Developing Matt

I attended the class New Sq Server Reporting Features 2008 by  Jason Carlson. 

The highlights are below.  The full notes I have are here.  Due to legal constraints I’m not sure that posting the slides would be ok, but I’m leaving the references.

1.       Not hosted in IIS any more  (however it does use http.sys which means it can communicate with IIS).  It uses sql server networking stack instead. (?) There were many settings that they discovered that conflicted with report engine.  See slide on ssrs 2005 vs ssrs 2008 (page 6) to see architecture differences

a.       Settings not supported

                                                               i.      Isapi filter

                                                             ii.      Anonymous authentication

                                                            iii.      Digest authentication

                                                           iv.      Client certificates

b.      You can now pick your own root, not IIS’ root (graphs!)

2.       Memory managmement

a.       Dynamic self-monitoring under memory pressure

b.      Uses file system cache to adapt to memory pressure (receives memory events from server)

c.       Administer can set targets

3.       Suggested using sharepoint with it.

4.       Reports are now hierarchial cursor-based object model

a.       Rdl is exposed as an object model

                                                               i.      Object model reloads based on which group is shown (?)

5.       Report engine modifications

a.       Report processing is not on-demand (only grabs first page.  Expressions will never run until you get to that page)

b.      New rendering architecture

                                                               i.      Slide 17 shows architecture

                                                             ii.      They wrote all their own renderers

                                                            iii.      New word rendorer

6.       Report builder modifications

a.       Format updates to text, paragraphs, lists, etc.

b.      Can use [fieldname].  No need for “this text “ & field.bla.value & “ results in whatever”

c.       Tablix (multiple parallel row/column members at each level)

                                                               i.      Slides 28-33

7.       Other

a.       Still no css, but it is the number one request they receive

b.      Gauges can now be dropped into reportview and used and every series can have it’s own report type.