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…
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.
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…
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…
The publisher 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. "One of the most useful features of Microsoft Reporting Services is its extensibility model. Just about any aspect of Reporting Services can be custom-tailored to meet your specific requirements. Part one of this two-part series explains how to replace the default Windows-based security model of…
Printing reports was akward with RS 2000 to say the least. This was especially true when the reports were rendered in HTML since in this case the report is generated inside an IFRAME element. Since the frame could scroll right-clicking and engaging the standard browser printing was problematic. As a workaround, the report had to be exported in PDF format (or other non-HTML renderer) and…
As I stressed out in one of my previous posts and my book, it is an absolute must that you back up the RS encryption key as one of the first steps after you install RS and lock it up in a safe place. You can back up the encryption key this by using the rskeymgmt utility as follows: rskeymgmt -e -f <filename> -p <password>…
While we still have to wait for a couple of more months to get the official release, Santa is giving us a Beta preview of the forthcoming RS 2000 SP2. Key new features include: Reporting Services SharePoint Web Parts enable you to explore and view reports located on a report server by using Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or SharePoint Portal Server. A set of Reporting…
An interesting trend has been building momentum recently which has caught my attention. More and more authors are choosing self-publishing as a viable option to commercial publishing. Interestingly, I haven’t come across a technical author who is happy with commercial publishers and has good things to say about them. Although I am not excluding the probability that there may be a few enlighten commercial publishers,…
