Geeze since March! Subscribed. Their second post is about what I need to do: dynamically embed an image into a report at runtime. Of course, it’s on www.ASPADVICE.com!

Posted from BLInk!

You probably know that Crystal was bought by Business Objects last year. Crystal is a great product with a horrible support reputation. That’s not about individual support people (I spoke with an awesome one last night) but just an overall problem. I have suffered plenty as well. I will never get past the experience of upgrading from 6.0 to 8.0 and how it horribly shattered many of my client applications and the deployment nightmares I went through (and my famous $500 phone bill for calling the free support line in Canada). And still, when I do have a problem, I sometimes cannot find the solution to it (granted at this point I have wierd problems, but still….)

But they are really trying. Now they have a .NET Developer Zone. It’s still a work in progress, but the more we use it, the better it will get.

I know that we all want it to be a good resource. So use it and if you don’t like it, let them know about it. Let them know what they can do to make it good so that we don’t roll our eyes when talking about Crystal Reports.

This is the tool I have used for years and am still using it even though I do keep looking over at ActiveReports and SQL Reporting Services. The hook for me is I know how to use Crystal. I only run into trouble once in a while, but I just don’t wnat to have to spend 4 hours researching a problem and still not come up with a solution.

I have been trying to figure out why my crystal reports are mysteriously growing to 2+MB in one of my applications. Ummm DUH – I kind of forgot that I had embedded a watermark in them and that file is over 1MB. I actually got them to call me to help me about it (awesome tech support guy who has been with Crystal for 7 years). I think sometimes I am too quick to get aggravated by Crystal.

Now I have to figure out how to either shrink the watermark or I was told I can deploy the rpt files outside of the dlls.

I have always had problems writing cd’s. This is with 2 different cdr’s and lots of different software over the course of many many years. I would have to toss about 2 cd’s for everyone written. So I basically avoid it like the plague. But I just downloaded an ISO image and discovered that Windows XP has built in software and I don’t have to struggle any more. I just dragged and dropped the file to the cd in windows explorer and xp handled the rest. Finally. Thanks to whomever put that in there.

Of course I still have to test that it worked…

Okay I confess. I literally copied the ISO so I had to toss 2 cd’s after all. Then read the in your face ISO instructions and downloaded ISO Recorder (note there’s an XP and a new XPSP2 Beta version) and also note this is shareware. If you use it enough to justify thanking the creator, click on that PayPal button. This makes it pain free – right click on the ISO file and you’re almost done. Thanks Alex!!

Posted from BLInk!

KVM stands for Keyboard Video Mouse. Since I bought a new desktop this summer, my former daily driver was sitting in a corner doing nothing. I just bought a KVM 2 Port Switch made by LinkSys that is one sweet little cable with all of the connections built in. I can now switch between that computer and my regular one without moving any more muscles than my little index finger to tap on the Scroll Key twice. Love it! Now all I need is Ghost so that I can use that machine either to test additional beta software or to emulate a clean client machine to test installations, etc.

Posted from BLInk!

Cool!! This might finally enable me to rip that Access database out of one last of my old VB6 projects.

It also made me wonder why I haven’t even played with this stuff yet and then I realized I’ve kept myself busy with WSE2, ADO.NET2 and a host of other new things. Oh, to be able to just spend all of my time playing with the new toys and call it a job. Yeah I know some people actually have that as their job definition.

Posted from BLInk!

when I spoke in Montreal, I got to use a remote control (had used on at DevDays also). I love the freedom it gave me to wander around. So I ordered one after some recommendations and am looking forward to using it. This one is by Atek.

I know it looks like it might double as some kind of sex toy…but I’ll never tell.

I got sick of trying to figure out what to do about icons in my ink blogging application and just wasted the morning creating my OWN. Some are just from scratch, some take the images that are part of the Microsoft dev tools SDKs and modified them a bit.

I finally gave up on finding a little infinity sign for doing a hyperlink and the butterfly is for inserting images.

Now, to either get back to my original plan this morning – adding categories to Blink, or actually doing some work for my clients, working on some articles or my presentations for Connections.

I am having great difficulty getting back to Dare’s blog this morning and I wanted to comment on a post he wrote on 10/18 so I’ll just do it here.

Dare, dude, I did not say Google Desktop replaces WinFS. In this post, I pointed out the fact that many people were saying that and that WinFS is a whole heck of a lot more than just finding files faster. I’ve been trying for days to get to your old post that addresses just that point, but having trouble with your site (as you know). Dare did post more on that yesterday. Go check it out.

I have made some pretty good headway with my complex App Updater Block needs, which I wrote about the other day here.

However I have run into a roadblock. One of the things I was trying to accomplish is actually doing authentication and authorization before the user even got the updates. I have a reason for this. However, I realize that now getting the user info to the new process that my stub application starts up is going to be a task which is not what I want to start hammering on. Although…maybe a combination of reflection and getcurrentprocess and then adding in a method to my main exe to pass an object in and then I can invoke that method and …and…and.. oh I’m too tired for this tonight! 🙂 I have used reflection with assemblies but never with a process, so I could just be on drugs with that idea.

.NET 2.0 ‘s version of the ProcessStartInfo class actually has username and password as well as  LoadUserProfile (boolean) properties that will help me do this next year, but not now. And of course, we’ll have ClickOnce then anyway…

I will probably have to rethink my architecture again and another way to accomplish the result I was after that was the reason for putting the authentication right up front in the stub application.