Reserved Words

SSRS .rdl file will not open in design view in Visual Studio

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ssrs reporting services sql server CRM reporting visual studio bids

So you've got a SQL Server Reporting Services .rdl file and you want to open the report in Visual Studio and modify it. But it just keeps showing you the XML of the report. You've installed all the right SQL Server Data Tools / Business Intelligence Studio (BIDS) bits for your version of Visual Studio and all that jazz. Double-clicking the file from Windows Explorer shows you an XML view, not the report designer. File -> Open also shows you XML and not the report designer. How the hell do you ge…

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TechEd - Helicopter ride

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helicopter sql server teched

If you follow me on Twitter you probably saw my delirious excitement about the helicopter ride I won. There was a competition and the Windows Server 2012 team were giving away these joyflights as a prize. I was fortunate enough to win in the first round and went for a 10 minute flight over the Gold Coast.  Behold some pictures! You’ll see they are geotagged as well, you can kind of make out the flight route.  TechEd 2012…

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TechEd: Real world SharePoint Customisation - IT Pro v Developer

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developer it pro microsoft sharepoint sp2010 sql server teched technology

In this session Jeremy Thake and Mark Rhodes took us through both sides of SharePoint customisation, pitting developers against IT pros.  Jermey started by taking us through a common scenario – the blame game. Customised SharePoint performs slowly, devs are guilty until they prove themselves innocent and need to prove their customisations have not caused the performance problems. Yet real world example where a simple SQL setting wasn’t applied upon installation.  IT Pros hate customisations an…

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TechEd - Introduction to SharePoint 2013

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apps microsoft sharepoint sp2013 sql server teched technology

Before attending this session I had downloaded and installed a preview of SharePoint 2013 and had a bit of a play with it. But this session was very helpful and well presented. The first part of the presentation was about My Sites and social features in SP2013. The My Sites activity feed is now slick and improved. There are a lot of elements that are borrowed from all the popular social networking sites –Like / Unlike, Follow, Share, hashtags and so forth. Document libraries One of the highlig…

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SQL Server – cannot connect to named instance

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sql server

Problems connecting to your newly installed SQL Server instance? Did you happen to create a named instance (e.g. sql01)? Microsoft SQL Server named instances use dynamic TCP ports and rely on the SQL Browser service to provide the port number to the client in order to establish a connection. In a lot of cases I have seen people trying to connect to their new SQL Server named instance (e.g. sql01) and assuming that SQL Server was listening on port 1433. They open the Windows Firewall to allow inb…

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