Love at first sight

We met at Staples.

Arg! the telnet client is disabled by default in Vista

I'm trying to fix my dad's website, after his gallery suffered a sql injection and his database is no longer with us. I needed to check if port 2077 was open on the server to map a folder as a drive on my windows explorer after a few problems with my ftp connection timing out.
To make the story short, how to enable the telnet client on Vista:
Go to Control Panel.
Go to Programs.
Go to Program and Features.
Click Turn Windows Feature on or off.
Check mark the telnet client.

Adding an NHibernate collection to your QuickWatch initializes it

I spent most of the day trying to improve performance on an application. We use NHibernate 2.0 and try to lazy load most of the collections.
I found these two links very useful for troubleshooting my performance issue:
http://djeeg.blogspot.com/2006/08/nhibernateutilisinitialized.html
and the NHibernate reference:
http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/nhibernate/html/performance.html

The curious thing is I got really confused when testing my
NHibernateUtil.IsInitialized(_myobject.MyCollection) line and it was false
but I saw a query retrieving the collection in Profiler...


until I realized that adding the collection to the Watch initializes it. The same happens if you open this collection in QuickWatch. :-p

This merge replication error: The merge process could not connect to the Publisher 'Server:database' is so misleading

We have a merge topology in place with pull subscriptions, this is the merge agent runs at the subscribers.
One of our subscriptions in had the error that the merge process couldn't find the server. The server was there and the ping was fine, also the Replication Monitor was able to register the error with the x mark.

The details of the ertor are as follows:

Command attempted:

{call sp_MSensure_single_instance (N'Merge Agent Name', 4)}

Error messages:

The merge process could not connect to the Publisher 'Server:database'. Check to ensure that the server is running. (Source: MSSQL_REPL, Error number: MSSQL_REPL-2147199368)
Get help: http://help/MSSQL_REPL-2147199368

Another merge agent for the subscription(s) is running or the server is working on a previous request by the same agent. (Source: MSSQLServer, Error number: 21036)
Get help: http://help/21036


Our error was due to the second cause. It seems the subscriber had lost power while replicating, and any replication after that could not acquire a lock for the merge agent. We restarted the subscriber machine, reinitialized the subscription, with no luck. Only when we dropped the subscription and recreated it again the subscriber was able to run the replication agent again. Just a curious note for the future as this error is not well documented. The only MSDN forum thread that deals with is is still unanswered here...

My wish list for SSRS 2005 and 2008

Right now I'm swamped making reports in SSRS 2005. Even though that might be considered a junior's task I found it interesting. Last time I created report templates was 10 years ago with Quick Reports and VB 6 in the late 1990s :-p

My team recommended SSRS over Crystal Reports and VTO mainly because we have had a previous bad experience with word templates for report generation and really liked the idea or having the report engine accessible using a web service. Also being the RDL files xml with a documented schema, instead of the proprietary Crystal Report format, made us believe SSRS might go farther in the long run. Price was also a consideration for ruling out Crystal Reports. One of the big points towards this decision was the Report Manager in SSRS. Deploying our reports independently of the application where they will be viewed allow us to deploy and test the reports in parallel. There is no need to wait until the main application goes to QA. Report subscriptions was another plus.

The purpose of this short post is not to compare those three technologies though. You can see a good comparison of Crystal Reports vs SSRS here.

Our initial hesitation of putting most of our eggs on the SSRS's basket is almost gone now, but not without having a wish list that would make the maintenance of our solution easier:


- Widows and Orphans control, there's a hack if you use a rectangle control to group elements, KeepTogether property for a table doesn't work
- Full aligned text, no workaround for this AFAIK.
- Reuse datasets in the reports that belong to the same project.
- Reuse images
- Reuse custom code and make it visible other than in the Report Properties->Code Tab
- Be able to re-use headers and footers on all the reports on the project.
- Be able to use more than one reportitem in an expression for an element in the header or footer.
You have to do lots of hacks in order to achieve this.I have an example of doing this using a dataset and an internal report parameter after I gave up on using the ReportItems for hiding or showing header elements.
-Barcode print in PDF, some barcode fonts get distorted when the report is rendered as a PDF,
so you have to rely on third party components such as Aspose.Barcode. Microsoft SSRS team fixed some fonts on the SP2 for SQL Server 2005 but unfortunately the font we use is not fixed yet.
-More alignment with the Visual Studio project layout. Being able to group reports in subfolders, being able to see the shared datasets in a project folder, the custom code in a project folder, being able to see the referenced external assemblies similar to the references added to the visual studio web and windows projects.
I know that aligning the web rendering with the PDF rendering might be too much to ask, but it would be really nice if the report rendered in HTML form would look similar to its PDF counterpart. Right now you cannot rely on the HTML view at all
when your final renderer is PDF.
- Rendering RTF text out of the database (I still have to explore this on 2008)
- Using CSS to apply styles to your textboxes.

Hope this helps if you have to make a technology decision, I'm sure I'll increase the wish list soon...