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Technical and Developer Podcasts Worth Listening To

A fellow member of the IE .Net User Group asked me what podcasts I listened to.  He expressed taht there are so many it’s hard to sift through what is actually good quality, both in content and actual production.  Some podcasts are great sound quality, however have very little content that is worth while.  In contrast, some podcasts have great content, but are so hard to hear or are of such poor audio quality that it is really frustrating to ferret out what they are actually talking about.

Here’s the list I usually listen from:

The two I listen to the most and are of very high quality (both in production and content) are .Net Rocks (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/) and Hansel Minutes (http://www.hanselminutes.com/).  Both can be subscribed to via iTunes.

ASP.Net Podcast (http://aspnetpodcast.com/CS11/) is another one I will listen to if they have a good topic but the quality is pretty lousy so they have to have someone really good for me to bother.

If you’re interested in good podcasts that aren’t necessarily just .Net development, but all around technology check out TWIT: http://twit.tv/.  I haven’t listened to them in a while but they are all very high quality (Leo Laporte, the main host, has been in radio for 30 years) and they have a lot of very good content.  Almost anything technical you’d want, other than .Net development, is covered by one show or another.  Here are just a few that I’ve listened to (not in any particular order):

  • net@night is a good all around what’s happening in tech this week.  A little more of a social bent but a lot of good info and a very open topic of conversation.
  • The Tech Guy is Leo’s actual call-in radio show helping users.  Lots of good general information on anything tech, but probably more for the general consumer.
  • Security Now is a good in depth security podcast.  I think that Steve Gibson is a little too proud of himself but the actual knowledge and explanations of complicated subjects are quite good.
  • MacBreak Weekly is a really great podcast if you are a Mac guy or have Mac friends.  It’s funny and has wonderful content. 
  • TWiT (This Week in Tech) is a very good open discussion podcast with a few regular experts.  Really interesting with the different viewpoints given.  Very good listening.
  • FLOSS Weekly is an complete open source driven podcast.  Usually on things Linux and such but on fairly broad open source projects that do appear in the Windows world.  Very good interviews, however, despite the name it is not weekly.

I don’t listen to every edition of these podcasts, only those that are actually interesting.

If you come across any others that you like let me know!

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Baaaaad User!

I’m in the process of installing ArcGIS Server 9.3 and moving all our GIS data over to ArcSDE.  It’s been 6 months since the last ESRI UC so most of the time I’m reading over docs trying to remember all that I learned.

 

Anyway, our data is now in SDE.

 

I attempted to publish a locator service to the web.  Here’s what I got:

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Baaaaad login user!  No, no!

I’m getting scolded by GIS!

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Verifying code with Pex

I’m a very TDD yourself type guy. I don’t like generated tests, which totally conflicts with the first D in TDD, Test Driven Development.

 

Anyway, Maarten Balliauw had a really nice short post on using Pex. 

 

Stealing from Maarten’s post, here’s an abstract from a recent session on Pex:

“Pex is an automated white box testing tool for .NET. Pex systematically tries to cover every reachable branch in a program by monitoring execution traces, and using a constraint solver to produce new test cases with different behavior. Pex can be applied to any existing .NET assembly without any pre-existing test suite. Pex will try to find counterexamples for all assertion statements in the code. Pex can be guided by hand-written parameterized unit tests, which are API usage scenarios with assertions. The result of the analysis is a test suite which can be persisted as unit tests in source code. The generated unit tests integrate with Visual Studio Team Test as well as other test frameworks. By construction, Pex produces small unit test suites with high code and assertion coverage, and reported failures always come with a test case that reproduces the issue. At Microsoft, this technique has proven highly effective in testing even an extremely well-tested component.”

 

In the simple example Maarten used he showed how Pex may be a great tool to run after your TDD tests are finished just to possibly catch any edge cases you missed. 

 

However, make sure you refactor after including any code Pex suggested.  In Maarten’s post the last check ( if(length < 0)) is never entered because it is included in the check by Pex ( if (length < 0 || current.Length < length)).  This entire block can be removed.  It’s not harmful in anyway, but can be a little confusing and should be cleaned up.  ReSharper probably would catch it.

 

I’m going to have to give Pex a try!

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Budget cuts for schools, what to do?

My wife just sent me an email from her Moms Club.  One of the mothers is a teacher at a local district and sent a request for suggestions to all the members of the club.  Apparently her district, in light of the budget crisis in California, is forming a committee of community members and is soliciting applicants or simply suggestions from local individuals.  This is basically a search for ideas from the community on how to save costs and improve schools.

