As we all know, SQL Server Reporting Services reports are saved as .RDL files. The files saved and consumed by the VS/Beta 2 Web-based report designer and viewer control, however, are .RDLC files. So, what are the differences?

• ReportViewer Control FAQ
• Report Controls Forum
• Web Log Analyzer Starter Kit (uses the control)

Thanks to Scott Allen, a fellow VSLive! presenter for providing these valuable links to RDLC files.

The VSTS team is finishing up its first series of webcasts.  These provide both a wide overview of the product and a number of deep drill downs on specific technologies within the product.

You can find them here.

Not sure how long this has been online, but it is a pretty good summary.

By no means complete, but several people have asked for my RSS "master list" of Team System folk. Here it is

Any of you who caught my presentation know what I'm talking about. It's the reason I started 3 minutes late. Thanks to an anonymous attendeed (thanks dude) who directed me to the Virtual PC newsgroups and looking for a thread about Hibernation. I found the discussion, and I guess that this is a new problem, that came with VPC SP1, as the inital VPC 2004 release did not have these problems. Colin Barnhorst [MVP  Windows - Virtual Machine] posted the KB article link on 8 March 2005.

Thanks for attending my session. Apologies for not getting through all of the slides, but here they are if you want them. Also, my demo script, if you'd like.

A lot of my cool information can be found at the Beta ASP.NET site including the TreeView control and how to populate it without a postback.

Visual Studio 2005 will be the most customer-focused suite of development tools ever released by Microsoft. This was the message delivered this morning by Prashant Sridharan, senior product manager of Visual Studio 2005. Prashant has been doing a lot of traveling and speaking lately. His schedule has taken him all over the world, including many stops recently in Europe, where he regularly delivered the message of Visual Studio 2005 and Team System to groups of 1500 or more people. We were glad he could stop by VSLive! Las Vegas to update us on Visual Studio 2005’s progress and features.

His message was clear. The core Visual Studio 2005 product is awesome. With the enhanced Microsoft languages, their features include generics, iterators, partial types, and the My classes (Visual Basic). Smart client and Web development features include ClickOnce, new controls, improved designers, and better data support, and a code reduction of up to 70% in ASP.NET. This statistic caught everyone’s attention.

Microsoft’s Jay Schmelzer stepped in at this point to demonstrate the construction of a smart client application, which leveraged many of these features. Using Beta 2 and, in under ten minutes, Jay put together a decent RSS (blog) reader. The coolest thing about Jay’s application, was its striking resemblance to the look and feel of Outlook 2003. Out of the box, Visual Studio 2005 provides many of Office’s look-and-feel controls, such as an advanced Toolstrip and Taskbar. Microsoft even updated their venerable list of graphics. Look for a folder named VisualStudio2005Images under \Common7 to see what I mean. Jay, being a Visual Basic guy, couldn’t help himself and had to show off VB’s code snippet and newly integrated refactoring support, thanks to Developer Express. As a finale, Jay right-clicked on his project and selected publish, which automatically generated the ClickOnce support – the ultimate delivery vehicle for smart clients.

At this point, the hundreds of VSLive! attendees were quite amazed and, if the feature presentation stopped right there, would be plenty for “the next version of Visual Studio”. Being driven by customer demand, however, means addressing the needs of many teams, small and large. Prashant went on to introduce the lineup of editions, including the many Express editions, meant for hobbyists and students. He summed it up best by saying that when an Express edition is given to a young student, he or she can quickly build cool applications and then “by accident they will learn how to program”.

The Express editions, however, have restrictions, such as not being able to access remote data sources, therefore professionals will want to the select standard or professional edition, depending on the applications they intend to build. The professional edition will support all code writing scenarios. It is equivalent in scope to the Visual Studio 2003 Enterprise Architect edition, but includes many new features as previously mentioned, as well as a nifty class designer interface.

The other end of the spectrum from Express is Team System. Team System is a suite of tools, delivered in separate editions of Visual Studio 2005, to support the entire software development lifecycle. Architects will have their own edition Visual Studio 2005 in which they will be able to use the Distributed System Designers, to model their applications and logical datacenters, as a way to “design for operations”, which is to increase the chance of a successful deployment later in the lifecycle. Developers will have an edition that includes many code quality and defect testing utilities, such dynamic and static code analyzers, performance profiling, unit testing, and code coverage. Testers can also unit test and determine code coverage. Further, they will be able to build and execute Web tests, load tests, and manual tests as well.

