Chris Testa-O'Neill on Increasing Business and IT collaboration with SQL Server

I was one of the few who braved the 39°C heat outside to hear Chris Testa-O’Neill (@ctesta_oneill) speak at this month’s Adelaide SQL Server User Group. Great to have Chris back in Adelaide again.

It proved to be a really interesting presentation about what BI tools are now available, and what tools are appropriate for what problems.

• Reporting Services
• Report Builder
• PowerView
• PowerPivot

The talk concluded with a nice demonstration of setting up PowerPivot in Excel, highlighting what could be achieved by a business ‘power user’, and what areas they would require assistance from a BI expert.

We also met in a different room from normal which I think most people thought was a better space. Plus (as you may observe in the photo above), it has a grand piano – I’m sure we could find a use for that somehow!

TFS Best Practice Analyzer failing with "%TFSServerURLValidated%

I’ve been having trouble running the Team Foundation Server Best Practise Analyser (TfsBpa for short). It was failing with the following warning:

Cannot validate the URL provided The scan was generated using the corrected URL “%TFSServerURLValidated%”.

I noticed in the “Other Reports” section that it listed the following additional errors:

23:03:07.351: Exception resetting Execution Policy in TFS PowerShell Object Processor: System.Management.Automation.CmdletInvocationException Access to the registry key ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell’ is denied. at System.Management.Automation.Internal.PipelineProcessor.SynchronousExecuteEnumerate(Object input, Hashtable errorResults, Boolean enumerate) at System.Management.Automation.PipelineNode.Execute(Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) at System.Management.Automation.StatementListNode.ExecuteStatement(ParseTreeNode statement, Array input, Pipe outputPipe, ArrayList& resultList, ExecutionContext context) System.Management.Automation Script

Hmm.. I wonder if it’s a problem related to PowerShell’s execution policy setting?

I ran the following in an elevated PowerShell prompt:

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

And that’s fixed it – now the BPA process runs as expected. Yay!

Dumb Questions

Something I still remember from my school days was one of my teachers telling me, “David, don’t be afraid to ask a question!”. Presumably I’d been struggling with a particular topic (possibly maths), and essentially they were encouraging me not to sit there “spinning my wheels”, but get some help to make sense of the problem.

That’s a lesson that’s just as applicable today as it was then. In software development, we are constantly solving problems. Some are easy, and some are hard. Some are easy but the hard bit is finding the bit that will be easy to fix.

Sometimes it’s just the act of getting a colleague to come and have a look that sheds light on the problem.

But not just in work. Only this week I was at a Church meeting, and people were asking some very deep, insightful questions. I however asked what some might call a “dumb” question (but one which I didn’t know the answer, hence why I asked).

After the meeting as I was leaving, a couple of people came up to me and said, “I was wondering the same thing, thanks for asking that!”.

Which is another great reason to ask questions, even if you think they’re dumb, as odds are someone else is wondering the same thing too.

Photo from Mallala Museum, used under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license