Yeah i know, this might be a bit of a lame post considering I haven't blogged in ages! but nonetheless, I at least have come out of hiding! Anyway, onto my news.....Not sure if anyone else has noticed, but it looks as if Amazon.com have a software dev team going on here in SA. Check it out at www.amazon.co.za

I wonder if this will become an amazon.com but for us locals here, or whether its just an advertising front? hhhmm.

Yesterday I was reading a newsgroup, and I came across a thread that was talking about the Garbage Collector. What struck me as quite surprising, is that the CLR has TWO, yes thats right TWO different garbage collectors! I always thought there was only one [:-S]

MSDN Quote: "The CLR has two different GCs: Workstation (mscorwks.dll) and Server (mscorsvr.dll). When running in Workstation mode, latency is more of a concern than space or efficiency. A server with multiple processors and clients connected over a network can afford some latency, but throughput is now a top priority. Rather than shoehorn both of these scenarios into a single GC scheme, Microsoft has included two garbage collectors that are tailored to each situation."

You can read more about this at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/dotnetperftechs.asp

The Joys of SRS :S

Last week I had to install Sql Reporting Services on our test environment in order to simulate a production environment installation. Just short of cracking my skull open from excessive head banging against the wall, and knawing on the edge of my desk with frustration, one could say that SRS hasn’t really left me with a warm fuzzy feeling inside, and I’m going to be a nervous wreck when installing it on production. [:-S]

These are the events that unfolded while trying to get SRS installed.

First off, to give you an idea of what we wanted here, was to install SRS across two machines, one machine to be the app server(where the users will navigate to, to access their reports) and one machine to hold the ReportServer and ReportseverTemp DB’s.

Currently our test environment consists of one server, which acts as the app server and the db server, but in order to simulate a production environment, we needed another machine to act as the DB server, and we could keep the current machine as the app server. Hope I haven’t lost anyone with this weird explanation…incidentally, this machine that holds the SRS DB’s is going to be our Test Database Server, so we would need to move any DB’s on the current machine to this new DB Server.

OK, now that you have the background here’s the story.

Another developer had already tried to install SRS on the current test machine, just to try and get it up and running, but after that installation, every time we start up enterprise manager on that machine we’re greeted with this helpful little message :

Well, unfortunately I don’t speak any dialect of GUID, so I’m not really sure WTF that’s supposed to mean, not even trying to access EM from a snap-in in mmc worked!

O well, we managed to register the current machine from another server, just so we could do a backup of the databases, to be restored on the DB Server. I also removed the ReportServer and ReportServerTemp db’s that were created form the previous installation.. looks like SRS doesn’t delete these when you uninstall it.

So now my pain begins… I begin installing SRS, and I choose to use Sql authentication for when accessing the databases, I type in the username and password, wait for the whole installation to reach the end, and I’m shown this heart warming message :

Now it rolls back the entire installation, without giving me the chance to enter a new username and password! This must have happened about 2 or 3 times, because evertime I thought that maybe I had typed in the username and password incorrectly. However after much trawling on the net I found a blog by Tara Duggan who had a similar experience, where the Sql username and password aren’t passed correctly from the GUI in the install, so instead I had to run the installation from a command line like so :

Setup /i <install root>\setup\rsrun.msi RSSETUPACCOUNT=<username> RSSETUPPASSWORD=<password>

Well that seemed to work well, and it had all the signs of a successful install except for a warning message saying “Setup could not initialize the Report Server. You will have to start it manually”.

Naturally I assumed that it was talking about the windows service, because it was stopped, so I started it and tried to navigate to the reports virtual directory in IE, only to be shown a “Page cannot be found”….aaarrrgghhh, so back to google I go, and it turns out that I could have stopped and restarted the windows service until my fingers bled!, what I actually needed to do was run the following command line :

Rsactivate –c “<drive>Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Reporting Services\ReportServer\RSReportServer.config”

That seemed to work, but as per usual, yet another problem crept into the wood work. I navigate to the reports virtual directory, but now the only difference is that I now got prompted for my user credentials. If I entered in a domain account’s credentials I got page not found, if I click cancel I get a HTTP Error 401.1. Access Denied. WTF?! I couldn’t believe this. Just problem after problem. Can’t this damn thing just work! Anyway, after much searching, trying to find the smallest clue possible, I see in the event log, two events that describe that SRS had re-created the IUSER_<computername> and IWAM_<computername> accounts! This got me to thinking, that perhaps I needed to re-set the accounts, maybe that would work, I originally thought running aspnet_regiis.exe again would do that, but alas I was wrong. L What I needed to do was edit the c:\inetpub\Adminscripts\ adsutil.vbs search for a string called “IsSecuredProperty = true” and I needed to change it to “IsSecuredProperty = false” save the file and close.

After I had done that I had to run :

Cscript adsutil.vbs get w3svc/anonymoususerpass

This will display the IUSER_<computername> password. If I hadn’t set the IsSecuredProperty = false, it would have just displayed asterisks. I had to take this password and re-type it in the directory security tab in IIS for the virtual directory of Reports and ReportServer, and I had to select allow anonymous access. This removed the HTTP 401.1 error, and I was shown a familiar Sql Reporting Services page! YAY….

But hang on, I couldn’t do anything! I didn’t have any menu functions, like the Contents or Properties tab. I couldn’t upload files or create folders. Eventually the only thing that worked was I had to go to the same place where I had re-typed the IUSER_<computername> password(under the directory Security Tab of the Reports and ReportServer virtual directory, and where I allowed anonymous access), and I had to enter in the credentials of a domain account! Even trying to add the IUSER and IWAM account to the administrators group didn’t help(btw that was a last ditch desparate attempt). If I didn’t enter the domain account credentials, I never got to see the navigation tabs etc.

