March 2008 - Posts

• Transitioning from TiVo to Windows Media Center

  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 Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 25, 2008 1:55 PM by Shahar | 4 Comments Filed under: Geekdom

• Who's Afraid of the big-bad cast operator?

  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 Read More... Posted Monday, March 24, 2008 9:00 AM by Shahar | 5 Comments Filed under: Development

• Using a Generic return type that does not appear in the parameter list - when to use it

  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: Read More... Posted Sunday, March 23, 2008 2:15 PM by Shahar | 5 Comments Filed under: Development

• Hitting "Session Timeout" errors when you clearly are not supposed to be hitting them

  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 Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 18, 2008 2:09 PM by Shahar | 3 Comments Filed under: Excel Services

• COM Library for Excel Web Services - Use EWS from VBA!

  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 Read More... Posted Wednesday, March 05, 2008 9:00 AM by Shahar | 1 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services

• Chapter of the 'Professional Excel Services' book is on MSDN.

  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! Read More... Posted Tuesday, March 04, 2008 4:49 PM by Shahar | 1 Comments Filed under: Excel Services

• Single-select Dimension member Analysis Services Filter Web Part

  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 Read More... Posted Saturday, March 01, 2008 9:09 PM by Shahar | 2 Comments Filed under: Development, Excel Services