I thought this was great.  As an employee of the Val Verde Unified School District and a father of 2 (soon to be three!) I am very interested in what happens to the state of our schools.

Simply put there is no money.  So, I won’t get on a soapbox and demand that education doesn’t get cut. That’s simply not realistic.

I am the poster child for doing too much with too little time, but this may be one committee I’ll look into being a part of.

Here are some of the suggestions I sent back with the email.  If any of you have some thoughts on these, for or against, or some other additions yourselves feel free to chime in. 

Thanks!

I’m really excited that the district is looking outside for public suggestions.  This is great.  Usually districts (including ours) think they have all the answers.  I always hear people saying "they waste too much money doing X.  If they just did Y it would be better and cheaper."  It would be great to get these ideas into actual consideration and action.

I would say the first two high priority issues for me are class sizes (I.e. keeping teachers) and class days.  At work this morning we talked about the thought of closing the schools for 5 days.  It sounds like David heard some news that this may not happen.  It wasn’t entirely thought through (it really was just one of the suggestions) and there may not be any real savings in it (and a whole lot of opposition!)

So that brings me down to the one priority of class sizes.  Simply put, there isn’t enough money right now to keep that many teachers on staff or pay for the cost of physically having a school open (electricity, custodians, etc).  So, if teachers are to be kept and building are to remain open you have to find MAJOR savings elsewhere.

As a technologist there are several low cost solutions that I can think of that would replace some more expensive practices that are in place right now.  I’d like to see these explored.  It would be a great way to save money with little loss of quality.

Here’s just a bullet point of ideas I have.  Again, most of them are on technology but there are a few others in here.  For the technology ideas I would extremely encourage seeking the assistance of the IT staff or a knowledgeable person.  Some inexpensive and flashy solutions that are getting a lot of press late just aren’t ready for the market yet or simply do not save money.  The ideas I present below are simply suggestions and may or may not fit all situations.

