Direct Reports

I've spent the last 17 years at Microsoft, the majority of my adult life. For most of those years, I've been in a role called "program manager". Surprisingly, one of the challenges with being a program manager at Microsoft is determining what on earth...

One of the most impressionable meetings that I have been involved in occurred early in my career at Microsoft. In was 1996 and I was a freshly minted technical evangelist working in Microsoft's Developer Relations group (DRG). DRG was a group tasked with...

Early in my career at Microsoft, I was part of one of the biggest development disasters at Microsoft (no, not Windows Vista), called WinFS. WinFS was an attempt to bring the benefits of schema and relational databases to the Windows file system. I never...

Sometimes I'm at a party and someone asks where I work. If the party is in Seattle and I say "Microsoft", the follow up is usually "Which group?" because the person either works there, contracts there, or has a friend in the XBOX of Office team that they...

Hard to believe my last post was over 6 years ago. At the time, I was departing the SQL Server Reporting Services team to join the Microsoft Health Solutions Group. That lasted about a year and a half (I'll tell some of those stories later) and I joined...

The rumors are true. I will be leaving the Reporting Service team after 7 years and SQL Server after 10 years. Here is the message that I sent to my team: It first dawned on me about 3 months ago that I had been in the same position for close to...

Hopefully, you have gotten a chance to work with the latest CTP of SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services . But if you have, you may be a bit puzzled by the report design options in the CTP. Specifically: Report Builder looks just like it did in SSRS 2005...

After many months of working on getting them posted, I'm excited to let you know that two whitepapers on the integration between SQL Server Reporting Services and SharePoint are now available. SQL Server 2005 Integration with Microsoft SharePoint...

If you have gotten a chance to try an early build of SQL Server Reporting 2008 Reporting Services, you know that one of the changes in the product is the removal of the Internet Information Services (IIS) dependency. I have gotten some questions about...

As most of you probably know by now, Visual Studio 2008 is now available. What you might not have noticed is a new version of the ReportViewer control and local /embedded report editing experience. Included with VS 2008 are the following new features...

As localization is not a built-in feature for Reporting Services, people have tried a a variety of techniques for localizing reports. One technique is to use the LocID propertie to create a version of the RDL in each language. Another approach is to have...

One of the questions that I get often is about putting database fields in their SSRS report page header and/or footer. Note that putting fields in the page header and footer is not the same as putting a data region in these sections. Because of the...

Some of you may be familiar with Nigel Pendse’s OLAP Report . This year, the survey is broadening to include more BI functionality and is being renamed "The BI Survey". If you have some time, take a moment and fill out the survey . We (and the other BI...

Last week I attended TechEd in Orlando, Florida . Here are my thoughts on the event. This year was TechEd's 15th anniversary. I realized on the way down that I was attending my 10th consecutive TechEd. When I started attending, TechEd was about 2,000...

I am very happy to announce that a fix has been released for the notorious "Visual Studio cannot shut down because a modal dialog is open" bug. I know that many of you are getting this daily when using the SQL Server 2005 Report Designer. You can read...

I think that you might be surprised how long it takes people within Microsoft to adopt new software. While there are some software that we are "strongly encouraged" to adopt <g>, what applications we use on a day to day basis is generally up to...

Unlike previous years, I decided not to attend the first day of TechEd. This means that I missed BobMu's keynote but you can read about the details from many of the TechEd bloggers . If you read the press release from TechEd today, we announced the...

I wanted to give some props to my friends at 90 Degree Software (Vancouver, Canada) on the latest release of their report authoring tool, Radius . Radius is a report design tool based on the Reporting Services Report Definition Langauge (RDL). If you...

With the return of “Select All” in Service Pack 2, all multi-value parameters allow the user to pick all of the available values. But what if you want to remove the predicate from your WHERE clause instead of generating a long set of values in the IN...

Wow, what a show! I spent this week recovering from the first ever Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference . Conferences in downtown Seattle are always fun because I live in Seattle and don't have to cross the bridge to get to the Microsoft campus...

For Katmai we are considering the removal of namespace management (folders, reports, data sources, models) from the Reporting Services Add-in for SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). In other words, we are considering removing the 'Home' folder under...

For those of you who are incorporating the ReportViewer control in your WinForms or ASP.NET applications, I'm happy to announce the availability of a new ReportViewer redistiributable package. This package contains all of the fixes to the controls that...

After installing the Reporting Services Add-in for Integration with SharePoint , you may find that the Reporting Services features are not visible in your SharePoint web sites. Why does this happen? Because when the add-in is installed, it is only activated...

It's a bit tricky to get Reporting Services (including the report server that comes with SQL Express with Advanced Services) to work on Windows Vista . The key is to turn on the right set of IIS components in the "Turn Windows features on or off" tool...

Now that we have released the SSRS integration in MOSS 2007 / WSS in SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 , people often ask whether they can build reports against data in SharePoint lists. Although this functionality is not built into SSRS, if you are willing...