Team System’s success is contingent on having a strong ecosystem. This will include training, books, and new certifications. As proof of this, Microsoft Press will be handing out thousands of copies of Introducing Visual Studio 2005 Team System (beta) at Tech-Ed 2005 in Orlando and Microsoft Learning is just wrapping up development of Microsoft workshop #2631 Optimizing the Software Development Life Cycle with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System.

You could hear the pride in his voice as Prashant reiterated that Team System is going to be huge – not just as a software suite, but as a way to enable teams to write better software.

Update: Fawcette has published this here.

You can find the .msi here to run.

Improve the performance, serviceability, and enhance the security of your customers’ SQL Server 2000 installations with SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4. Download it here.

Today I built the most trivial of ASP.NET 2.0 Web applications that called the most trivial of ASP.NET 2.0 Web services. I deployed both to IIS 6.0, and the one wouldn't call the other. I was getting these, over and over:

Security Exception

Description: The application attempted to perform an operation not allowed by the security policy. To grant this application the required permission please contact your system administrator or change the application's trust level in the configuration file.

Exception Details: System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type 'System.Net.WebPermission, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089' failed.

Resolution

Not very elegant here, but I added this to the web.config of the calling Web site, and it works:

<system.web>
   <trust level="Full" originUrl=""/>
</system.web>

Found some research here and here.

Keep your eyes open for Microsoft Learning workshop #2631, titled “Optimizing the Software Development Life Cycle with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System“.

It's a great course, if I don't say so myself.

I see that some education centers in Sweden and another in the UK are already advertising it.

Google Web Accelerator is an application that uses the power of Google's global computer network to make web pages load faster. Google Web Accelerator is easy to use; all you have to do is download and install it, and from then on many web pages will automatically load faster than before.

Give the beta a try.

Some friends passed this along to me, and it's a pretty cool download. It runs in the system tray and allows you to easily view the date and time in various locations around the world. You can also quickly and easily add your own personal locations to customize Microsoft Time Zone the way you want.

I happened upon this today. Enjoy!

In a recent posting on the Team System forums, Microsoft suggested that we will be really pleased when we see the new certifications for both VSTS and VS2005. These will get announced at Tech-Ed.

"Outsourcing", which has become synonymous with sending American jobs to India or China, could soon mean foreign workers sleeping in ships just a few miles off America's coast. Read the story here

Read more about the product here, and even sign-up to receive an evaluation of it here.

Looks like I'll be presenting three sessions on Team System at Wintellect's Devscovery event in DC next month.

I found a few more answers to some questions that came up during the ISV Community Days Tour.

Q. Will there be an XML data type in SQL Mobile?
A. No. In Beta 2 there is not an XML data type. If you replicate a SQL Server table with a XML datatype it converts it to ntext in the SQL Mobile database. You can see more information at the end of this article.

Q. Can you index a managed UDT column? If so, does it index on what the implemented ToString() provides?
A. Yes; we can define constraints on UDTs (PKs, FKs): constraints are implemented with indexes; the “key” is created with the serialized value; when you create the UDT, you must define how the value is going to be serialized: Format.Native or Format.UserDefined. If you select UserDefined format, you must implement the Sql.IBinarySerialize interface coding the methods Read and Write to serializate and deserializate the value. You can create an index on the column, as long as SQL knows which value to index, and this is what you decide when you select how to serialize the UDT.

Q. I’ve heard that Intellisense is gone, will we see it back in any form? Maybe for just T-SQL or system sprocs?
A. It was dropped when Beta2 came; I think we will not have it in any form.

Q. I’ve been hearing scary things about the scalability of managed UDTs – anything public on this yet? Some students are thinking that since Microsoft dropped ObjectSpaces, this is an alternative.
A. We must think about UDT as an extension of scalar types (date, time, points and so); we should not think of UDT as extension of business objects (Employee, Address, Contact,…). For this release, CLR UDTs are meant to be a mechanism to create new scalar data types, not complex objects, so it is NOT a replacement for ObjectSpaces. Balaji published a white paper which talks about this.

Must've happend overnight. If you're a subscriber, check it out ... but give me about a 4 hour headstart!

Martin Danner sent this to me tonight. He scanned this advertisement out of the Idaho Statesman. I'm not really sure who dropped the ball, but see if you can spot the bug ...

Wanted to say a quick hello to my friends in Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin. I met Doug Rhoten, who is the president of this INETA group at a SQL Server 2005 Business Inteligence event in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. If you get a chance, drop by their Website and say hello.