  • Alternatives to SMART Boards
    SMART boards are very popular, and extremely costly.  A project started by a student (Jonny Lee) at Carnegie Mellon allows you to use the wireless controller for the Nintendo Wii and a projector in place of SMART Boards or similar technology.  If you already have a projector and a computer (many classrooms have these) the cost is ~$50.  Very comparable to a Smart board and in some ways better.
    Here is a video talking about the Wiimote whiteboard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s5EvhHy7eQ
    Here is the project webpage: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/
    Here is a comparison (by a school) comparing this solution to smart boards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSDxc2kFjms
  • Alternatives to new computers
    Everyone wants computers in their child’s classroom.  This can be very costly.  Fortunately technology is incredibly powerful these days and most school applications don’t need state-of-the-art computer systems.  This has created a market where schools (and other organizations) can purchase high quality computers that are slightly used for as little as $100 each.  Computers coming off of 1 or 2 year leases are called "off lease" computers.  Some companies do extremely intensive work and constantly need to purchase high-end new computers for their employees.  This creates a large market of quality computers that are only 1 or 2 years old.  At Val Verde we commonly purchase these types of computers.  There are some pros and cons to this but largely getting computers for $100 has been a real cost savings and has allowed us to purchase many more computers than we normally would have been able to.  Just make sure to go with a reputable vendor who has several hundred in bulk (rather than your local small business getting rid of 2 or 3).  This way the vendor can easily guarantee the machines and replace any that may fail to work.
  • Laser printers instead of Ink-Jet
    Do not buy ink-jet printers.  This seems counter intuitive for some people since they are very cheap and in some cases free.  However, you spend a fortune on ink and they often breakdown much more often with paper jams, dried up ink, broken plastic parts, etc.  They are pretty much considered disposable these days.  When you have 25 students in a classroom this can be quite a lot of abuse for a home type ink-jet printer.  These have become a black hole for expenses.
    Instead purchase inexpensive but economical laser printers.  These often cost more initially but their toner lasts much longer, thus being much less expensive in the long run.  They are also usually intended for businesses and as a result can withstand much more use.
  • Classroom supplies
    Basic supplies like paper, pencils, pens, crayons, rulers, notebooks, etc can be quite costly.  It’s fallen on the teachers themselves to personally pay for any supplies they cannot get from their district.  I say it would be great for the teacher to have a fundraiser in their own classroom every so often, such as during back to school night.  If each parent would donate as little as $5 (maybe like sponsoring their child :)) in a class size of 25 students this would create $125 for supplies .  That’s not a whole lot but if you shop at warehouse stores like Costco or discount stores you can purchase a huge amount of supplies for very cheaply.  $100 at Costco goes a really long way in their office supply section.
    If you have the ability to make use of a computerized whiteboard, such as my first bullet point, then you can cut way down on any "presentation" supplies such as dry erase markers, chalk, etc.  The teachers and students can easily use the computerized whiteboard without any consumable costs.
  • Textbooks
    I’m not sure about all schools but our high schools (and many others near us) have gone to the point of purchasing 2 textbooks for every student.  This is so that one textbook stays in the classroom and the other permanently goes home with the child.  With the amount of textbooks kids need these days and the removal of lockers at some sites this was a solution so that kids wouldn’t have to lug around books or forget them at home.  Unfortunately this effectively almost doubles your textbook costs.  I had to lug around books when I went to school.  I think most of us did.  At high school we used our lockers (normal or PE) and cars to stash books between classes.  When finances become real slim I think this is a solution to a problem that doesn’t take priority. 
    Even more encouraging is many of the textbook publishers now offer the entire textbook as an Adobe Acrobat file.  Many students in our area come from low income households and may not have access to a computer.  However, there are a majority of students who do have a computer or some other device such as an iPod Touch, iPhone, Palm Pilot, etc that can read PDF files.  They can take advantage of having their entire textbook in an electronic form.  Purchasing only one textbook per student would be a great cost savings while still offering the ability for most students to have multiple electronic copies.  With the ability to search, index, cross-reference the book in Acrobat Reader, along with no torn pages or defacement from a previous student I wish electronic versions were available when I was a student!
  • Music/Art
    We were just talking about this in my department this morning.  It’s most likely that music will be cut entirely across our whole elementary level.  This is very sad and will obviously be protested by many music lovers.  But I won’t join them on my soapbox because there is no money.  That’s it, plain and simple.  The question is what are we going to do about it (besides demanding money that isn’t there)?
    There are three experienced musicians in our department (that IS unusual) but I was thinking there are probably several dozen in a decent sized district.  If it’s possible and can be worked with administration I think it would be a great idea if staff could volunteer their time.  Yes, it would be unpaid and have to be worked into your schedule.  But I think it would be great to keep our music programs running if a few people would adopt the program at their site.  They could take a few hours out of their week, or work out some sharing program where maybe they only took one hour out of the week.  Then they could run the music class at the elementary level.  This would require a basic knowledge about music and working with kids.  For the most part you are working with beginners so you wouldn’t have to be a well seasoned music instructor, just someone who liked working with kids and could teach music fundamentals.  This may be an economical way to keep the program going in these hard times. 
    This same idea could be applied to any of the "creative" areas that are in danger of being cut.
    When I was in elementary school we had one parent who was really creative and also knew how to play guitar.  She would come to our school entirely on her own time and visit classrooms on Fridays for a half an hour.  During that time we either learned songs, music fundamentals like clapping rhythms or basic notes, would work on various art projects, etc.  It was all volunteer and unfunded but was a great time that I remember.

Those are just a few suggestions off the top of my head.  I’m sure there are many other people here that have wonderful ideas in many different areas.  I am encouraged that this district is looking for suggestions like this and may be considering putting some of them into action.

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World’s first flying car prepares for take-off

Check this out:

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article5489287.ece?print=yes

I think an idea like this is a bit far off yet.  Sure, the technology and physical product may be ready fairly soon, but I doubt the FAA is ready to let any person just jump in the air flying over buildings and roads.  If I run out of gas right now I coast to the side of the road.  You run out of gas in one of these things and you may be wishing you topped off before you left for the last time. 🙂

However, think of what the world would be like without traffic?  I live in the Inland Empire (southern California) and commonly travel to Orange County and Los Angeles.  The only three freeways between the IE and OC/LA are the 91, 60 and 10, which are 3 of the highest traffic freeways in the country.  If I could fly from my house to OC and avoid the entire freeway system it would make the commute a thing of pleasure rather than frustration.

It is set to list at $200k.  Maybe to pay for it I’d initially shuttle business execs from IE to OC/LA.  Get to work in 30 minutes!  Just $50 a trip! 🙂

Let’s see, supposed I did 3 runs in the morning and three in the evening.  That’s $300 per day.  5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, that would be 75,000 a year.  After overhead for gas I could have it paid off in 5 years. :)  Of course, it may cost $1 million a year just for insurance.

In all seriousness though think of what transportation would be like if these really did take off (no pun intended).

