Todays problem, missing the reporting data toolbox in Visual Studio 2013 – once again, a different menu options. Open the actual report (.rdl) View > Report Data Alternatively press Ctrl + Alt + D

Stupidly today, I accidently closed the SSIS toolbox. After a bit of unsuccessful searching in the Visual Studio menus, I gave up and done the IT norm and Google it – hoping I wouldn’t have to reinstall. Luckily I found James Serra had already blogged about it, the only difference is Microsoft has changed the icon, its still in the same place at least So when is a Visual Studio Toolbox, not a Toolbox?...

One really annoying bug in SSIS when using Visual Studio 2013 / SQL Server 2014 is the object jumping, so when you drag an object like a sequence container down the object shoots to the bottom. Thankfully the fix is simple. Close Visual Studio and apply SQL Server 2014 SP1 to your machine.

One of the problems we have is documentation and how to keep it up-to-date. We tend to deliver a new batch of reports as part of a CR (Change Request) then make changes as part of BAU (Business as usual) unless its a particularly complex or time consuming change. The problem is often BAU changes happen rapidly often within a short time frame and time isn’t always allocated to updating documentation....

So I’ve been following a few folks on Twitter – one of them is Tim Mitchell from the US, he tweeted a link to some resources he used in a recent SQL Saturday he presented at. One of them is Konesans.com. Who happen to be based in Holbeach, which is really close to my home town of Wisbech. You go all over the world in search of knowledge, only to find there’s a guru right on your own doorstep....

I had a rather odd error with OctopusDeploy where the RavenDB backups were failing. Turns out the problem was because I had assigned 1 IPv4 address to OctopusDeploy and another IPv4 address for TeamCity. Oddly the RavenDB backup routine referenced the localhost address – 127.0.0.1, it appeared to be hardcode with no option other then changing port. This was especially weird as the OctopusDeploy service, was able to access it fine....

It appears IBM has moved the Cognos backup folder location from: C:\Program Files\ibm\cognos\c10_64\bkp To: C:\Program Files\ibm\cognos\c10_64\uninstall

Our new HR system uses SAP Business Objects for transactional reporting, as this was setup by our HR supplier we haven’t really got involved with it beyond writing a few custom reports, turns out we’ve written quite a few, so much so that the Business Objects CMS database has swollen to over 30 GBs. This, as you might have guessed, is causing a few performance problems. After a discussion with the supplier, we found out it was storing all the reports, even the ad-hoc one-off reports and we should have set a parameter to limit it....

Two new Azure features have caught my eye – the first is Logic App. In a nutshell this is workflow. You have connectors and you can add triggers and actions. So you could have a trigger on your HR system that when a new employee starts, it creates a user account then sends a welcome message to the existing staff informing them of the new starters. The other is Data Catalog, this basically allows you to generate meta data about your data sources....

I made the above video using Microsoft Excel using data from a FOI request to Ipswich Borough Council about the number of Parking fines issued since 2010.

Just an update to my previous post about the Toshiba Laptop, I’ve been thinking about reinstalling the Toshiba laptop with Ubuntu, but before I do that, I want a backup. Luckily, I still have the original 500GB hdd spare, I just need a USB caddy. Luckily my local Curry’s had a USB3.0 one (PNY SSD and 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure and Upgrade Kit), before anyone comments about how I could of got one cheaper off eBay, just remember, I was able to get it same day and it included Acronis....

I was talking to a colleague about one of our suppliers and the progress they were making on a new product they were developing. He was surprised to hear how little progress they appear to have made, they had previously been making huge steps in very little time with very few developers, especially surprising when they have been scaling up the development team over the past few months. I explained they are burning some of the technical debt they have collected whilst they still can....

UPDATE: I’ve detailed the Toshiba default build a bit here At the beginning of the month I order a new laptop, for the past few weeks I’ve been wanting something more mobile then my desktop, at first I was toying with the idea of selling my desktop and picking up a new Surface. The new Surface 3 which starts at £419 seemed like a good idea what with its sexy full hd touchscreen, however when you scratch the surface (ha ha) it doesn’t look so go...

