Category: Uncategorized

I hate Crystal Reports

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
Crystal Reports is touted as an end-user reporting tool.
Then it requires the entry of sql in it’s own twisted format.
Developers end up using a dumbed down tool.

One of the products that I work with uses Crystal Reports as a data transformation tool.
This app parses structured messages to load it’s database.
Crystal is then used to query this database to produce a report that is fed back into the application.

We have upgraded the product recently and it has updated Crystal.  The new version has lost the ability to resize the page.  You need to use the printer setup to set the print size.  Oh and the existing data has been badly squashed up to fit into an A4 page.

I am exporting data as a text file.
Yes I am using a report WYSIWYG screen painted tool to define fixed with text output.
The app then uses a pick screen to identify fields to read in.

Adding WPF and WCF to VS2005

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment
Microsoft as I have said before are not very good at writing installers.
They have a tendancy to ignore possible futures and always test for exact current versions.

This is the case when you try and add the WPF and WCF addons to VS2005.

Here is an article on how to make it work once you have installed service pack 1 for .NET 3.0

The idiot who wrote the installer tested for the presense of the uninstall option for the initial version of .NET 3.0, ignoring the possibility of a service pack.

This is not the first time I have seen a microsoft installer perform this stupidity.
Back in the day I learnt a lot about the registry configuration for COM objects the hard way.
The 16 bit version of VB installed a common library.   Subsequently this library had a 32 bit version released too.
If you installed the 16 bit version over the 32 bit one it clobbered the registry sufficiently to break the later version.
Rather inconsiderately the application suite that I was assisting used both versions…
I had to write a patch utility to correct this problem.  COM always had a technique for handling this kind of versioning problem but it was clear that whoever wrote the installer did not understand this.

How to escape the microsoft viral marketing campaign

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

When Microsoft release a new version of office that has an incompatible file format all of the users have been recruited into a viral marketing campaign.  This is especially the case with the new docx format.  The receipent may need to upgrade their wordprocessor to read the document.  Given that recent versions of office only run on recent operating systems this could force a machine upgrade – a little steep for no real benefit.

This is especially insideous when combined with the default setting of hide known file extensions.  Users don’t even know that they are using the new format until someone receives the document and can’t read it.  This is a wonderful drain on productivity and the novice user that has just bought their new machine does not understand how to “save as a doc file”.

Now I can understand a file format change if there is a real benefit to the user (say Excel 2007 now allowing more than about 50k Rows) but for a majority of the world this is not of use.

Here are some links to means of setting the old format as a default:

http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/save_word_2008_files_as_doc_instead_of_docx.html

 

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc178949.aspx