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Computer geeks learn to flirt

Just saw this great article from Reuters (via Yahoo News):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090109/od_nm/us_flirting_odd_1/print

BERLIN (Reuters) – Even the most quirky of computer nerds can learn to flirt with finesse thanks to a new "flirting course" being offered to budding IT engineers at Potsdam University south of Berlin.

The 440 students enrolled in the master’s degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection.

Philip von Senftleben, an author and radio presenter who will teach the course, summed up his job as teaching how to "get someone else’s heart beating fast while yours stays calm."

The course, which starts next Monday, is part of the social skills section of the IT course and is designed to ease entry into the world of work. Students also learn body language, public-speaking, stress management and presentation skills.

"We want to prepare our students with the social skills needed to succeed both in their private life and their work life," said Hans-Joachim Allgaier, a spokesman for the institute at Potsdam University where the course is being offered.

(Writing by Anna Brooke; Editing by Nick Vinocur)

In all seriousness this is a great idea.  It’s really a class on social skills in the work place.  I’ve never seen this in any of my courses in technology at college and some of my fellow students severely needed them.  If you’re going to get ahead any place you work the ability to be comfortable talking with peers, management, customers, giving presentations, etc is a required skill.  It’s nice to see some institutions are addressing this area.

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Multiple Displays on a Laptop

Two of the main reasons why I’ve never switched to a laptop as my main platform is performance and multiple display support.

 

With today’s laptop performance is almost nil.  The cost compared to desktops is almost trivial and the performance a laptop can offer these days is absolutely incredible.  Unless I am a performance nut, such as someone working in film or audio editing and you need quad-core processors, four hard drives and 8 GB of ram a laptop can usually fit all your needs these days.  If you’re a gamer they even have laptops with SLI on board (although these are still fairly expensive).

 

However, multiple displays has always kept me back.  I love my dual 20” displays.  I also don’t want a 17” screen on my laptop.  The whole point of a laptop to me is portability.  When I go to a presentation or a conference I don’t want to lug around a 12 pound machine and then fight for chair space when I try and open the behemoth in the audience.  So I want a lightweight laptop with a 15.4” screen.  That causes a problem when I’m home at my desk.

 

In the last few months USD-DVI cables have started coming out and the performance is pretty amazing.  Here’s a company allowing you to run three simultaneous displays as 1600×1200.  After a firmware update coming out in the near future you’ll get even more performance and resolution.  Amazing!

 

Check it out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-dvi-lcd-display,6777.html

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Back to Postin’!

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post.  The problem is I see a lot of cool little things and think, oh, everyone’s probably seen this already, and never post about it.  Well, that will change.  Not everyone has seen everything and my co-workers and I share lots of great links and such about cool things we find.  So I’ll start posting this stuff.  If nothing else, it should make a fun set of links for people to check out.

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Commercial Reporting Framework Comparisons

I was responding to a recent CodeProject forum question and my response got so long and detailed I just thought I’d blog it instead.

If you haven’t been by CodeProject check it out.  It’s a great site with an incredible wealth of very useful information in the articles and forum communities.

Anyway, the topic in question was this:

http://www.codeproject.com/Lounge.aspx?msg=2828212#xx2828212xx

“I’ve been tasked with researching some alternatives to SQL Server Reporting Services and was wondering what experiences and recommendations anyone out there has?

I’ve also seen a couple of add-ons for reporting services, some of which look quite promising – has anyone got any experience of these?

PS Ideally not Crystal Reports – I had to use this in an old job and *hated* it!!”

 

I’ve used various reporting frameworks as a developer and end user in various projects for the past 7 years.  While I am not up on the extremely current (such as developing in CR XI or SSRS 2008 yet) I hope this information will prove useful.  If you have any corrections or suggestions you would like to make please chime in!

As a side note my organization will be installing SQL 2008 (waiting for a couple of months now for our purchasing process to get the license through) and I’ll have a chance to really play with SSRS 2008.  I’ll post an update at that time.

Another side note; this is strictly a comparison of reporting, not business intelligence.

Another side note (how many of these can I have? :)).  There are some very good open source frameworks (such as Jasper for Java) that I have not had the opportunity to use.  Commercial products like those listed here are not the only alternative.  Plus, as several users have stated in the forum, rolling your own may be well suited to your project if you have very customized requirements, have a small reporting needs or restrictions on funds or use of open source limit your options.

Now, on to the comparison!

In several projects over the last 7 years I’ve used Crystal Reports (v8.5 and some limited XI), Active Reports (v3) and SSRS (v2005).  All have their pros and cons, however, they are in completely different areas.  Note that there are now newer versions of each product so I can’t speak for new features.  These also were the base products.  No 3rd party controls or such were used.