I’ve been thinking lately about the adoption of version control. One of the common fears of using version control is that its permanent. All mistakes are visible and are in fact, highlight. Originals are updated with new commits which detail only the change and a nice comment. There is no hiding mistakes. The thing is Mistakes are what make us human. Everyone makes mistakes, we need to accept that fact. In doing so we can move forward faster....

I’ve been working on SQL Server 2014 lately and one of the annoying problems I’ve stumbled across using SSMS is that F5 no longer means execute the SQL query, it now means Debug. Which brings up an annoying popup (least for me) about configuring my Windows Firewall. This can be changed in SSMS by going Tools > Customize… > Keyboard… The default is: Debug.Start (F5 (Global)) And the traditional is:...

It appears the Local Government is looking to follow in schools footsteps and do an “Academy” – cutting the red tape and be given more control and freedom.

Tomorrow, Sunday the 7th December 2014, I will be celebrating 4 years of contributing wasted CPU cycles to the excellent Rosetta@Home project. Rosetta@home project is determining the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins through research, that may ultimately lead to finding cures for some major human diseases such as HIV, Malaria, Cancer, and Alzheimer’s. The project is lead by Dr David Baker at the Univerity of Washington. You can find out more about the Rosetta@Home project on their website – http://boinc....

So in my last blog post I asked, are you ready for IPv6? The post came about when I was looking at Schools MIS data, which Graham, Joshua and myself have being look at to see who are the big movers and shakers in the Schools administration software (MIS) arena. Data is collected by what software suppliers a school uses to submit the School Census (in England) which is requested under the Freedom of Information (FOI) from Department of Education(DfE) (saving having to FOI every individual school)....

For a long while now it has been known that IPv4 will run out of available publicly assignable IP addresses. IPv4 address are 32 bits wide and quite simply can’t cope with the demand of the modern world – despite NAT’ing. IPv6 looks to resolve this by have not only more digits, but also using hexadecimal. For example, an IPv4 address looks like this 192 . 168 . 0 . 1...

I’m currently getting bogged down with other projects and unfortunately my final sprint of SIMS Bulk Import has grind to a halt. On the plus side I managed to swash a few more bugs last month, get a code signing certificate. This will mean all future releases will be signed as coming from me which is great news, it adds a layer of confidence that the code you run is unaltered by a third party....

Tonight I was trying to get TeamCity to auto-update the version number for my SIMS Bulk Import application, however the simple AssemblyInfo Patcher just failed to work. No errors. Nothing. Then I read the manual, again… Note that this feature will work only for “standard” projects, i.e. created by means of the Visual Studio wizard, so that all the AssemblyInfo files and content have a standard location. So I created a new package which placed the AssemblyInfo....

Last night I chopped up my WIX installer project – I basically split the actual installer parts into one file – CoreMsi.wxs, the versions into a variable file – Version.wxi and the file list into a separate fragment file – SimsBulkImport.wxs. This worked. Great I thought, simple PowerShell script to generate the file list, I can even grab the main repository complied bin as a artifact dependency – got to love TeamCity....

Overview If your in the UK, the chances are your local school is using SIMS .net. Just checkout the stats on their site. 22,000 schools taking 2,500,000 children’s attendance, every day. That’s impressive. So what is SIMS .net? Well its a MIS system, but what is a MIS system? In the simplest terms its a database that holds the school records, for both students and staff. So it makes sense that you are going to want to interface with it as it’s your at your core when it comes to data sources....

I’ve finally gotten round to setting up the VDS Mythic-Beasts have kindly donated to host the API backend for one of my open-source projects. A few nights ago I enabled IPv6 and today when I went to run apt-get update it just hung saying: 0% [Connecting to gb.archive.ubuntu.com (2a01:450:10:1::10)] As they had previously worked, I suspect it’s IPv6 problem, quick google and… http://askubuntu.com/questions/272796/connecting-to-archive-ubuntu-com-takes-too-long For sites which prefer IPv4 connections change the last line to precedence ::ffff:0:0/96 100 Bingo....

I always find it funny when IT departments talk about BI for their company and they don’t actually have a BI solution in place for themselves. Surely you should practice what you preach? So why do IT departments need BI. Well lets look at Rosetta@home. Jul 30, 2014 We are aware of significant network slow-down between the subnet upon which our servers sit and the Internet beyond the UW campus. We are working with the UW’s Network Operations team to pinpoint the cause....