Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wed 10 Mar 2010

The official date of Microsofts next Office release (Office 2010) and SharePoint 2010 including SharePoint Foundations will be 12 May 2010 - we’ll get to play with the RTM versions before then so keep an eye out for updates on new functionality, features and gotcha’s with the new software here.

You can read more about the launch here: SharePoint 2010 @ Microsoft.com

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Wed 18 Nov 2009

Today we had an issue with a report and its related subreport in CRM 4.0, specifically that the report wouldn’t run and we were receiving the following message…

 
"The sub report could not be shown" 
 

Looking at the reporting services log on the server, we could see the following error, leading us to believe that the problem was a result of a date field being passed between the main report and its related sub-report, ...

 
w3wp!processing!7!11/17/2009-08:53:56:: 
e ERROR: Throwing Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportProcessing.ReportProcessingException: Cannot read the next data row for the data set _MSCRM., ;
Info: Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportProcessing.ReportProcessingException: Cannot read the next data row for the data set _MSCRM. 
---> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type datetime.
 

This problem however was only being experienced on certain machines. Looking at the specifics of these machines we could see that the machines affected were those who had their CRM Current Format set as English (United Kingdom), those machines who had their current format as the default English (United States) could run the report without any issue.

The only date related functionality we had in the report was a string parameter in the main report which held a date value, this was being passed from the main report to the sub-report and was used to compare against a datetime field in the sub-report. The source dataset of the date string parameter was as follows…

 
DECLARE @DateRange AS Table
(
	Period VARCHAR(14),
	EndDate DATETIME
)
 
INSERT INTO @DateRange (Period, EndDate)
VALUES('Current Month', DATEADD(WEEK, 3, GETDATE()))
 
SELECT EndDate FROM @DateRange
WHERE Period = 'Current Month'
 

Looking at the above sql I could see that the datetime value was being pulled directly from the sql (therefore it would be in american format, potentially causing issues on british format CRM browsers), so I therefore decided to change this to ensure the date was in the more generic ISO format of yyyymmdd.
I therefore changed the SQL to the below, replacing one line with a CONVERT statement, shown below…

 
DECLARE @DateRange AS Table
(
            Period VARCHAR(14),
            EndDate DATETIME
)
 
INSERT INTO @DateRange (Period, EndDate)
VALUES('Current Month', DATEADD(WEEK, 3, GETDATE()))
 
SELECT CONVERT(varchar,EndDate,112) AS EndDate
FROM @DateRange
WHERE Period = 'Current Month'
 

After modifying the dataset as per the above and re-uploading the report it worked without issue, as I had removed the dependancy on an American date format which didn’t agree with any English (United Kingdom) format CRM browsers.

Posted by (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on Tue 17 Nov 2009

On resetting a dev machine on Hyper-V after setting up a Windows 2008 machine we found that we could no longer connect to a virtual machine.

The Hyper-V console told us that “The authentication certificate has expired or is invalid” - I found this helpful forum entry.  The issue is that the self issued certificate had expired.  To re-create a new certificate I deleted the old certificate and then restarted the Hyper-V Management service to regenerate the certificate.