April 2008 Entries
Debugging Custom Report Item controls for Sql Server Reporting ServicesWhen you are developing a control which inherits from CustomReportItem for Sql Server Reporting Services (SSRS) you will certainly want to debug your code. The documentation is shoddy and at best incomplete, and the examples are poorly explained. So being able to debug your control is paramount to your success.The way to setup debugging follow these steps:Open the project properties for your custom report item (right click project - Properties...) Set debug properties (Click "Debug" tab on the left) Set start action (under start action click "Start External Program") Browse for...
As I continue to work with the ASP.NET MVC framework I continue to be inspired to dig deeper into things, to find out how they work and how I can make them work with this awesome new framework.The case in point here is using ASP.NET Ajax controls with MVC. Currently this doesn't work because it is closely tied to the web forms model. More specifically, ASP.NET Ajax requires an html form element with the runat attribute set to “server”. Without it, client enabled controls written to use the ScriptManager server control won't work.Here's the error message if you include ScriptManager...
Before I started working with ASP.NET Ajax I found using MultipleIEs very valuable for testing pages for both IE6 and IE7. But then I started working on a project which had been developed using the ASP.NET UpdatePanel and IE6 became worthless. I got the error "Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException" with an error number of 12019.But recently a user had a problem which could only be duplicated in IE6, so I had to figure out a way to get it to work on my machine. Fortunately, I stumbled on a thread on tredosoft.com which mentioned that copying msxml3.dll from your system32 folder to the...
One of the features I continue to wait for from the ASP.NET MVC team is a server control library to work with the MVC framework. So as I have been working on a project using ASP.NET MVC I have begun developing my own library of server controls.Recently, I began looking at the ExtJs library as a client-side script library for my project. I love how extensible the library is and the documentation is very good. However, there seems to be quite a bit of boiler plate code to be written for any data driven controls. So I decided to look...
This is nothing new or revolutionary, but is important nonetheless for those maintaining large-scale SQL Server databases. For years I've used the sysindexes system table to find out how many rows are in a large table. The reason for this is to prevent table scans of large tables just to find out how many rows are in that table.Sometimes you just gotta know and you don't need a custom filter, just the raw row count. If you use SELECT COUNT(*) FROM myTable you scan the whole table affecting the performance of your server.For those who've never heard of this here's...