Here’s my very brief summary:
CR: Best designer and overall most professional output of static reports.
AR: Best tool from a strictly development perspective and most friendly to integration.
SSRS: Free, fairly decent but still an “early” product.

All three had their definite "quirks" (i.e. bugs, hacks, required massaging, etc).

Here’s my take in different areas:
Report Design (manual):
CR had the best designer I have seen.  Incredibly easy to use and I could create very rich and professional looking reports in a matter of minutes.  CR actually replaced my quick and dirty T-SQL result printouts when a supervisor asked for some quick numbers.  I could do a very professional layout in 2 minutes ready for use in a meeting rather than the dry text print of a result screen. However, extreme dilligence must be placed on good design.  It is very easy to scatter formatting and calculation code all over the place.  It can quickly become a mess of spaghetti and make debugging a report almost impossible.  If you exercise good design such as using base functions that are called by other functions, basing formatting of functions rather than inline code, using well documented code or good function/variable names then this can be mitigated.  XI comes with a new function and formatting explorer that really made hunting for customizations very easy.  This was a real “pain” in 8.5.

Active reports had no real designer other than a VB form like designer built into .Net.  I believe they have upgraded this in newer versions.  With AR I found that it was often easier (and more accurate) to edit the design in code.  Definitely not a rapid report development tool. However, I did find that of the three this tended to produce the most accurate results since I could almost hand code it myself.  As an example images were exactly where I placed them and with the exact right dimensions the first time.  That being said getting a very professional looking report really depended on your code/design skills there wasn’t really any help from AR in this department.

SSRS’s designer leaves a lot to be desired.  It is very rigid, has no real-time editing, and overall lacks a lot of the usability features of CR.  I could design decent reports much faster than AR, but it was difficult (if even possible) to get the same professional output of CR.  I believe this has been somewhat upgraded in 2008, but I’m not sure to what degree.

Advanced Design (i.e. functions, custom code, etc):

CR lets you create functions for almost any UI area of the report and this could be coded in a VBScript like syntax or their own.  I say UI area because there really was no control over the various events or rendering loops.  You could really only alter cell values, do running functions or change formatting.  That being said in the 8.5 version not all UI elements could be customized on a granular level.  For instance, you may be able to bold or hide something with a function but then couldn’t change the font or size. (Don’t quote me verbatim on this.  It’s just a example and my memory may not be accurate as to the actual specific limitations)

AR is pretty much a wide open playground for developers.  I love the amount of control you have.  It is pretty much entirely built with integration from the ground up.  Almost anything you’d ever want to customize you have full ability (and the .Net language) at your disposal.

SSRS is a love/hate situation.  You can use custom code in three different ways.  You can enter “expressions” almost anywhere you would want to manipulate data or formatting.  This is all in a VB like syntax so C# developers may not like that.  Plus, expressions are written in a single line so if you want do do anything other than simple manipulations or conditionals expressions won’t work.  Another con with expressions is much like CR pre vXI days, it’s very easy to “lose” a function because there is no one explorer tool like in CR XI that shows you all the different expressions that are embedded into the report.

A step above expressions is code embedded in the document.  Here you can create full fledged functions that are callable by the expressions, which is a preferred method if you are doing the same thing more than once.  However, in v2005 the embedded code has no designer.  It literally is a textbox with all the code at the same time.  There is no syntax highlighting, no IntelliSense and no debugging.  You simply run the report and if it doesn’t successfully execute you try and decipher the exceptions thrown.

Beyond that you can write your own code in C# (or whatever .Net language you choose), compile these into an assembly and then reference them in the report.  This is great because you get the full robust quality of the CLR and Visual Studio to create your functions.  However, this does slow down the development process as you’re now working in several different places and (at least with VS2005) each time you made a change to the assembly you had to close the reporting solution and re-open it for VS to reference the updated assembly dll.

Report Design (dynamically generated (even partially) within code):
Sometimes people want to be able to generate reports from scratch or even partially depending on the use of the application.  For instance, if you have a billing department, you may have several different reporting requirements based on the type of bill, who the bill-to party is, etc.  In this case you may have a base report template with a header and footer and on the fly add different “parts’ to generate the completed report.  This would be beyond static reports but not ad-hoc in the sense that the user is creating their own report.  I don’t really have experience in this area but I’ll state what I believe to be true.  Feel free to correct me.

I don’t believe that CR has any ability to do this what-so-ever.  Correct me if they have a new feature or product out by my experience is you either use a static report or a completely user-driven ad-hoc report.

