I’ve been waiting on this one for a while… hopefully they’ve fixed the ReportViewer control.  That control is wholly broken when using SQLServer sessions.  But I digress, here is the meat:

Microsoft is committed to making customers successful with Visual Studio 2005. As part of this continuing effort, Microsoft has released the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta. Visual Studio 2005 shipped in November of 2005 and this Service Pack incorporates fixes that we have addressed since that release.

We encourage all interested parties to participate in the Beta. You will have the opportunity to use the service pack and notify us of any bugs you may discover. You can apply for the Beta by filing out the nomination survey or by signing up on the "Available Connections" page of the Microsoft Connect web site.  The Beta Program will run until October 30th.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 will focus on addressing product issues reported since the release of Visual Studio 2005. These are types of fixes you can expect to find in this service pack:

• The Hotfixes and General Distribution Release Updates released between Visual Studio 2005 Release to Market and the end of the Service Pack customer beta period.
• Any fixes addressing security issues categorized by the Microsoft Security Response Center as "Critical", "Important" or "Moderate".
• Fixes for product reliability and stability issues, including those reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center, and the crashes most frequently reported via Watson.
• Fixes for common "eligible" functional issues reported by customers via the Product Feedback Center. "Eligible" functional issues are those that do not require breaking changes, architectural changes, or Design Change Request level feature work and that do not create unacceptable product quality risk and/or cost of implementation.
• Fixes for the top customer and supportability issues as reported by Customer Support Services.

As always, the goal of all of our Service Packs is to increase the overall quality of the existing product features while maintaining a high level of compatibility.

I’ve applied for participation in the BETA so hopefully I get in and am part of the elite geek crowd.  It’d be nice to know if this Service Pack fixes the control.

In most environments when intellisense is driving me crazy, by suggesting wacky results to common code, I can simply hit the escape button for relief.  The intellisense dropdown disappears and quietly hides until it can bother me again in the near future.

EXCEPT WHEN WRITTING EXPRESSIONS IN REPORTING SERVICES!!!

No, in this case rather than hiding the bothersome intellisense it closes the entire dialog window.  This completely and absolutely sucks.  And fortunately all of the edits in the expression I was in the middle of working on are gone.  Lord knows I didn’t really need those changes.  And the ones I did need I was dreaming of writing them multiple times.

If anyone out there knows how to shut this <insert derogatory yet politically correct> behavior off… please send it to me.  I’ll even hack the system registry without backing it up to get this fixed.

Disclaimer: In case it isn’t overly apparent, this behavior annoys me to no end and having not spent years in meditative training many monitors would have had "shortened" lives.

I found a new "feature" in Reporting Services today.  It seems that the format code for Percent (P) hasn’t come to an agreement with Excel as to what it means when exporting.

On detail rows P3 properly formats to Excel as a percentage value out to three decimal places, i.e. 99.999%.  But move that same format code to a grouping row and the value could be 99.999%, or sometimes it’ll have a little fun with you and add more decimal places… 99.9999%

Can you imagine the fun with a report and the wacky scenarios you can get into with the reports?

"Hey, Bob!  Lunch at Panera if the first grouping value is four decimals?"

"Oh, you are on, Ed!"

The fun would never stop.  But sometimes it must and when reports can’t pack that kind of fun in them… there is a better way.  Instead of usign the P format code, use 0.000% to set the decimal places.  So far its worked as expected and now I am stuck finding my fun elsewhere.

Yeah!  I’ve been at Digineer a year.  Go me!

That’s all, nothing to see here.

Wait… Digineer is hiring and it’s the best place that I’ve ever worked.