A must-read RS blog
Brian Welcker, Group Program Manager for SQL Server Reporting Services, has started a blog. Join me to welcome Brian to the blog community and for giving us a chance to get the news directly from the source.
Generate Ad-hoc Reports with Microsoft Reporting Services 2005
If you have followed the RS 2005 roadmap, you have undoubtedly noticed that among the many new features in Microsoft Reporting Services 2005 is one that can truly help reduce the workload for developers—the ability to give end users the power to generate their own ad-hoc reports. My article explains the major components of Microsoft Reporting Services’ ad-hoc architecture and semantic model, and walks you through an end-to-end example that demonstrates how to author, manage, and deliver ad-hoc reports.
Happy ad-hoc reporting!
More Analysis Services Books
Chris Webb mentions in his blog about more SSAS-related books coming up. It looks SSAS 2005 is catching like a wild fire 🙁
Upcoming Business Intelligence webcasts
There are quite a few upcoming Business Intelligence webcasts you shouldn’t miss. If you are interested in the Business Intelligence with SQL Server 2005 make sure to register and mark you calendar.
My next book
I have to admit that I haven’t been very prolific lately on the blog arena. The reason for my extensive absence has been that all of my free time (what’s that?) has been spent writing my forthcoming book. That’s right, let’s blame it all on the book
Ladies and gentlemen, I am very excited to announce my next book – “Applied Microsoft Analysis Services 2005 and the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform”! As the book name suggests, the focus on the book is Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Besides Reporting Services and Integration Services, Analysis Services is the third pillar of the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform. For those of you following this initiative know that there are exciting changes happening in Yukon…at least enough to pick up my interest. I will disclose more details about the book as the project unfolds. I hope the book will hit the retail channels around the SQL Server 2005 release timeframe.
And here is a great chance for those of you who want to help me out with the book. To improve the book quality, I am looking for a few peer reviewers who are willing to read the raw manuscript of my book as the chapters come along, and let me know their sincere opinion. What’s not clear, what could be improved, what is missing, what you like, and more importantly dislike about the book. In other words, you will be providing feedback from a reader standpoint. It is great if you have a prior Analysis Services experience but it is not required. It is enough to have a strong desire to learn Analysis Services and have some free time. I won’t even ask you to run the samples (you are more than welcome if you want to).
If you are willing to help me as a peer reviewer, use the Contact page to drop me an e-mail and mention your SQL Server-related experience. As an expression of my gratitude, I will send you a copy of my book when it is published! Hurry up, while the promotion lasts 🙂
SP2 is here
The much anticipated and long-delayed RS Service Pack 2 is here! Download it from from the Microsoft Download Center: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=502C0D89-1308-4662-8F58-CEC55EF1235B&displaylang=en. The list of changes and bug fixes can be found here. The SP 2 is cummulative and it includes the SP1 changes. Therefore, you don’t need to apply SP1 before installing SP2.
Join me to give credit to the RS team for their heroic effort. For little more than a year they managed to release two service packs (with numerious enhancements), merge the RS 2000 codebase into Yukon, implement the new Yukon feature set, and meanwhile address hundreds of questions on the RS newsgroup (which by the way is one of the most active discussion lists). I personally know of a few “enterprise” shops that couldn’t complete the design phase for this period of time. Well done for a team of about 30 people!
SQL Server 2005 March Community Technical Preview (CTP)
Today, Microsoft released the third Community Technical Preview (CTP) for SQL Server 2005. The latest CTP includes a number of new features, such as enhanced integration with Visual Studio 2005, performance improvements in Management Studio, a SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 upgrade tool, and 64-bit support for Reporting Services, Notification Services and the management, development and configuration tools.
In addition, this CTP includes Report Builder, a new component of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition and based on the technology acquired from ActiveViews. Because the new self-service, ad hoc report building client is built upon SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, the tool will make enterprise reporting easy, scalable, and reliable for end users. This CTP includes model files that can be used with Report Builder. These model files are available as separate downloads from the Beta Download Page.
The SQL Server 2005 CTP is now available to all MSDN and Betaplace subscribers.
Harden MS Reporting Services Using Custom Extensions (Part 2 of 2)
The second part of my article for DevX.
In Part 1, you learned to create a custom security model for Microsoft Reporting Services. Now, tighten the screws by adding role membership authentication and stave off problems by troubleshooting and debugging your custom extensions ahead of time.
Writing custom rendering extensions
As you probably know, the custom rendering specification wasn’t documented with RS 2000. The features set was there, only the information was lacking. The SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 documentation now includes the rendering extension specification.
James Yip has written an excellent article about writing custom rendering extensions in the February issue of the MSDN magazine. As you can imagine, custom renderers are not trivial to write. For this reason, I highly recommend you check for availability of third-party rendering extensions that support the rendering format you need before you embark on this journey. For example, as I mention in one of previous posts, SoftArtisians provides flexible Excel and Word rendering extensions.
Happy rendering!
Article here, article there…RS, RS everywhere
Some of my recent writings see daylight:
- The publisher of my book donated Chapter 1 of my book (Introducing Microsoft Reporting Services) to The Code Project website. It is available for free access here http://www.codeproject.com/books/MSReportingServices.asp?msg=1015597#xx1015597xx
- DevX published part 1 of my two-part article about RS Forms Authentication. It is available for free access here http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/26759.
- MSDN has picked up my article first published by Pinnacle Publications in the November issue of the Visual Basic Developer magazine. The article demonstrates how to leverage Reporting Services to generate reports on the server side of ASP.NET applications using a custom web control called AwReportViewer. You can read the article and download the sample code here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnhcvb04/html/vb04k8.asp).
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