Asp.Net Team's Weblog

DTS.DLL

Frank Adams — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 13:04:40 +0000

Well, who would have thought. I mean really Micr*soft. Really? What the crap!? Here is what I am referring to. I recently updated our servers with Sql Server 2005 SP3. We updated our development server. It went without a hitch. We updated our test server. Again, went without a hitch. Our test server more resembles our production server. So I update our production server. Does it work like it’s supposed to? NO! After updating to SP3 for SQL Server 2005, the jobs broke. I first looked at permissions for a while. Nothing changed as far a permissions go, but I know where I work things are changed on the intranet without our knowledge. Kind of a communication breakdown in my opinion. Just sayin. Anyway, it turns out that there was a .dll that was (unregistered?). Is there such a thing? Apparently so. After looking into the issue for quit some time I found that the DTS.DLL needed to be re-registered. Go figure. Thanks Micr*soft! Great going! Make my life easy why don’t you. You need to run the below command at the c:\ prompt:

regsvr32 dts.dll.

I ran that command and it fixed my issue. Why it didnt break on development or test environment is beyond me.

Have fun and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions they are welcome. Thank you.

Computer Programming

Frank Adams — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:51:29 +0000

I can across and interesting article a while back. I printed the doc out and put it up on my desk. I thought I would share it with you this morning. I appoligize for not giving the right person thier due props. I forget where I saw it though. Here it is;

Computer Programming:

Every problem can be solved by breaking it up into a series of smaller problems.
The computer will always do exactly what you tell it to.

Software Engineering:

Writing the code is the easy part. Writing it so someone else can understand it later is the important part.
Make it work, then make it elegant, then make it fast.

I like the Software Engineering part 2. It is exactly how I work. Crazy that I am not the only one. Anyway, quick post today. Just was looking at it and thougth I would share.

Have fun and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions they are welcome. Thank you.

Team Building Opportunity

Frank Adams — Fri, 13 May 2011 13:39:40 +0000

Good morning. I see an opportunity for us to do some team building. By us I mean the team that helped me coin all the things developers don’t like to hear and the developers. There are only two of us developers left after the contract ended. We were kept on for sustainment only. We cannot do any development on our tools. No changes. Nothing. We are running reports and making sure the servers are running. In light of that, the other team and us has not really been in contact much at all. I cannot tell you the lat time I heard anything from them. Our servers will be down on Monday until at least noon. So, since we cannot do anything productive until then, we are all (both teams) going out for a team building breakfast. I think that will be great! It is important to keep teams communicating and not loose the unity. Even though there is not a need for the teams to communicate currently on a daily basis, the structure still needs to be there so when it happens again, and it will I am sure, it won’t be awkward. How does everyone else keep team friction at bay? I remember I worked at a place once that team building was part of the work week. Every Friday we would meet in the conference room and play a ‘getting to know your neighbors’ kind of game. It consisted of ethical questions, situational questions, and any other questions that came up that may have spun off the previous two. I found out that one of the sweetest ladies that I worked with would keep a certain amount of money if she found it. It asked in different amounts. What about $10? What about $50? How about $100, etc. The higher the number got, she said she would start keeping it. Everyone laughed. It was fun. It was good times. We will see how this breakfast goes. I’m sure it will be fine as everyone is pretty outgoing and fun for the most part…..outside of work. Heehee.

Have fun and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions they are welcome. Thank you.

Things Developers Dont Like To Hear

Frank Adams — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 11:55:18 +0000

Working with a group of people that don’t really get what we do, there are a few things I keep hearing over and over again. Here is a list of those things. Feel free to add to if you have more.

1. You can just…

2. Sorry we didn’t update you but…

3. Yea…were going to need you to come in on Saturday…(for real)

4. You don’t have the most recent requirement but…

5. You didn’t get the email?

6. I remember something about…

7. All you have to do is…

8. That’s the wrong file.

9. You already have the data…

10. I know what it says but its not what we meant.

That is the list I have so far. I don’t like it but it is what it is.

Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions they are welcome. Thank you.

