Author Archives: chrismay

VS.Net for Database Launch Event

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Microsoft is releasing “Visual Studio Team Edition 2005 for Database Professionals” (who on Earth comes up with these names????).

MS is holding some launch events all over where you can come (for free) and learn a little about this product, which from what I saw looks pretty slick.

http://www.teams-deliver.com

Red Gate SQL Refactor Tool Looks Cool

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Red Gate has a pretty interesting tool called SQL Refactor:

http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_refactor/index.htm

 

The “Layout Code” feature looks awesome.  It basically takes a terrible looking select statement and turns it into a nicely formatted block.

 

Here is a code project article that shows some of these features:

http://www.codeproject.com/showcase/SQLRefactor.asp

 

Missing Step in, Step Out and Macros in VS.Net

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A while back I had some problems with a coworkers VS.net settings.

They were missing the step in and step out as well as the Macros option in the tools menu.

We were able to get these back by changing the VS.Net settings by going to Tools->Import and Export settings.

Then select to Import settings and pick where you want to backup your current settings.

Then I think we picked “Visual Basic Development Settings” or maybe “General Development Settings.”  This seemed to get things back to normal for the most part.

I still have a few problems, like if I am working on some file, that file will not be highlighted in the solution explorer (what a pain) and I can’t right click on a webform and select “View Code” (what a pain).

It looks like MS was trying to make it really customizable, but I think they ended up making it a pain to get things working the way you expect them to.

 

UPDATE:
I was able to quickly find a setting to make sure that the current page I was working on became tracked in Solution Explorer:

 

Custom Credentials for SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 Web ReportViewer

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SQL Server Reporting Services 2005 allows you to connect with a web based ReportViewer control.

This control needs to provide credentials for the reporting server to authenticate the user requesting the report.  By default, the account running the asp.net worker process is used, but you can use the code in this forum posting to create you own custom credentials.

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=409854&SiteID=1

 

Anti-Spam GreyListing

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I recently started getting some soft bounces coming back from Yahoo. 

I believe that this is a “greylisting” operation on their part:  “Message delivery has been delayed.”

The typical “lists” are Blacklists (all email is rejected) and Whitelists (all email is accepted).

Greylists utilize what is called a soft error, or soft bounce on the email server. 

When sending an email, there are some errors that cause the transmission to fail and halt, and there are others that indicate that the sender should “try again later.”

For example, if you try to send an email to an account that doesn’t exist, the sending server will not try to deliver the message again.  But if the error is something like “Mailbox is full”, then the sender will keep trying N number of times.

Almost all spammers will not bother to resend these soft bounces.  They are kicking of millions of emails, it isn’t worth their time to deal with these soft bounces.

So greylisting does the soft bounce, and sees if the sender tries again.  If they do, then yahoo labels them as an OK sender, and allows their email through.  If they don’t try again, yahoo can label them a spammer, and block them out.

 

AJAX Toolkit Library Growing

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A while back I was looking at the AJAX toolkit page (http://ajax.asp.net/ajaxtookit) and I was really not impressed with anything I saw.

Things like the “Confirm” button, which is basically a button with 10 seconds of javascript coding built into it isn’t a big deal, IMO.

But their list of controls has really grown and there are some really interesting things in that toolkit.

It still boggles my mind that they don’t have an autocomplete dropdown list where your selections are LIMITED to the choices from the list.

 

ReportViewer with heigh=100%

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When you try to assign the web reportviewer control to a height of 100%, it displays as a very short (height wise) format.  For me, adding the style attributes to the form did the trick.

The solution to this problem was found on this page: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms252090.aspx.

Considerations for XHTML and ReportViewer Web Server Control

If you configure the ReportViewer Web server control to run in asynchronous mode in an application that is written in XHTML, you must follow specific steps to display the ReportViewer control properly. If the ReportViewer control uses relative height (for example, if the height is specified as a percentage of available space), the control collapses to a height of 0 pixels as a result of how frames and DIV tags render in containing tables in XHTML. You can avoid this problem by using one of the following workarounds:

  • Explicitly set the height on the on the ReportViewer control to an actual value rather than a percentage.

  • Add the following style setting to the head tag:

    <style>html,body,form {height:100%}</style>.

    By forcing the html, body and form tags to maximum height, the frame used in the ReportViewer control will also grow to maximum height, making it visible on the page.

  • Remove the xhtml doctype from the page.