James Kovacs' Weblog

I had a great time presenting at the Victoria Code Camp this past Saturday. Over 100 developers attended the event at the scenic University of Victoria with lots of great talks by some awesome speakers, including a few from Alberta – Jean-Paul Boodhoo, Donald Belcham, and Justice Gray. They even let me of al people give two talks.  Nolan Zak and the rest of the organizing committee did a phenomenal job orchestrating the event and making sure everything ran smoothly. For those of you who attended my talks, you can find the slidedecks and demos here:

Tools of the Trade: Must-Have .NET Utilities (slides)*

ASP.NET Kung-Fu: Advanced Techniques and Idioms (slides & demos)

I would also like to thank JetBrains for sponsoring my talks by generously donating two copies of ReSharper as prizes. (I don’t work for JetBrains. I’m just a very happy customer!) Congratulations to the two winners, Joe and Robert. I hope you enjoy using ReSharper as much as I do. It’s a phenomenal product.

* The Tools of the Trade slides are in PowerPoint 2007 format (pptx). If you don’t have Office 2007, you can download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack, which allows you to open/save Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 documents using Office 2003.

You know you’re living life on the bleeding edge when you search the web for an answer to your problem and your own blog appears as one of the most promising results!?! (Currently third from the top on this search.) Reporting Services on Windows Vista just doesn’t work out-of-the-box, even with SQL Server 2005 SP2 installed. (N.B. SP2 is beta/CTP right now.) So I decided to do a bit of digging. As is noted here, local administrators are no longer SQL Server admins by default. (Local administrators used to get this because they were a member of Administrators group and Administrators was added to the SQL Server sysadmin role by default. Because of UAC – which is an excellent security technology no matter what its detractors might say – local administrators do not have the Administrators SID in their security token. (In order to have the administrators token, you must elevate using “right-click, Run as administrator” and consent via the UAC prompt.) So how do you grant your user (administrator or not – and I still encourage not) access to the report server?

1. Run IE as an administrator. (Right-click IE, Run as administrator.)
2. Browse to your Report Manager directory, usually http://localhost/reports.
3. Click on Site Settings (upper right).
4. Under the Security heading, click “Configure site-wide security”.
5. “New Role Assignment” and add your user to the System Administrators role.
6. Click “Home”, “Properties”, and under security “New Role Assignment”, add your user to “Content Manager”.

Now the funny part… Try running a non-elevated IE and browse to http://localhost/Reports. This is the result:

Now let’s try it with FireFox:

That looks a lot better. Turns out that IE Protected Mode is getting in the way and preventing Report Manager from rendering properly. (IE7 runs in Protected Mode by default, which is a good thing.) We can disable protected mode just for this site by adding it to our trusted sites list in IE. (Tools… Internet Options… Security tab… Select “Trusted sites”… Click “Sites”… and add http://localhost to the list.) Also make sure that “Enable Protected Mode” is disabled for Trusted Sites. (It should be enabled for Internet/Local intranet/Restricted sites.)

Note on the bottom bar “Trusted sites | Protected Mode: Off”. That looks a lot better under IE7!  I haven’t investigated why Report Manager doesn’t like Protected Mode, but it should get many of you up and running with Reporting Services on Vista.

Congratulations to Jean-Paul Boodhoo on his well-deserved Microsoft MVP award! Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy and more awesome dev. Welcome to the club, Jean-Paul.

Well, Bil Simser has tagged me, which means that I’m it. The basic gist of this blog game/chain letter is that I have to tell you five things that you probably wouldn’t know about me. As a reward, I get to pick five other hapless blogging souls who must then do the same.

1. I am a long-time vegan and avid chef. I taught cooking classes for a number of years while living in Boston. I even got featured on the front page of the Somerville Journal, North America’s oldest newspaper.
2. I’ve been playing the saxophone for about 20 years and have been in various jazz bands, big and small. I can carry a tune, but I’m not giving up my day job. (I take full responsibility for the “musical interludes” that grace Plumbers @ Work.)
3. I have a Masters degree in Physical Chemistry from Harvard University. Although my business cards say “M.Sc.”, it’s actually an “A.M.” or Artus Masterus, which is Latin for Master of Arts. It’s easier to write “M.Sc.” than explain to everyone that Harvard gives out an “A.M.”, which is equivalent to every other university’s M.Sc.
4. I love games. I collect European-style board games. Examples include Puerto Rico, Power Grid, The Princes of Florence, and The Traders of Genoa. (i.e. Not Monopoly.) BoardGameGeek is an awesome site. I spent much of my teenage years playing AD&D, Car Wars, BattleTech, Paranoia, and similar games. I was a popular dungeon master in my high school and was president of the RPG club. (In high school, dates were a fruit that grew on trees.)
5. Unlike Bil, I have broken a bone in my body. Many years ago, I broke a toe on my left foot in a freak cooking accident when I ducked into my pantry for a potato.

My duty is done. I pass on the gauntlet to…

• John Bristowe
• Kenny Kerr
• Oren Eini (aka Ayende Rahien)
• Donald Belcham
• Justice Gray