I really don’t know if AR has this ability.  The reports are ultimately stored in XML (I believe) and it’s completely development driven so I would almost assume you could do this.  However, because the reports are really .Net objects you get full capability such as inheritance.  In v2 we created a template “base” report that had a header and footer.  Then we simply created several different static reports that were derived from the base report.  Almost like a master page scenario in ASP.Net.  The designer, however, didn’t show the master page elements and didn’t give any indication you were using a derived report class so you just had to remember things like not to make use of page headers or footers.  In v3 they broke this ability.  I created a support issue on their bug tracker but it hadn’t been resolved when the project was finished a couple of years ago.  I’m sure they’ve fixed this in the current version.  It was handy though!

The above solution is not quite the same as using sub-reports.  With sub-reports you create the base reoprts and include any sub-reports.  A sub-report may be reused several times.  In the above solution I created the base report and used that several times, which you can’t do in the sub-report scenario.

SSRS is based on XML, so theoretically you can design a complete report in code at run-time, however, I’ve yet to hear of anyone doing this in a practical sense. 

Ad Hoc Report Design (for end users):
CR: There was no ad-hoc ability in CR 8.5 other than putting an actual designer control in your windows forms app.  If you were selling the app I believe there were licensing restrictions around this and often software vendors had to sell a fully licensed copy of CR with their product, adding another $500 to the bill just for the ad-hoc ability.  Business Objects may have relaxed this in the later versions.

I have used the Business Objects InfoView XI R2 web based ad-hoc system as an end user.  It may be just the way the vendor set it up but in my opinion this is a terrible interface.  It is very clunky and constantly returns useless errors if a field no longer exists on a database, if a function is syntactically incorrect, etc.  A very un-user friendly product for non-technical users. In this day and age with web-based designers from almost anything such as designing a scrapbook like ShutterFly or Google Maps mashups, BO’s interface is a far cry from a well designed UI.  As a web developer myself I would have to state that this mostly is a lack of a good web 2.0 or Java development staff.  They use Java applets.  While Java applets (and UI in general) have gotten a bad rap there are some very good designs that show it is possible.  There is no real fundamental difference between what an applet vs a full blown app can do regarding UI.  If you have ever used IntelliJ (from JetBrains, the makers of ReSharper) or Eclipse (yes they fudge on their UI rendering and it’s not really Java that finally draws the screen) then you’ve seen some outstanding interfaces.  I’ve seen some incredible Java applet games (even in 3D 7 years ago) if you think Applets are different.  There’s no reason why BO couldn’t do the same if they had developers with the proper skills.

Active Reports also gives ad-hoc ability in the sense of putting a designer control in the Windows Forms app.  however, unlike Business Objects there is no licensing fee to to this.  This is largely one of the biggest draws to AR. As a developer you can purchase it and use it in all your apps without having to worry about licensing issues with your customers.

AR has no web designer, at least not as of v3.

SSRS: Comes with Report Builder.  It is a fairly easy to use system but may be confusing the way they "navigate" relationships.  All in all it’s probably the easiest ad-hoc system I’ve seen, however, v2005 offers only the most basic functionality.  For instance you cannot conditionally format text.  A very promising first release and I’m excited to see where they take this.

As a side note, while SSRS 2005 is free in the SQL Server Standard edition, they do leave some cool features for the Enterprise edition.  For instance, SSRS can dynamically generate views of a table showing field values, aggregates for foreign-key relationships and links to foreign key tables.  As an example, if you have a database of customers, orders, products, etc, you could view an order, navigate to the items, navigate to the base item, navigate to inventory, navigate to the invoices, navigate to the vendors, and on and on, without any development.  If you wanted a customized view of a particular table you simply create it and reference it.  Then SSRS will dynamically generate the table views as normal but use your definition when viewing that particular table.  This is a great way to “drill-down” into an app quickly when you need to check on the data rather than diving into the Query Analyzer.  But, alas, this is only offered in SQL Enterprise, <sigh>.

UI Controls:
CR has fairly decent UI controls.  Lines, boxes and other shapes worked fairly well if you navigate around the rendering quirks (like page breaks through shapes, etc).  Their charts were fairly decent but did not have near the granularity of something like Excel.

I didn’t use the AR controls on the projects we used it on so I can’t really speak to this.

SSRS has very basic user controls such as shapes, images and charts.  I haven’t really used these other than the image control.  It worked as expected. 

I will say that the chart control had some definite quirks in Report Builder.  When demonstrating RB to a group of co-workers we built a chart, viewed it, changed some formatting, viewed the changes, etc.  We eventually got to a point where I asked it to chart an invalid sum or result.  RB complained as expected, but we couldn’t simply change the values back to their valid settings.  It somehow remembered and said “Nope.  I don’t care what changes you make I’m not showing this chart again!”  The only way to get rid of the error was to drop the chart all together and re-create it.

All three packages have 3rd party vendors who sell very nice UI controls.  If your final intention is a very flexible and professional looking report you would probably want to explore these options.

Developer Take:

This is just a small section on how it is to develop with these various reoprting tools.

CR (as of v8.5) has almost no real report manipulation beyond their built-in functions.  As a developer you can change various run-time things such as page setup, the target database, etc but the actual report must be pre-built.

AR is a developer’s dream!  It is entirely created for .Net.  You have full access to the reporting life-cycle.  Just as you have access to events for web forms or ASP.Net web pages like Init, Dispose, etc you have the same abilities with AR.  You can run code during the report init phase, the before or after retrieving a record from the db, before or after rendering a page, etc.  Anything you want to do you can do.  It’s definitely a breath of fresh air for any developer.

SSRS really has no other abilities than what was talked about above in the Advanced section.  Like CR you can change a couple of run-time settings but you don’t have near the control of AR.  Again, I suppose you could intercept the xml and manipulated it on the fly before passing it to the rendering engine, but again, you have no control other than basic formatting/calculation functions while in the actual generation process.

Distribution:

I’ve used four basic ways to distribute my reports: give the report file to the user, embed it in my Windows Forms app, embed it into my web app or upload it to some Reporting Server.

  1. Give the report to the user(s).  With the web this is becoming less and less of a desired option.
    CR: The user must have either the full CR product or a report viewer.
    AR: I don’t think this is an option at all.
    SSRS: With Report Builder you can export the report as an xml file, which you can share with co-workers or give to a developer who can use it as a base in SSRS to expand on the functionality.  Comes in handy when an end user designs a report the way they want in RB but then requires some more advanced functionality so they give it to the developer to make the changes and deploy on the Report Server.  This gives some freedom to the end user while taking some of the labor off the developer.
  2. Embed it into the Windows Forms app.  All three products can do this and usually without any problem what-so-ever.  Since most of the security restrictions have been removed by running it in an application and the referenced reports/dlls are always available this is relatively straight forward.  In all three cases a “report viewer” control will be embedded in the app.  There is no licensing restrictions with using the report viewer with any of the there companies.
  3. Embed it into the web app:
    I haven’t done this with CR but I know they have web controls for this.
    With AR you can render the app in a variety of different ways.  I especially like that I can, in code, render the report in a variety of formats, such as pdf, and stream it to the user as a download.
    SSRS has a web viewer control but its very problematic.  For instance parameters for linked reports or sub-reports don’t seem to carry through well.  Dynamically assigning parameters is a head ache all together.  On one app where we use forms authentication we simply unlinked the reports and created separate urls.  Really lost a lot of nice dynamic functionality when we did that but it was the only we could find to adequately give data to only the users who should be able to view it.
  4. Reporting Server:
    As of v8.5 BO had a wonderful Crystal Reports Server web based server.  It was very easy to use and was free if you only needed 5 concurrent users.  This worked great for small departments.  We had a reporting server crash and rebuilding the settings from backup was a pain.  It took about a day and could have been made much easier but all in all the server was a pleasure to use when it was up and running.  It offered all the normal functions such as deploying reports, distributing them via on demand, sending to email, caching, scheduling, etc.  It even served as more of a document server in that it would let you upload other documents like PDFs, Word docs, etc. 
    Read the quirk below regarding the ActiveX report viewer control.  It was the only sore point of the system.  Unfortunately BO changed the licensing and now you can only use it for free with 5 named users.  Now its really only good as a test server or a very very small department.  To buy it is several thousands of dollars which makes it prohibitive for some groups and not really worth the money.  A good development team could recreate the web app if they really wanted to use CR reports.
    AR has no server.
    SSRS has their Reporting Server.  This is also an excellent system.  It mirrors much of the functionality of the CR server (except that it only serves SSRS documents).  This also is a pleasure to use and is very easy to implement.  In 2008 they have revamped the server and now it no longer depends on IIS. 

Quirks:

This is just all around quirks.  There are a multitude for each app and you’ll just have to learn how to work around each one.  Here are just a few I can remember off the top of my head.

