I've been working on my company's site for the past several month now, and we use Devexpress tools, which are way cool, by the way. I wanted to figure out a way to apply conditional formatting to some of the gridviews I was adding to the site, but since I'm a bit of a newb to the world of ASP.NET, I struggled with it. Luckily, my buddy Chris Rock , who is the Jedi Master of all things codable, gave me a hand. Thanks, Chris! To apply conditional formatting to a gridview, you could do something li...
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Late last week, I was able to assist a BI Documenter customer who was having an issue opening a .chm file generated by BI Documenter. Every time he tried to open the compiled help file, his screen showed “Action Canceled” and he was unable to view the .chm document ( Fig. 1). Figure 1 So I did some research and came up with a few different possible causes and solutions to this frustrating problem. 1. The first possible cause of this problem could be that any of the containing folders has a “#” c...
Since I've been doing alot of .NET development lately, I also get the opportunity to create my own graphics and images using Adobe Master Collection Creative Suite 3. Adobe makes some great tools that are very versatile and easy to use and I love designing with them. Lately, however, I'd been having some strange issues with some of the Adobe programs, so I set about uninstalling and reinstalling. After popping my CD in and beginning the installer, a little message box popped up with this message...
Recently I've taken it upon myself to attempt to learn SharePoint Services 2007. So I quickly got to work on setting up a virtual machine with Windows Server 2008. I popped in my CD with SharePoint Services 2007 and began the installation. Unfortunately, I was promptly greeted with the following screen: Apparently you have to do a little file shuffling to make this work. After searching all over the net, I discovered many different suggestions, so I've decided to post what worked here. 1. Extrac...
For the last week or so I've been working on an SSIS 2005 project for a client that has involved processing a spread sheet for inserts and updates and then loading those records into staging tables in preparation for writing to the production database. Since developing the package, we've processed multiple spreadsheets ranging from 5 rows to 22,000+ rows with no problem. Well yesterday I received an email from the client saying that they were having trouble processing a spread sheet that contain...
Yesterday I was working on a report for a client and I ran into a problem. The report was using a table that contained 2 groups and the first group was set to page break at the end but the second group could not be set to page break at the end due to the small size of the groups. If I checked the “Page break at end” setting for group 2, I would have about 30 pages of data that could have been printed out on 2 pages. So you see my problem. The page always broke at the end of the first grouping, b...
If you’ve been doing Reporting Services work for any amount of time, you have probably been asked to calculate a running total of some kind in a report. Well that’s fine and dandy if you are calculating the running total within a matrix. But what if you are using a table inside of a SQL 2005 environment? While SQL2008 provides tablixes for you to calculate running totals in a table, calculating a running total in a table in a SQL2005 environment is going to be more difficult. I encountered this ...
If you’re looking for a way to trick your boss into thinking that you’ve been hard at work for the past week, this is the way to do it! Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom and knowledge of all things, has given us lowly beings the ability to create a dynamic web form that can allow a user to view data from a datasource, update that data, and sort data in just a few clicks by using the GridView tool in Visual Studio. After you’ve done this once, you’ll be able to create a sweet looking and amazin...
While working on the reports for the new release of BI Documenter, I encountered the following error: “Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: index.” Any time I would try and preview my report in SSRS 2008, I would get this error. In SSRS 2005, the reports ran fine. The wonderful thing about this error is that its super vague and doesn’t really help you in hunting down the problem. So after doing some research, I discovered that the...
This past week I was working on an SSIS 2008 package for a client. The client was shuffling some data around between two tables as he modified the rows and prepared the rows to be written to one last table. All in all I think he read/wrote the data about 6 or 7 different times using OLE DB sources and destinations. The package took much longer than it should have. Using about 60 rows, the package would sometimes take as long as 30 seconds to run. This would just not do. So to help speed things a...
The Unpivot Transform is a pretty useful dataflow transformation that can be used to normalize a dataset by taking a single record with multiple columns and expanding that single record into multiple records with those multiple columns combined into a single column. For example, take a gander at the following Parts table: You can see that there are multiple columns that hold the different monetary values for these automobile parts. Using the Unpivot Transform, we can move those cost values into ...