Grabbing RDL from Server to Edit

Frank Adams — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:11:10 +0000

I had a report that was working on on server but not inside my studio environment. I had changed it too much. I wanted to go back and start with the report that worked. This is what I did:

In Report Manager, I clicked Edit in the Properties>General tab for the
given report. You should get a File Download window; select Save and
put the rdl in the folder where you want it. I over wrote the file I was working on. You should probably close Visual Studio before you do this so there are no issues. Another way to have done it is to save the RDL file someplace else and then import it by right clicking on Reports then select Add>Add new item then pick your RDL. You should then be able to open it in Designer.

Hope this helped someone. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are always welcome. Thank you.

SQL Server 2005 Reporting Service (SSRS) EnableClientPrinting

Frank Adams — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:32:19 +0000

This post was originally on a friend of mine blog: C# Conspiracy. I wanted to move it here and make sure he got his due recognition. The link to his site is over to the right under Blogroll. Now for the verbaige.

So I received a new requirement to disable the client-side printing of the reports in my application. The reports are generated in SSRS which manages the client printing control via the toolbar displayed at the top of the report page. No problem I declared.

Unfortunately I did not realize that the SSRS server I inherited did not have an account with administrator privileges. Apparently the builtin\adminstrators account has been removed and an admin account wasn’t added to replace it. (I’m still looking for the means of adding a new system administrator to the service.) In the meantime I was able to disable the client-side printing by setting the value column of the EnableClientPrinting row of the configurationinfo table in the reportserver database to false from true. The configurationInfo table maintains a copy of several of the parameters for the report service that you can manually change if you have access to the db. Glad I found this workaround! Still looking to get back admin…

Hope this helped someone. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are always welcome. Thank you.

Finding duplicates in a column with SQL query

wmsmith — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 16:20:50 +0000

Need to find a duplicate in a column? You can use a query like this:

select accountID, COUNT(accountID) AS NumOccur
FROM myTable
group by accountID HAVING (COUNT(accountID)>1)

Any duplicates will be returned. That easy

~Wayne

Excel to Access to SQL Server

Frank Adams — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:44:43 +0000

I recently found that it is not easy to import external data from Excel to Access. The version I am referring to is Office 2003. I was trying to import some data into an access database to make it easier to import into SQL Server. What I found was its not easy either way (that is until I figured out a pretty easy way to do it). What happens is Microsoft tries to figure out what you want to do with the data. Well the way things are figured out from Excel to Access is the first field that is not a header, determines the data type of the field. That is all find and dandy if all the columns are the same type. What happens if they are not. What happens if I have say row 1 contains a number, row 2 contains a number, and row 3 contained a character or even something like a 001? I’ll tell you. Your import fails. Just fails. An (what I think is easy) way to import such data is to make the first row that is not the header a character (I use ‘A’). Then no matter what is in the row, it will come in fine. The only thing you have to do is remember to delete that row of ‘A’s when the import is finished. Works like a charm. I have used it more than twice.

Hope this helped someone. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are always welcome. Thank you.

VS 2005 Premier Partner Edition

Frank Adams — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:49:14 +0000

First off let me explain what Premier Partner Edition is. It is the studio environment that is installed when you install SQL Server 2005 or greater. It is used to create Analysis Service Projects, Integration Service Projects, Report Model Projects, etc. Beyond that it doesn’t much else. The issue we were having at work was that at one point it worked (for over a year) and then one day it just stopped working for some reason. Not sure why. We tried a bunch of stuff without success. Our setup is Windows XP SP3 with SQL Server 2005 SP4. I tried to install different SP for XP and along with different combinations of the SP for SQL Serve 2005. No luck at all. What it turned out to be was one setting. Isn’t that always the case. The setting in this instance had to do with the connection managers. There is an attribute that needed changed from false to true. It is the “ReatinSameConnection” setting. Once that was changed; no more issues. It took months to figure that out. Literally months. Rebuilds, reconfigures, changing, etc. to no avail. Hope this helped someone.

Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are always welcome. Thank you.

Enable Trace on Compiled Application

Frank Adams — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 12:13:24 +0000

Here is a quick post for those who don’t know everything yet. If you have code on a server that is already compiled and need to see debugging information on in the page (i.e. trace=true) for whatever reason its doable. All you have to do is enter the following line of code in the applications web.config file in the proper place (inside system.web tags) and you now have debugging information throughout the application.

….

Just remember to comment out the code to stop the extra information from showing up at the bottom of every page. Not good for the users as it confuses them. That is all.

Hope this helped someone. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are always welcome. Thank you.