Install Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 For Eclipse

Typically shops using Eclipse will probably be using SVN or some other source control system, but there are cases where you shop may be a mix of coding languages.  Team Foundation Server is a good offering for source control and much more, such as bug tracking, project management, etc.  If you are in such a shop, Teamprise, which is now owned by Microsoft, wrote a plugin for Eclipse that will connect to Team Foundation Server.  I will describe how to install this plugin for Eclipse in the below steps.  I’m basing my example off the Ganymede installation of Eclipse.

1.  Download TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0.zip.  Unpack zip file into C:\Tools. You should have C:\Tools\TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0.

2.  In Eclipse, open the menu Help ^ Software Updates… On other flavors of Eclipse this maybe Help ^ Install New Software.

3.  In the Available Software tab, click the button “Add Site…”. In the “Add Site” dialog, click the “Local…” button, which will bring up a folder dialog. See the screen below. Select the folder C:\Tools\TFSEclipsePlugin-UpdateSiteArchive-10.0.0 which is what was unpacked earlier. Click Ok in folder dialog, then click Ok in “Add Site” dialog.

4.   Now you should see the plugin available in your “Available Software”. Check the Visual Studio Team Explorer Everywhere 2010 checkbox and click the “Install…” button. It will chug through some requirements calculations for a second or two.

5.  After it’s done checking dependencies, an Install dialog will appear as shown below. Click Next button, accept the license agreement, and then click Finish button. After it’s done it will suggest that you restart eclipse, so do that now.

 

In upcoming blogs I will be talking about the usage of this plugin with respect to TFS.

SSRS Will Not Let You Upload RDLs of Certain Sizes

Not sure exactly how we ran into this, but for some reason one of our 2008 Reporting Services servers would only allow us to upload RDLs that were less than ~105k.  Couldn’t find much online so we ended up calling Microsoft to figure out what the deal was.  Turns out here is a registry key that needs to be in place to remedy this situation.

Location: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\HTTP\Parameters

Add a REG_DWORD with the name MaxRequestBytes and a hex value of 500000.  You will be able to upload larger RDLs now.

VS2010 And SSRS Report Viewer Hanging

The other day I needed to integrated Reporting Services reports with a web application.  I knew I wanted to use the ReportViewer control, but I ran into a few issues of which I’ll state here.  Briefly, one issue is that the web application was already an ASP.NET MVC application, so I wanted to see if I could get the control to work with a view.  I tried to wrap the control in a <form runat=server>, because it needs viewstate, etc  Some ASP.NET controls will work just fine in MVC, no biggy, but this one is a no go.  So I was left with using webforms, not the ideal, but that’s what I had to work with.  So the big issue I ran into was that the ReportViewer control would hang and never load a report.  It turns out that they made some fixes to the async rendering behavior.  To avoid having the report hang you need to set report properties on the initial page post only, as shown below.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    if (!IsPostBack)
    {
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportPath = "/MyReportFolder/My Report";
        rptViewer.ServerReport.ReportServerUrl = new Uri("http://SomeRptServerName/ReportServer/");
    }
}