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. Report Designer is hosted in the VS 2005 shell and...

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 Products and Technologies Troubleshooting Integration...

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 the motivation behind this change so I thought I...

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: Design-time: New Report Projects: Two new project...

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 impact on layout (what happens when it grows?), we...

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 or so people. This year, TechEd had over 13,000...

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 official name for the next release of SQL Server...

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 predicate? You can accomplish this is via an expression...

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 the Reporting Server node in SSMS. Why the change...

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 for the sites in the default Site Collection...

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 in the Vista control panel. Here is the list of required...

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 to go pick up a 3rd party component, I have heard...

It's been a long time coming, but SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 is now available. See http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/servicepacks/sp2.mspx .

Sometimes I'll get a question like "Why would I use Reporting Services when I can use Excel?" or "Why does Microsoft have so many tools for building reports?" The underlying assumption behind these questsions is that a limited number of applications should be are able to work with data. IMHO, I think...

Here is some useful information about using SSRS in SharePoint Integrated mode (included with SP2): Installing the SharePoint Add-In If you plan to upgrade from a previous version of the add-in, you should uninstall the previous add-in then install the new one. After installing the new one,...

Some people have had problems during installation of the new Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint . If the add-in setup fails while to add the Reporting Services feature to the sites, some of your SharePoint sites will no longer work. You can tell if the custom action failed by looking...

Based on feedback from a couple of folks, I've decided to make my post titles a bit more descriptive. I'll still use the name of one of the albums in my music collection as the primary title but will also include a description of the actual content of the post (happy, Jason?). Anyway, one of the cool...

While the legend built into Reporting Services charts is relatively easy to use, it lacks some of the flexibility that you might like to have. One issue is that it takes up space within the chart boundaries, making the plot area smaller as the number of series grows. So how can you get more control over...