But now all is working, I don’t like the fact that I have a domain account set up for anonymous access, but I’ll have to find some way around that.

So if you’ve read this far, all I really have to say is that if you’re going to install SRS, plan your whole day around it. There are plenty of people out there who are having hassles with SRS installations, but once you have it installed it can be, imho, one the best reporting tools you’ll ever use. But be warned, installing SRS isn’t as easy as some people make it out to be, and I hope I may have helped some of you out there who are having theses same kinds of problems that I had.

Man, I need a coffee break…..

Haven't blogged in ages, so thought this might be a good time to break the deathly silence and mention what I stumbled across on the net the other day. I had been looking for Javascript stuff and came across this site

This site has reference cards which you can purchase, but if you dig a little deeper into the site and click on the pics, they open in full size, so just save the pics and print them :-D They have HTML,CSS and Javascript reference cards and they seem quite good, especially if you're looking for what javascript stuff is compatible with which browsers(which was what I was looking for ;-P). There also seems to be CSS,DOM,Regular Expression reference cards too!

Use it don't use it ;-)

Came across this bizzare oddity. The worlds tallest virtual building. Lets see the Al-Qaeda try and kamakazi into this one! Some people just have too much time on their hands....

This was an event I know I would have kicked myself for if I hadn't gone. As you might know it was held at CS Holdings last night, and I must admit - being the pessimist that I am - I didn't have faith, and so didn't expect so many people to attend. But I do apologise for my lack of faith in the Durban crowd, because there were probably around 15 people that came! And for a Durban event thats quite a generous crowd.

As for the content, well if you weren't there Stuart gave a talk on extending Reporting Services to create your own delivery methods(his was a delivery to a MSMQ - keeeef) and what one should expect if they wanted to create their own Rendering, Data, or Security Extension.Aswell as topics like interacting with the SRS web service(incase you want to write your own front end to reporting services) and a few of the sneaky things to look out for when setting up subscriptions to reports.Overall it was really good and seeing as though I'm trying to learn the in's and out's of SRS this session was just what I needed :)

Then afterwards we got to chatting to a couple of guys there, it was a good get-together. Hopefully we'll have one of these again soon.

Well as you probably see in my previous post, I had absolutly no comprhension of formatting whatsoever, and despite my lack of english puctuation style(English at school were neva my stongk point), this time it was not my fault.

Seems as though when I blog from firefox, it just disregards any formatting of paragraphs! - NICE. So hence that is why I am now blogging from IE (all it's really good for now), that is until I can find a fix for this Firefox problem.

Well Last night we had our durbanite SA Developer Pig out at News Cafe - Gateway. Overall it was a good evening, Ernst pulled out his iMate and showed it off, not a bad little toy I might add! For a Durban event it was a surprisingly good turn-out, I didn't realise there were that many SA Dev members here in Durbs! :D Mark managed to snap some pics of this auspicious event, and lets hope he'll post them up soon. Prizes were also given away(Calendars, Mugs, Caps, Shirts and a fleece jacket), however the number guessing game that was used to win the prises seemed to wear thin, so eventually the prizes were just handed out to the first person who looked like they needed one! - Damn I knew I should have looked a little more hobo like!

Well I've just gotten into using SQL Reporting Services(from now on it is dubbed SRS), and whoa, this is a powerful reporting tool!

I installed the trial along with the SP1 for SRS - O and don't forget the all important documentation! - and got cracking right away with my first report. It's quite easy to write a report, I'm still learning the inner workings of this neat little beast, but I couldn't help think how the designer reminded me of Access Reporting!

Well I got a fairly simple report up and running and the web front end looks quite stylish, often presentation is neglected, and look rather bland/dismal, but SRS really presents the reports in a professional way, and another one of it's really neat features are the number of formats you can export the report in - HTML,Excel,PDF,CSV,XML,TIFF and there are a few others. Along with that, you can subscribe to a report and the user can be e-mailed the report on a regular basis, things like weekly sales reports, monthly stock reports, the power behind this is phenominal!

Also there just so happens to be a microsoft event here in Durban on SRS, although it is only a level 200 - 300 it should prove to be a good intro, especially for the likes of someone like me who's just getting started on the topic of SRS. Hopefully I'll see some of you Durbanites there? who knows?

So to end it all off I've only just hit the tip of the iceberg with SRS , and I'm sure I'm going to find plenty more rich features. So well no guessing what I'm going to be doing tonight of course!

Well, I finally got off my lazy backside and joined the crowd of blogging.

Hopefully this is a place where I'll be able to share some ideas and contribute some worthwhile stuff while at the same time post some of the “not so clever” things that happen in my life, just to add some humour.

Well lets start off with a little about me for those of you who don't know me(and I'm sure there's plenty of you!). I am a software developer for a Durban based company(and yes there are software developers here in Durban believe it or not!). I develop web apps in C#(not the best developer, but hey who is? We're all learning hey?) and I work with a great crowd here, nice and relaxed environment, no beurocratic nonsense like what I had to put up with at my last job, and the work it great! In my spare time I like to play squash(haven't done that in ages!) and i like to keep up with technology and the latest gadgets, you know all the usual geeky kinda hobbies.

Well before I run the risk of babbling on and boring some you to death, I think I'll end this blog off now.

Can't wait to blog about something useful soon.......