I’m fed up

I have worked with many products/projects and have played many roles in projects such as developer, tech-lead, DBE, DBA, project manager :), associate software architect, business intelligence architect, etc. Almost all projects I had involved were successful (so far, proudly say, NOTHING has been discarded but extended and enhanced), not because of me :), because of the strength of team, because of the proper design of the system, because of the collective decisions. Once a project is deployed, if you are a part of the team, you know that how it pleases your heart. It makes you proud, gives you industrial recognition, and knowledge (and salary increment if you are lucky :)). What if the project would be a failure :(………?

So far I do not have such an experience. If you have, please share the reasons for it and how you felt on it. It helps all of us to come back to the track if we are out of it.

What made me to make a post like this? I am bit fed up now. Currently I am working on few projects, some of them are Business Intelligence projects, Training related projects, some are DBA-Specific projects, and ETL projects. My involvement for these projects are in many ways such as a developer, an architect, a lecturer, and a consultant. What bother me? What annoy me? Here are some of them:

• Your are NOT the part of the project but have to be responsible
• Major changes after the design is completed, done, again changes, again, again, …… continues
• I see something as wrong, but everyone keep their mouth shut, pretending “something” is NOT wrong
• No one is responsible…… (who cares, as long as we get the salary at the end of month)
• Do the delivery as “someone” want, not as “I” want
• You have not done the job, wonder whether you are qualified enough
• “Someone” has done a mistake, you have been irresponsible, did not you see she/he making the mistake?
• Don’t talk, your words make this upset… later… why did not you point it out?
• etc.

Hello, did I say that all projects give me all these types of headaches? NO, that is not the case. I still enjoy with many but, you guys know, if there is one, I might be losing the balance going over the stepping-stones. So, wish me luck!

Reporting Services 2008: Report Templates

If you are working (or have worked) with a Reporting Services project, you know that most of the reports have similar characteristics such as items in header and footer. Are you spending time for adding such similar things for all reports? If yes, this post will be helpful to you.

This process can be speeded up by having a report with all common items as a template. What you have to do is, create a report with all common items and save it as something like ReportTemplate1.rdl.

Once you saved the file, you need to take the RDL file and place in template folder which is {drive}\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\PrivateAssemblies\ProjectItems\ReportProject.
Done. Open a Reporting Services project and open Add New Item dialog box. You should see the newly added report as a template. Get it and continue with your report creation.

Free SQL Server 2008 R2 eBook

Are you interesting in SQL Server 2008 R2 resources? Here is a good resource. It is a free eBook, published by Microsoft Press. Click on the image below for downloading.

SSRS 2008 R2: Sri Lanka Map Report

Just created a Polygon-Layer Sri Lanka map using SQL Server 2008 R2 for showing population by provinces. It is fun to work with R2, I will share the way of creating this with an article soon.

SSRS 2008: Disabling “Go to Report” action through expression

Have you ever come across a situation where you need to disable an action set to a series in Reporting Services? If so, you might know that Action property cannot be set with expressions. It has to be set through Series Properties and select either None or Go to report (or other). If you have the Action as  None, you cannot set it back to Go to report via an expression.

One of my colleges faced a situation where he had to disable the action based on a report parameter value. What he had done was, set the Action as Go to Report and had below expression in Specify a report.

   1: =iif(Parameters!Parameter1.Label="All", "", "NewReport")

This worked fine. It did not allow user to perform the action if the condition is satisfied. Problem arose when a tootip is set. If a tooltip is set to the series, it shows that action can be performed when the mouse is moved over, and leads to an error because it tries to open a report which has set with NO name. This can be sorted out too.

   1: =iif(Parameters!Parameter1.Label="All", Nothing, "NewReport")

This expression solved the problem. All I had to do is, replace the “” with Nothing.

Complete Farm SharePoint 2010 installation on Single Server using non-domain accounts

When I was installing and configuring SharePoint 2010 in my machine, the following error appeared, stopping my installation.

The specified user Administrator is a local account. Local accounts should only be used in stand alone mode.

The reason was, I was trying to install and configure complete farm installation on standalone machine. My machine is not a domain controller or connected to a domain. However I found a way to continue my installation. It explains here.

All you have to do is, do not continue the installation with configuration wizard, stop it and as above link explains, use New-SPConfigurationDatabase with PowerShell for specifying none domain account for the farm. Once added, start configuration with SharePoint 2010 Products Configuration Wizard which is in StartMenu – Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products.