Thursday, October 22, 2009

Source Control...TFS

One of the situations that arise while working in development teams is to keep track of code changes. Coding goes through lot if iterations and modifications, in order to handle such situations using version control becomes important. It gives the ability to store all the code related to a project in one place and provides check in/check out facility so that 2 developers do not step on to each other while modifying the same piece of code. Microsoft has a offering, one of the components that is available in the Team foundation Server and Team Explorer. The TFS server is the place we create all the projects and hierarchies as how the code is going to stored. Visual Studio 2008 can hook into the TFS using the Team Explorer. Once the TFS is setup, the developer can use the Team explorer Snap in to the get latest version of the code. The team explorer allows the developer to keep in sync with the changes in the TFS Server (version control system). I have found the TFS and Team Explorer very powerful when it comes to team code development.

Monday, October 12, 2009

ReportViewer

I spend a lot of time developing SSRS reports, recently came across a situation where i had to develop a c# application, this application had to provide links to the SSRS reports. The user base was pretty small and hence the decision to develop a application and perform a clickonce deployment solution. The report viewer control offered in the .NET framework is powerful and yet relatively simple to use. The reportviewer is part of the Microsoft.Reporting.Winforms.Reportviewer namespace. In the windows form drag the reportviewer control and drop it on the form. The control is present in the reporting category in the toolbox. Some of the properties that are useful in setting up SSRS reports to appear in the control are: these are in the Misc category.
They are LocalReport,ProcessingMode,ServerReport,(DisplayName,HistoryId,ReportPath,ReportServerUrl,TimeOut)
For the reports which are deployed on a reportserver, set the processingmode to Remote, set the reportpath to the path on the server, set the reportserverurl to the webserver having the reports. Once this is set, run the application, the report which is deployed on the server will appear on the application. The user will now be able to access the SSRS reports in the application.