures. A CLR stored procedure can encapsulate complex .NET code, process data, and pipe the results back to your report. The advantage of using CRL stored procedures is that from a reporting perspective things are very simple. The report just needs to call the CLR stored procedure, as it would call a regular SQL Server…
Recently, I’ve come across a question on the RS public newsgroup about how to use the new RS 2005 XML extension to report off relative nodes in an XML document. The attached sample demonstrates this scenario. For example, given this document: <bookstore xmlns="http://example.books.com"> <book genre="autobiography" publicationdate="1981" ISBN="1-861003-11-0"> <title>The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin</title> <author> <first-name>Benjamin</first-name> <last-name>Franklin</last-name> </author> <date>09-06-1956</date> <samplechapters>1 3 4</samplechapters> <price alternative="discount">5.99</price> <price>8.99</price> </book> <book…
Perhaps, you’ve heard that Excel 12 will support publishing and executing Excel spreadsheets on the server through a server-based technology (currently dubbed Excel Services). My first reaction when I’ve heard about this was “who on earth would ever want to do this?” However, after reading the David Gainer’s excellent blog (will anyone compile these great notes into a book?) I got my "Eureka" and I…
SSAS 2005 can be configured for HTTP access, e.g. for Internet reporting. Here are two whitepapers with step-by-step instructions for configuring Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for HTTP access with SSAS 2005.
There is an extremely nasty new exploit that targets a vulnerability in Windows Fax and Picture viewers (WMF). Usually, I don't pay much attention to the latest on spyware since IE always asks you to confirm download. But this one is really bad. No IE warnings or security toolbar. If you havigate to a rogue website that uses the exploit, it will bypass the IE…
Thanks for Marco Russo’s blog, I’ve learned that Microsoft has released an updated version (version 1.5) of the Excel 2002/2003 Add-in for SQL Server Analysis Services. I discussed in details how version 1.0 could be used to generate ad hoc reports from SSAS cubes in my book Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005. Although version 1.0 was compatible with SSAS 2005, it was unaware of the…
