Upcoming webcasts

There are some handy webcasts coming up that may interest you. Some are technical based and others are career based.

Microsoft Thrive have a couple of webcasts for helping you with your resume/CV and preparing for interview questions

• Thrive Live! What to look for in a job posting and how to search for jobs (Level 100)
• Thrive Live! Creating your online resume (Level 100)
• Thrive Live! Networking and your job search (Level 100)

Move webcasts from Thrive can be found here

Additionally via the LinkedIn group LinkedIn .NET User Group (LIDNUG)

• Scott Guthrie talks shop
• Phil Haack Q&A on ASP.NET MVC
• A lap around Telerik developer tools for Web Developers

Some good free stuff out there!

Fixing rsAccessDenied on Vista / Windows 7

When I upgraded myself from Windows XP to Windows 7 a while ago, I had to install all my developer tools again. I use SQL Server Reporting Services 2008 on my development machine and it installed fine. All the prerequisites were installed correctly and everything seemed to be installed correctly.

I went to the usual http://localhost/Reports and got an rsAccessDenied error on the page. Thinking that maybe it was an issue with localhost I tried /Reports">/Reports">/Reports">http://<machinename>/Reports and still the same error.

Now at this stage I was a bit stumped. My gut instinct was telling me that Windows 7 UAC was the issue here and that some communication between the browser and the Reporting Server was at fault. So I ran the browser as an administrator and viola it worked.

I found this Microsoft Knowledge Base article which details how to install Reporting Services on Vista but it should be ok for Windows 7 and SQL Server 2008 SP1

The same issue also reared its head when I tried to publish reports to the server. Again the fix was to run the Visual Studio IDE as an Administrator.

In Windows 7 you can set the properties for this on the executable itself.

Right click on the devenv.exe file (not the XML settings file) and click properties

Click Compatibility and the select “Run the program as an administrator” option.

Using this method will allow you to double click the solution files (.sln) and automatically run the program as an administrator

You can see the dialog to the left (click to enlarge)

Moving to a custom domain

Well this blog is growing in size and readership so over the next couple of months I will be moving it to its own hosted solution. The new domain will be http://www.certsandprogs.com and I will be moving to a nice new shiny WordPress engine as well.

There should be no change for most people, RSS will be updated via feedburner.com and the existing blogspot url will still work but will be redirected. I am taking my time moving the blog as I have built up some decent SEO etc and would like to keep it.

SQL Server 2008 Edition Comparison for Windows Forms Developers

As I am studying right now for my MCPD Upgrade Windows Forms 3.5, I was trying to get my head around a lot of the different ways of storing data for Windows Forms. One of the things that struck me was SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition and the features of each.

These two products are used a lot in developing self contained or occasionally connected Windows Forms applications that require a persisted data store.

Unless you are familiar with the two products it can be quite hard to get a good overview of the pros and cons of each.

So a quick overview for people doing Windows Forms development.

	SQL Server 2008 Express Edition	SQL Server 2008 Compact Edition
LINQ Support	Yes	Yes
Stored Procedures, Triggers, View	Yes	No
Merge Replication	Yes (subscriber only)	Yes (subscriber only)
Install with MSI	Yes	Yes
Embedded install	No	Yes

You can get a full overview of these two editions here and an overview of the edition features of the other editions of SQL Server 2008 here