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...

Repeat after me, "reports is for interface, reportserver is for reportserver"...This morning I spent the best part of 30 minutes trying to determine why a SSRS report was visible through the reporting services user interface, but not when through a ReportViewer in my ASP.NET application. No matter what I tried, I kept receive a "The request failed with HTTP status 404: Not Found" error message. As a developer I contemplated every possible Report and ReportViewer property configuration before realising that I was pointing to the reporting services user interface, rather than the server itself... There is quite a large difference between: http://myserver/reports and http://myserver/reportserver Hopefully, this will save someone else out there flogging the same dead horse (as the saying goes). Happy coding!