CR:

  • As of version 8.5 the browser web control used by CR Server (the web server) was a real pain.  It was an ActiveX object and often would become corrupt or not download properly.  Also, BO would regularly release new versions of the control and only half the browsers would correctly download the new version.  The only way to manually re-install the control was to log in as an administrator (we had IE locked down fairly tight at that company), go into IE, view the downloaded objects and manually remove the control.  Then we had to see if IE would correctly download the control the next time, which was up to chance again.
  • Using the API in v8.5 for web forms was somewhat problematic.  Not all reporting capabilities that were available in the designer were available in the API.  Also, sometimes the order or inclusion of specific calls determined the output.  For instance, you could not change some of the page setup settings without first telling it what size of paper you wanted.  If the report was built for 8.5×11 (Letter) and I didn’t specifically state that in code none of my settings would be applied.  If I applied all my settings and then set it for Letter it would wipe out all my previous settings. 

AR:

  • Again, as of version 3 they broke report inheritance.  I’m sure it’s fixed by now, but what troubled me is they broke it from v2 to v3 and never fixed it for several months.  This force our project at the time to go back and use v2.  this could be quite a problem if you had already developed several reports in v3 and now had to run v2 and v3 on the same computer (which was a headache in itself).

SSRS:

  • The web report viewer control doesn’t use standard printing functionality.  They rely on their own control.  This is a large hassle because in many large organizations they don’t let their users download and install software on their machines.  This causes a very obscure error to appear on the screen causing help desk calls (usually to me).  The only thing we can do is train users to export the report as PDF and print it through Acrobat Reader.

 

Anyway, that’s my take.  While some of these products are older the general sentiment is still the same.  CR has the best designer, AR is the best for developer integration, and SSRS is free and coming along.

I’ll try and post an update once I’ve had a chance to use SSRS 2008.

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Getting things done – Sometimes simpler is better

I’m working on a new project for my work.  I’m using S#arp Architecture started by Billy McCafferty, which is a framework using ASP.Net MVC, NHibernate for database persistence and Ninject for dependency injection.  It’s really shaping up to be a great framework and I’m learning a lot.

With NHibernate, you often come to the point where you have to map subclasses to your database.  The two prevailing strategies are one table per class or one table per class hierarchy.  You can look up any several dozen documents on these strategies.  For my project I chose one table per class hierarchy for one of my classes and its subclasses.

If you’re not familiar with Hibernate mapping documents, if you have one table per class hierarchy you have a single table storing the parent class and any subclasses all together.  This has its advantages, however, you have to have a column in the table (the discriminator) which holds a value telling Hibernate which class this record belongs to.  For instance, if I have a parent class of Person with two subclasses of Employee and Client, my discriminator field may hold “P” for Person, “E” for employee and “C” for client.

S#arp Architecture makes use of Fluent Nhibernate, which allows you to create Hibernate mapping documents in code in a fluent style.  Very nice.  It makes full use of generics and has been a pleasure to use once I dusted off my knowledge of mapping documents.

The problem is Fluent has a bug where it puts in discriminator elements for the subclasses.  There should only be one element describing the discriminator field and that goes in the main class definition.  For some reason Fluent also puts it in the subclass definitions causing Hibernate to throw an error.

So, what do you do?  Well, the great thing about open source is you can open up the code and find the problem.  I did just that but I hit another snag.  I love using Generics in my code, however, I’m not experienced at all at creating classes that use them.  After spending about a half an hour to find the problem and think about how to solve it I realized I didn’t have time to refactor the bug and relevant pieces to a logical usage.

So, I did the next best thing.  I added two lines of code to remove the element during the generation and fixed the issue.

The code to generate and return the mapping in xml ends with this:

1: writeTheParts(classElement, visitor);
2: return document;

So, I added the following:

1: writeTheParts(classElement, visitor);
2: foreach (XmlNode discriminator in document.SelectNodes("//subclass/discriminator"))
3:   discriminator.ParentNode.RemoveChild(discriminator);
4: return document;

In the code above, document is an XmlDocument type.  I used an XPath expression to find all the subclass elements that had a child discriminator element and then removed them.  The nice thing is this doesn’t affect any code that doesn’t have the bug.  It’s fairly clean and doesn’t get in the way at all.

While this certainly isn’t a true fix it does solve the problem in a very orderly and understandable way.  I still think it’s a hack but it helped me get back to my project.  I did submit the test (always create a test first!) and the patch to the project incase they wanted to fix the bug.  I also suggested that it still be refactored correctly by someone who is a little more experienced with Generics and the project.

So, in a case like this, I’d advocate simple when the solution is fairly clean, does exactly what it is supposed to do and there may not be time (or experience) for the alternative.