Bytes

Through the course of a day I browse to a lot of sites. I bookmark a large number of those, and probably revisited a small portion of the sites using them. Where does that leave me? I don’t really know…that would require more browsing. So here is couple of the ones that I do look at on a weekly basis:

• Coding Horror - Daily articles about a full range of topics relating to programming and computer science. A quick way to learn something new each day.
• A List Apart - Great articles on design, development, and web standards. One of the top sites for this type of information.
• Joel on Software - Joel runs Fog Creek, a software company in NYC. Lately his articles haven’t been as useful to me…but his archives are gold. He actually has two books published that are just reprints of his blog articles.
• XKCD - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. You have to be a geek to enjoy these…I showed a couple to my wife and she didn’t get any of them. I guess that is a good thing.
• Smashing Magazine - Great daily finds on here, from free fonts to best designs. Browse their archives for a quick way to get ideas on your next project.
• David Seah - Hard to really describe the articles he writes, but if you are searching on how to be better at what ever you do I think they might be helpful for you. Productivity, Printable CEO Series, design work and more just to list a couple.

Have you tried to use the SQL Server 2005 Report Pack for SPS? I had used the previous version of this for SQL 2000 last year, but hadn’t used it for a while. I remember having issues with the install of that previous version, and sure enough I had more issues this time as well.

Here is the error message you will see when you run the dbSPSReporting.sql script:

Msg 102, Level 15, State 1, Procedure usp_Insert_FactWSS, Line 57 Incorrect syntax near ‘WSSList’. Cannot add rows to sys.sql_dependencies for the stored procedure because it depends on the missing table ‘usp_Insert_FactWSS’. The stored procedure will still be created; however, it cannot be successfully executed until the table exists.

Update 7/10/07: kerwin left a comment about a new KB article and hotfix that Microsoft just released.  We tested it yesterday on a machine with both 2003 and 2007 Office components and it seemed to fix the error.  Note that although both the article and hotfix specify WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007, it also should work with 2.0/2003 (which makes sense, this is a client issue). Thanks kerwin for the information and to all the other people who left helpful comments.

If you want to use CRM 3.0 with a named SQL instance you first have to disable the Environmental Diagnostics Wizard (EDW).  How to do this?  I couldn’t find a way except for a couple blogs/newsgroups pointing me to a support call with Microsoft.  The Microsoft CRM Support Team might not like me posting this simple solution, but I think it is crazy that we got charged a support call for something like this and hopefully my post can prevent someone else from being on hold for two hours.

I mentioned Vim in my previous post, but wanted to go into more detail and show how powerful it is.  If you’re a Windows developer or administrator you probably haven’t tried using it before since it is from the world of Unix (Vim is a clone of vi, or vi iMproved), but you really should try it out.  In the next week I will show some examples up what you can quickly do with Vim, things that I’m not sure how you would do without it!  Until then, below is some links that I have collected: