Cum Grano Salis

We have a surplus computer store near my house which I like mostly because their pricing on cables is not equivalent to the GDP of a small island state. They have some real wonky stuff in there - very old printers, monitors, etc. I passed through there...

I finally made the jump to Windows Media Center 2 months ago or so and, overall, I am much happier for it. I have had TiVos in my house since 2001 and it has gotten to be that I just never watch live TV anymore. I adore the concept of the DVR and am greatly...

My previous blog entry (which was completely misunderstood by some people who commented - I blame the fact that English is not my native tongue) reminded me of another poor coding behavior. Just so we don't have a repeat of that last post, let me clarify...

EDIT: Contrary to what people understood from this post, it is NOT a "Do not use Generics" post - I think Generics are a GREAT addition to the language/framework and I use them all the time. It is against a very specific usage of Generics Short Answer...

Scenario: You are working on preparing dashboards or uploading workbooks to your SharePoint site for usage with Excel Services. Every now and again, even though you are clearly interacting with the session, EWA will suddenly tell you that the session...

In the ODC 2008, I gave a demo of how to use Excel Web Services from a VBA client - the demo was basically just a managed library that wrapped a generated Web Services proxy. Since Microsoft no longer seems to supply a SOAP toolkit for office, this is...

MSDN has just published a chapter from my book " Professional Excel Services ". You can find it on this link . This wouldn't happened without the great work of Siew Moi Kohr. Thanks Siew!

A long long time ago, in a building far far away, two Jedis developers called Sreepada Santhegudda and Sergei Gundorov showed me a solution they came up with for a single-select Analysis Services filter web part . While SharePoint ships with a set of...

Gabhan Berry (read his blog - he has lots of Excel programmability related information in there!) wrote a piece about how to make using optional parameters a little less painful when using C# to program against the Excel (and any other) COM PIA object...

Excel Services comes with a few performance counters designed to let an administrator know the load under which Excel Services is operating. When all performance counters are added, the list inside the management console looks like this: Active Requests...

Got this question from somebody who just installed the new version.. Previous builds did not know how to auto-fix invalid characters - with this version you can turn on auto-fix - but it will only work in some cases... When click on the Invalid Character...

I uploaded version 914 onto the download page . This build adds two new features: Finer control over which features are available (and which are autofixed) as well as adding the ability to "fix" external references/RTD functions. The ribbon changed a...

Towards the end of the development cycle of Excel Services, we saw some incredibly intermittent, incredibly rare issues with Internet Explorer crashing when doing certain operations. There were also a few people complaining about this on our forums ....

Deepak posted a question on one of my posts and I thought that it was worth posting a blog entry about. I will try to break this down as simply as I can, since there are many permutations and it is not always obvious what's going on. There are also a...

If you have an x64 install and are willing to help, contact me via the contact link at the top of the page. Edit: Got somebody to help. Thanks!

You can download the newest version from the download page . I posted an entry about ESCC being unable to find some cases of External Reference (also called Linked workbooks). This caused workbooks to be marked as compatible with Excel Services even though...

There have been a few internal queries about this and I think I have finally found the problem. The Excel Services Compat Checker will sometimes say that a workbook is compatible with Excel Services, and when that workbook is loaded on the server, it...

After a few people complained, I was able to illicit the help of one Paul Rubenstein to help figure out what was wrong. I sent him a debug version of the resizer and he installed it, hit the repro and sent me the log files. That in turn helped me figure...

In the first part of this post series I showed the EWA companion and its various capabilities. In this part, I will delve deeper into the "Automatic Refresh/Recalc" capabilities of the companion. This feature is divided into two parts - refresh and recalc...

I have made two examples of Code Art - taking a piece of code that does something and placing the text in such a manner that it conveys the idea of the program. The reason it sucks so much more than ASCII art is two-fold: a. It is very hard to do significant...

In the first part of this post series I showed the EWA companion and its various capabilities. In this part, I will delve deeper into the "Open" functionality of the EWA Companion web-part. There are a few reasons behind adding the Open command to the...

In a previous post I discussed the EWA companion and how to set it up for saving back to SharePoint. This post will show the next set of capabilities which is the ability to Save As (actually, it exports or saves under another name - the new workbook...

Download the Ewa Companion Over the past year or so, some requests have been voiced by the community again and again. Some of these related to the EWA, asking for extra functionality that is not there by default. To that extent, I decided to write the...

Sherman (one of our funkied-hair testers) found this issue with the compatibility checker - it ignored chart-sheets that are protected. These would cause the workbook to be un-loadable by Excel Services, but is not detected by the compatibility checker...

Hi, I am doing some work on a new sample (called EwaCompanion, more on that soon). As part of that work, I had to add a few things to the AJAX library and fix a few issues. The main addition is the support for the .refreshAll() method which will execute...