February 2009 Entries
SQL Server Reporting Services is great in the fact that it comes with a handful of different rendering (export) formats out of the box. If a particular report is intended to be paginated and printed, then from my web applications, I will often link to the report with a parameter instructing the render format to be PDF - this way, the user is never taken to the report viewer (they just get an Open/Save As dialog for the PDF itself).
The URL for such a link may resemble the following:
http://server/ReportServer?/path/reportname&rs:Command=Render&rc:LinkTarget=_blank&rs:Format=PDF&SomeParameterValue=1
There are other interesting things that you can do with the rs:Format...
My surname is relatively unique, and in all my life, I have never known of another "Jason Follas". Well, that changed today when I got a vanity alert from Google that "Jason Follas is on Facebook".
I am on Facebook, but it seems that there's another from the New Zealand clan of Follases (there's quite a few of "us" down under)! I'm going to befriend him for the novelty aspect. :-)
Microsoft Regional Director (and friend) Steven Smith has a great talk about ASP.NET performance tips - I've seen the presentation probably a handful of times already, and always seem to walk away with something new to try that I didn't quite "grok" previously.
But, here's one additional tip that I can offer that is easily overlooked, yet very important for enterprise development.
Enterprise web applications (at least in my world) tend to use Integrated Security in order to provide Single Sign-On capability (i.e., automatically authenticating the user according to their Active Directory credentials). As such, Anonymous access to the web application is usually...
I recently developed a spatially-aware .NET application that did not use SQL Server 2008 as the backend (this enterprise was still on SS2005, but we needed the spatial support in the application today). While the application worked properly on my laptop, it was a huge failboat when deployed to the server environment.
I had previously posted that you can get the Microsoft.SqlServer.Types library from MS Downloads, but it turns out that this alone is not sufficient to allow your application to run. You also need to ensure that the SQL Server 2008 Native Client is also installed (regardless of whether you're...