I will be leaving this morning for a 2 day speaking tour in Wisconsin. I will be speaking to the Wisconsin .NET User Group in Milwaukee tonight March 11 and tomorrow night March 12 to the Chippewa Valley .NET User Group in Eau Claire.  Both talks will cover ADO.NET Data Services (AKA Project Astoria) and the Semantic Web.  I am looking forward to both and meeting all the great people in Wisconsin.

I have not dropped away from the Cloudsocket blog.  I am just getting prepared for the next month when the Cloudsocket podcast will be released.  Stay tuned in!!  I have 5 new blog posts being developed for this week and the first podcast will come this weekend.

I have had issues with my Zune 30 ever since I reinstalled Vista 64 and Zune Software 2.3.  I could not get podcasts to download through the software and syncing with my Zune 30 would not occur.  The software could recognize the Zune 30 and see the contents of the device but it would not sync.  I spent many hours trying to find a solution and fix this curse I have had.

This morning I came into the office and was determined to find a solution or just give up.  I was prepared to give the Zune to my wife for her laptop and needs and take back the 2G iPod Nano she uses.  I happen to remember there was a hack to see the Zune device in the Windows Explorer and thought I would do that in hope maybe I could bring files by hand to the device.  I did the steps for the hack and restarted my Zune Software.  I then disconnected my external harddrive from my laptop, wiped all songs and albums from the Zune Software, reconnected my external harddrive and allowed the Zune Software to compile a new updated media content list.  To my amazement, after reconnecting the Zune 30 to the laptop it started syncing.  I also noticed that all my Pending podcasts were starting to download.  WOW I was very happy.

Not that I really understand what I did to get the dam to open up.  Maybe the hack to see the device in Windows Explorer allowed something to happen.  I write this blog post to allow others to try this fix and see if it helps and also maybe the Zune team will see and get back to me on this issue and fix.

Hope it helps and let me know if it does.

Cloudsocket (actually just me) has announced the creation and delivery of a new knowledge center for database patterns and best practices for database design and development. The Cloudsocket Database Developer Wiki will be open to all to share and collaborate on the databases and the use, performance and development of this important and frequently overlooked technology. The main purpose is to share, educate and inform not only database experts but also the entire software development community to develop, use and maintain better relational databases.

We are building a repository for:

SQL Server 2005 Best Practices
Database Patterns
Database Design Best Practices
Database Tips
Database Blog List
Database Podcast List

Please sign up on the wiki and contribute.  For more information or to let me know you are interested email or Skype me. My email is cwoodruff at cloudsocket.com and my Skype username is cwoodruff.

Brother Keith Elder is planning a Geek Dinner after the Detroit Visual Studio 2008/SQL Server 2008/windows Server 2008 Launch Event. The dinner will start at 6:00 PM. RSVP here. All are welcomed.

When

Date: March 18th
Time:  6:00 PM

Where

Greektown, Detroit

PizzaPapalis®

553 Monroe Street
Detroit, MI   48226
Phone:               313-96…       

One of the things I want in my reports is to have nice headers for my reports.  I like to have a logo and the user’s report parameters along with other data to show to give more information for the business needs the report needs to clarify.  One of the things that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services cannot do natively is show data from a Dataset in the header.  This post will explain how to work around this and how easy it is.

Create the Report Server Project in the Business Intelligence Projects section and call it AdventureWorksLTReports.  I use the AdventureWorksLT sample database from CodePlex.

Next show the Page Header by right clicking in the Report area with the designer.

The Page Header will appear.  If you want to show the Page Footer this can be accessed from the same menu as the Page Header.

I created a stored procedure that returns data for the Sales Order to be presented in the Page Header.  I will show the following information about the Sales Order in the Page Header:

1. Order Date
2. Sales Order Number
3. Company
4. Sales Person
5. Total Due

I create a TextBox for each of my data fields in the Page Header along with a TextBox for the corresponding label.  Do not change the Expression in the TextBoxes that you want the Sales Order data in.

In the Report Body, place a TextBox for each data field needed in the Page Header.  In the Visibility for each TextBox, select True for Hidden.  This will be the placeholder for the data needed in the Page Header.

Your report should look similar to the screenshot shown below.

The last step and most important is to reference the Hidden TextBox in the TextBoxes located in the Page Header.  We use the the following Expression to reference the needed TextBoxes:

=ReportItems!<TextBox Name>.Value

Your report should now look similar to the following:

Your Report preview should now have the Sales Order Header data in the Report Header.

My son Spencer who is 7 is always playing Webkinz.  If there is a social gathering site for kids it is this site.  We have 8 of the animals at the house and I expect more soon.  The site is great for teaching kids about the value of money and saving and also for communicating with friends.  My son has learned everything he has about computers in the last year from Webkinz.  I wish I had thought of this business model.  $10.00 to $12.00 for each animal and all the advertisement on the site (which is minimal).  My wife gets her laptop back after I dug out an old P4 machine for my son to use for this need.  The machine only has 256M of ram so that will need to be increased with a new stick of 512M soon.

Also with all my Zune software issues around Vista 64 and the 2.3 update, I moved all of my music and podcasts to the external HD on the Webkinz box and am using it also to collect and hold my music and podcasts for my Zune 30 named Smokey.  Seems to be working OK but the lack of ram on the box really shows when running the Zune software.  Another reason to bump up the memory.

So the world is happy again.  I am listening to my Zune 30 again and I also get back a chunk of space on the laptop’s external harddrive for new VPC’s.  This is a good day.  I just wish I could discover what happened with that last Zune update?

I love my brown Zune 30.  It plays video and also the sound is great.  I loved the new 2.0 Zune software until this week and the 2.3 update.  I had the software do the automatic update and all went well as far as I could tell.  I was busy with work so I did not do any syncing with the Zune 30 until yesterday.  I first noticed that all new podcast episodes were not downloading but were still in Pending state from the listings in the Collection Podcasts.  I then noticed that no new songs or files were being sync’ ed to my Zune 30.  I event erased all content from the Zune 30 and tried a fresh resync with no luck. I am running a Vista 64 machine and think that may be the issue along with the newest 64 bit Zune software. I just wanted to see the numbers and if you are having issues after this last update.  I am hoping that either someone has discovered the issue and fix or Microsoft will come out with a update to fix this issue if it is common in the Zune community.  UPDATE – I seemed to have fixed my issues with the Zune Software and Vista 64… read about it here.

I will be in Cincinnati this Tuesday for a Demo2Win training class.  The purpose of the class to enable a sales professional to (from the site):

“The goal of the Demo2WIN!® workshop is simple: deliver a practical, proven set of skills, tools and procedures that both beginners and veterans can immediately put to use to improve their demo-to-win ratio.”

The training is for the Microsoft Dynamics line of business.  What I find fascinating is that this training will people with the following:

• Helping with demo mistakes committed during the presentation
• How the brain works and how to use this knowledge to present better to your audience.
• Using the movie making process to create better presentations
• How to do a better job creating openings and closings for a presentation

After the training I may try to blog about how this training could be used for building better developer community presentations for use at user group meetings, community events like Day of .NET and Code Camps and finally for internal technical training meetings.

Not that I forgot but here is Keith elder’s great interview.

CodeMash 2008 Interview with Keith Elder