Integration Services vs Named Instances

If you are encountering 'Login Timeout' messages when trying to connect to the MSDB database of your Integration Services check if you have installed it on a server with only named instance.

Integration Services points to the default instance of the localhost. If you don't have a default instance you need to change the MsDtsSrvr.ini.xml file in \Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\DTS\Binn. Find the ServerName configuration and change it to point to one of your named instances.

System.Transaction

I'm probably a few months behind but I recently read that the new Windows Vista will support a filesystem and registry that is capable of transactions in combination with the new System.Transaction assembly.

Now that's a very nice feature!

Advantages of 64bit on SQL Server 2005

Check out this whitepaper from Microsoft.

An unexpected error occurred in Report Processing. (rsUnexpectedError) - Hotfix

Finally some information about this.
We have confirmation from Microsoft that it is indeed a bug in ALL versions of Reporting Services. A hotfix request will be sent by us to solve this problem.

Nifty features in Management Studio

As you know Management Studio has lots of improvements and some are quite technical and usefull. Sometimes I stumble upon some little 'improvements' that are more or less cute.

When adding a clustered index to a table with non-clustered indexes I received the following message box.








Cute huh :-)

.NET 2.0

Finally found some time this weekend to play around with .NET 2.0.

Although I haven't seen a lot I'm already quite pleased with Master Pages and Themes. There are some nice improvements to the tools too like a tool to manage your web.config, refactoring in Visual Studio, ...

Next on the list:
MARS
Explore the possibilities of the GridView control