Good article from Andrew Connell regarding how to squeeze more performance out of your virtual machines.

Give it a try, they work well for me.

http://andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/SqeezePerformanceOutOfVirtualPCs.aspx

Seeya

Dave

Greg Low has blogged "What Makes A Good Data Entry App" and in it he makes some simple but often overlooked points.

Seems like the perfect shortlist of what developers should be looking out for when developing data entry apps:

have a read leave some comments on what else you feel should be included (or whats a load of ****)

http://msmvps.com/blogs/greglow/archive/2006/03/02/85303.aspx

Dave

Love IT!!!

Can't wait for it to be released, we have started using it at work for source control and DB source control. Its nice to have proper source control for the database for a change.

the MSCCII component for attaching it to VS6, .Net, 2005 and Enterprise manager is pretty cool too.

Although I'm still dissapointed that there is no option available for Sql Server Management Studio.

Hopefully that will come with the proper release.

Tis all

Dave

Make it die!!

We use Crystal Reports 8.5 for a few of our clients.

2 Weeks ago on a winform crystal report got the error message "Server could not be opened" which after a bit of research turned out to be Crystals generic there is a problem message.

After 20hours wasted no solution was found. REWRITE in reporting services 2005.

Last week another client started getting the same error on their web server. All the usual debugging done no solutions.

Tried to reinstall Crystal on the server only to find the license key the client had, had expired. We were used to that with Crystal 8.5 license keys though, they expire after like 3 yrs.

So we called up support to get a new license key which we have done many times before. Support told us Crystal 8.5 is no longer supported, so we cannot give you a license key.

In otherwords even though we bought and own a license to use Crystal 8.5 they wont let us.

Its like buying a car and then 5 years later having the car company say nope you can't drive that car anymore cause we dont want you to.

So once again bye bye crystal hello reporting services. I'm just glad our clients are nice enough to pay for rewrites, although the advantages are there for both them and us!

Bye for now

Dave

Oh a nightmare!

The current project uses the Dll I created yesterday to display a rdlc reporting services 2005 winform report, with the ability to save and email the report.

The fun part was trying to package the dll (and its requirements) with my vb6 application. Installshield 8 just refused to play.

Solution turned out to be generating a visual studio 2005 install project to install the report viewer, and...

In the installshield package include the original project (VB6)

Install Report Viewer Redistributable 2005 from MS

Then install VS2005 install package for my report viewer dll.

3 steps to install one small app. There has got to be something wrong there!

Hey,

Was playing around with the new Winform control for Reporting Services 2005. Did the standard follow the first tutorial you find. Created a rdlc file, got completely lost as I couldn't find the data and preview tabs from Reporting Services 2000, nor the standard datasource setup. After finally getting all the dataset and dataset population worked out it was looking pretty sweet.

I then discovered that you can import rdl files in the code and display them in the report viewer control. Much preferred as you can then post the rdl to a reporting services web server whilst also having it used in you winform solution. Only problem was if you include the rdl in the winform project it only opens as an xml document not in the report designer (go figure).

Solution was to have a Reporting Services Project and a Winform Project in the same solution, and manually make sure I deployed the rdl file with the Winform App.

Check out this Microsoft page for more info on using the Reporting Services Viewer for Winforms including the importing of rdl's and rendering to file.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252207.aspx