Hello (cruel) World

Of all the tools in my developer toolbelt none frustrates me the way SSRS frustrates me. Don’t get me wrong – it can be extremely powerful and given that it is packaged with SQL licensing becomes a little easier. But I have NEVER come across a tool that took so many dirty hacks, neat tricks or insider gotchas to get the job done. And I fear for the day that these combinations of hacks, tricks and gotchas need to be maintained but nobody remembers why things were written the way they were written…. Recently I worked on a report (actually, only part of a report) that required what seemed like a simple chart. The goal was to show some information over time – X-axis the labels should contain the date, on the Y-axis we should have three intervals with the labels bad, good and great respectively. ‘Bad’ corresponds to a 0 value, '’Good’ to a 50 value and ‘Great’ a 100 value. Easy, right??? Wrong!!! What I soon learned is that there was no way to achieve this goal using any of the Axis...

I was working on an ASP.NET side project and, upon deployment, was unable to perform a number of functions that worked just fine in my dev environment – all were GUI related and all seemed to point to issues with the Ajax Control Toolkit controls used within the site. Loading up the chrome (my  browser of choice) javascript debugger I noticed the following error message: uncaught exception ReferenceError: AjaxControlToolkit is not defined I am packaging the application using a Web Deployment Project and apparently the issue is related to the Ajax Toolkit’s Scriptmanager having difficulty in resolving assemblies – this makes sense because the Web Deployment Project is packaging the assemblies differently than they would look in the standard BIN folder. The workaround in my case was to update my code (a single line) to use the ASP.NET’s built in Scriptmanager instead of using the Ajax version. I had no defined reason to use the Ajax version instead of the ASP.NET version, so ...