Head of the class?

Last week I got to do something quite different – I taught the course 2310C: Developing Web Applications Using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to a group of software developers. I became a Microsoft Certified Trainer at the start of March, so I’m now able to teach a range of Microsoft courses. LobsterPot now has SQL, BI and .NET training comprehensively covered (contact us if you want to make a booking!)

I really enjoyed being up front teaching – an interesting contrast from just sitting at a desk in front of a screen. One of the first things I learned was how useful Win+P is for switching my laptop/data projector from ‘duplicate’ to ‘extend’ display modes. The PowerPoint slides were in ‘extend’ mode with the presenter view on my laptop screen, but for code demos I would switch back to ‘duplicate’ so I’d be seeing the same thing as the students.

The other useful thing was having a Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. This was a gift for taking part in the Demos Happen Here competition (along with a bright orange t-shirt). I’d worn the t-shirt a few times but the mouse had been sitting in a drawer feeling neglected. Last week it got a good workout though - really handy to swap between ‘mouse’ and ‘presentation’ mode to flick through the PowerPoint slides.

The course 2310C is a fast trip through various features of Visual Studio 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5, and is not a bad introduction to most of the things you’ll need to get started doing web development. I’m pleased to observe 2310D looks like it will be available next month – with updated lessons on Silverlight 3, ASP.NET MVC and ~ADO.NET~ WCF Data Services.

This week I’m booked in to do three .NET 4.0 exams (they’re beta/pre-release which means there’s no charge but also means you need to wait a few weeks to see if you pass or not). Passing those should mean I’ll be able to teach courses on Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. I’m also planning to do some SQL 2008 Business Intelligence exams (70-448 and 70-452). These will not only be a good way for me to improve my SQL BI knowledge, but should be useful in LobsterPot getting the new ‘Advanced Competency in Business Intelligence’ (though if you’ve met Rob, you’ll know he’s a one-man walking advanced competency in BI already :-)

vsdbcmd.exe fails with error 0x8007000B

How to: Prepare a Database for Deployment From a Command Prompt by Using VSDBCMD.EXE shows how to upgrade the schema of a database on a remote server. However I encountered a problem this week running vsdbcmd.exe on a Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit machine:

`

vsdbcmd.exe /action:deploy /dd+ /manifestFile:Project.Database.deploymanifest An unexpected failure occurred: An attempt was made to load a program with an in correct format. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007000B)

`

This error normally implies that you’ve got a mismatch between 32bit and 64bit dlls. I’d copied the DLLs from my Windows 7 32bit development virtual machine, so that made some sense.

It was suggested I copy the DLLs from a 64bit machine, but unfortunately that had no effect. I then noticed that some of the sqlce dlls did appear to be 32bit-specific.

I then downloaded and installed both the 32 and 64bit versions of SQL Compact 3.5 SP2 on the server, and removed the original sqlce dlls that I’d copied along with vsdbcmd.exe.

That seems to have fixed the problem – vsdbcmd now executes correctly.

So the actual list of DLLs ended up copying to the server now that the SQL Compact files are already installed are:

• Extensions (folder)
• DatabaseSchemaProviders.Extensions.xml
• Microsoft.Data.Schema.dll
• Microsoft.Data.Schema.ScriptDom.dll
• Microsoft.Data.Schema.ScriptDom.Sql.dll
• Microsoft.Data.Schema.Sql.dll
• Microsoft.Data.Schema.Utilities.dll
• System.Data.SqlServerCe.dll
• vsdbcmd.exe
• vsdbcmd.exe.config

T-SQL Tuesday #005 – Visual Studio 2010 Released

6.30am – Woke up

6.40am – Ate breakfast with kids

6.50am – Logged in to MSDN and started downloading the release version of Visual Studio 2010!

Not a bad way to start the day :-)

However, to make this post eligible for the SQL Tuesday series it’s worth mentioning that amongst other things, one of the new components released today is Microsoft Report Viewer 2010.

Brian Hartman has blogged about some of the new features in the Report Viewer. Here’s a summary from his posts:

• Support for the 2008 RDL schema in local mode.
• Support for ASP.Net AJAX (All page navigation and report interactivity is done with AJAX)
• Updated API including a new JavaScript API.
• Significantly improved browser compatibility.
• Usability and “look and feel” enhancements.
• Local mode now supports the same RDL features that are currently available in SQL Server 2008, including tablix, chart, gauge, and rich text.
• AsyncRendering now controls whether the initial processing of the report blocks the entire ASP.Net page, and nothing else.
• Can be loaded into a .NET 3.5 or a .Net 4.0 application.
• No more frames - ASP.Net postbacks are used to render the report.

Read more about the ReportViewer control in the MSDN Library.