Server 2012 Log Off

Tip of the Day-- go to the Start "screen", click on your user account picture/name in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, and select "Sign out".  Or you can ‬select "Switch User" from here.

To get to the "Start" menu hover the bottom right hand edge of the task bar and the "charms" should pop up--Start, Settings, etc... 

This might be the first in a series of "How do I do what I use to do"

Directory compares without installing a nifty little app

Here's the right way to do it, without the external downloads.  It looks like a lot at first, but once you've done it, it's very easy.  It works in all Windows versions from 7 back to 95.  For our example assume that you're comparing two directories named 'A' and 'B'.
1. run cmd.exe to get a command prompt.  (In Windows 7, the powershell won't work for this, FYI.)  Then do it again, so that you have two of them open next to each other.
2. in each window go to the directories that you want to compare.  (Using 'cd' commands.  If you're not comfortable with this, then you should probably go with the external utilities, unless you want to learn command prompt stuff.)
3. type 'dir /b > A.txt' into one window and 'dir /b > B.txt' into the other.  You'll now have two text files that list the contents of each directory.  The /b flag means bare, which strips the directory listing down to file names only.
4. move B.txt into the same folder as A.txt.
5. type 'fc A.txt B.txt'.  The command 'fc' means file compare.  This will spit out a list of the differences between the two files, with an extra line of text above and below each difference, so you know where they are.  For more options on how the output is formatted, type 'fc /?' at the prompt.  You can also pipe the differences into another file by using something like 'fc A.txt B.txt > differences.txt'.

use dir /s/b to include the subdirectories

Useless or fun and useful? Make windows minimize

Win7

Another *neat* little trick is if you want to ONLY show one window on your screen and minimize everything else, just grab the title bar with your mouse and SHAKE THE WINDOW REALLY HARD.  Everything but the window you're holding on to will minimize.  To bring everything back up, just shake your single Explorer window again and it all restores.

Tip and Tricks of C#

Was looking for a couple of syntactical explanations and ran across this post.  Awesome.

Tricks and Tips

Just handy reference ('cause you don't always know what to google on)

Syntax

xml handy items

I do a lot of processing of XML documents from various sources.  Just a couple of items I want to have around even through they are in my library of tricks. Removes declaration from XML document so that it can be loaded into XDocument. 

private Regex M_RemoveDecl = new Regex(@"<\?xml.*?\?>");

This is to remove namespaces in documents.  Makes the query of the document easier.
... Taken from this discussion


public static string RemoveAllNamespaces(string xmlDocument) { XElement xmlDocumentWithoutNs = RemoveAllNamespaces(XElement.Parse(xmlDocument)); return xmlDocumentWithoutNs.ToString(); } private static XElement RemoveAllNamespaces(XElement xmlDocument) { if (!xmlDocument.HasElements) { XElement xElement = new XElement(xmlDocument.Name.LocalName); xElement.Value = xmlDocument.Value; foreach (XAttribute attribute in xmlDocument.Attributes()) xElement.Add(attribute); return xElement; } return new XElement(xmlDocument.Name.LocalName, xmlDocument.Elements().Select(el => RemoveAllNamespaces(el))); }

Updating ReportViewer to VS2010

OK, today I blew the dust off of a project that had ReportView 9.0.  Since I had coded that website many moons have pasted and we have upgraded to VS2010.

I tried to just stay on RV9 however, one of the reports was erroring and I had javascript issues with the handler page that it inserts.

So, upgrade I did and not without google's help!

1. Install on your machine ReportViewer 10
2. change the references in your project to point to version 10 of Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common and Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms
3. If you registered your control, change this tag in your .aspx or control 
1. <%@ Register Assembly="Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms, Version=10.0.0.0...

 If you have .rdlc files that you need to upgrade, some work and some don't

I had a report that was cause compile errors (The processing of Parent for the tablix ‘table1’ cannot be performed) with the grouping.  I had to take out the "parent" tag and then all was well.  Basically old versions glossed over this mishap, but not version 10.  For the long explanation of why you need to do this, go here.

            OrderNumGrp
">
              <GroupExpressions>
                <GroupExpression>=Fields!ClientOrderNum.Value</GroupExpression>
              </GroupExpressions>
              =Fields!ClosedDate.Value
           

Finally, when you are deploying to a server with IIS7.  Make sure that you add the following to your web.config

webServer
>
...
      ReportViewerWebControlHandler
" preCondition="integratedMode" verb="*" path="Reserved.ReportViewerWebControl.axd" type="Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.HttpHandler, Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms, Version=10.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
...
   
  webServer>

Finally, as it always happends, when you get it onto the production server something else goes wrong.  I was getting this error

Compiler Error Message: CS0433: The type 'Microsoft.Reporting.WebForms.ReportDataSource' exists in both 'c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms\8.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms.dll' and 'c:\WINDOWS\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms\9.0.0.0__b03f5f7f11d50a3a\Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms.dll'

If you add the following to your web.config it tells .net to always direct to the new version


                                                publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
                                              newVersion="10.0.0.0"/>
      

Happy Reporting

Getting the results from a stored procedure into a single variable

I have used both the methods below to put result sets into a single variable.  I will then use that variable as the message body to email the results to myself (or others).

Create Procedure DoSomethingEmailResult

....

I run a bunch of queried looking for data integrity issues, each result set I write into the following table.

    declare @Problems table(
                        SiteId varchar(15) not null,
                        GenId int not null,
                        Alert varchar(max) not null,
                        ProblemDate datetime null default getdate(),
                        AlertLevel varchar(20) null
                )

...

At the end, I want to email the results to myself because I am too lazy to go look for them.

This is how I get a multi-row table worth of results into a single variable.  This becomes the body of my message.

    select @result = coalesce(@result +
        SiteId + char(9) +
        cast(GenId as varchar) + char(9) +
        alert + char(9) +
        AlertLevel + '<br/><br/>','')
        from @problems   


Another query that I have used, but seems a bit more problematic

    set @result = stuff(
    (
    select
        SiteId + char(9) +
        cast(GenId as varchar) + char(9) +
        [Proc] + char(9) +
        alert + char(9) +
        cast(ProblemDate as varchar) +  char(9) +
        AlertLevel + '<br/><br/>'
    from @ErrorTable
    for xml Path(''), Type
    ).value('.', 'varchar(max)'), 0, 1, '');