Will Beattie's Blog

  I’ve just finished writing a nice wrapper which internally calls the SSRS ReportExecutionService to generate reports. Whilst it was fairly simple to implement there has been some major changes between 2005 and 2008 and the majority of online and documentation is based on the 2005 implementation. The most important change is that the Report Server and Report Manager are no longer hosted in IIS which will be a welcomed change to Sys Admins but makes the security model and hosting model vastly different. So far I’ve yet to figure out how to allow Anonymous Access, if anyone knows how to do this leave a comment and it will be most appreciated. Getting Started To get started you’ll want to add a service reference to http://localhost/ReportServer_SQL2008/ReportExecution2005.asmx where ReportServer_SQL2008 is the name you configure in the Reporting Services Configuration Manager. The Web Application files are located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSRS10.SQL20...

When you entrust your Applications and Data to the Cloud Based Service Providers such as GoGrid and Amazon EC2 it becomes absolutely critical to employ a strict Disaster Recovery strategy. As part of of our strategy it was imperative that we have a failover for our SQL Server. The only problem was that SQL Server Express 2008 doesn’t support Log Shipping. Well technically it does but SQL Server Express does not have SQL Server Agent. Now I’m a big fan of SQL Server, but when it comes to doing something a bit more complicated the Express editions limitations become a bit of a problem, that’s why it’s time to find creative solutions. To set up Log Shipping the first step is to Backup your database and then Restore it on another instance making sure set the Recovery state as “RESTORE WITH STANDBY”. See below To get this going you’ll need three stored procedures, one in the Master database and two in the slave database. Now when you are trying to do this across Network...

If you’re using Sql Server 2008 with Entity Framework and have a DateTime field you have no doubt come across this error when Inserting or Updating an Entity System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: The conversion of a datetime2 data type to a datetime data type resulted in an out-of-range value. The problem here lies in the fact that the .NET DateTime.MinValue equals 0001-1-1 but the Sql Server DateTime only covers 1753-1-1 through 9999-12-31 The very simple solution is to use DateTime2 in Sql Server 2008 which covers 0001-1-1 through 9999-12-31. DateTime2 has also has some other benefits .

The beauty of working for a small dynamic company is that we aren't restricted by corporate policies and can make changes as and when it makes sense. Recently a colleague of mine came into the office raving about Windows 7 Release Candidate . My ears pricked up at this and it certainly tickled my underlying desire for shiny new toys, however it got put on the backburner. It wasn't until I heard Visual Studio 2010 Beta was going to be released that I decided to make the shift. The prospect of having Code Contracts was just far too compelling. Fortunately we have a spare PC at the office with the following specs. 500 GB 2.66 GHZ Quadcore 3.25 GB Ram Our dev environment requirements are Sql Server 2008 Developer Edition SP1 Visual Studio 2010 ReSharper Dynamsoft Hosted Anywhere Client So I decided it was time for an upgrade and I agreed that if we could get a stable version of our development environment then we could all upgrade. Here are some install timings. Windo...

So I've just completed deploying an application to my first GoGrid server, this is the same application as what I've previously deployed to my Amazon EC2 instance . As I mentioned before the application is an ASP.NET MVC  front-end with supporting WCF services running on against a Sql Server Express 2008  Database.   Because I run a Vista development machine I was aware of the fact that running .NET MVC on IIS7.0 outperforms II6.0 with the wildcard ISAPI filter which is what I had to resort to when using my EC2 instance. What I didn't know was by just how much.  On a general note the overall learning curve and time taken to setup the server and then deploy the application was far less than with Amazon EC2. So full credit to Go Grid for the intuitive user interface. Also not having to concern myself with Elastic Block Stores and tracking down the Windows Server Install Disc Snapsh0t to install FTP server was a great help and thing's which have been made unnecessari...

style="" > So recently I got the chance to deploy my first application to Amazon EC2.   I've got to say after a little bit of trial and error I think the service is pretty amazing and is definetly the future of web hosting and you sure can't beat the price US $0.125 / Hour which is essentially US $90 / month. Bandwidth between S3 and your Ec2 instance costs nothing so is very attractive for Media Transcoding and other such tasks. The requirements were as follows: .NET 3.5 SP1 ASP.NET MVC Beta SQL Server Express 2008 with Advanced Services IIS 6.0 Velocity Ideally I would want to host the Application on a Windows Server 2008 instance so that I could leverage the features of IIS 7.0 and also have a dedicated SQL Server 2008 instance, but unfortunately Amazon does not support this yet and it's unclear when this will happen so I had to use a makeshift approach. To manage your instances you can and should use th...