SQL Server Session State woes

Unable to use SQL Server because ASP.NET version 2.0 Session State is not installed on the SQL server. Please install ASP.NET Session State SQL Server version 2.0 or above.

This error is so misleading. In our current setup, most of the time this error comes up not because SQL Session State isn't installed, but because the user account that is accessing the session state database doesn't have permissions to the sprocs. Quick and dirty fix? Grant that account db_owner on the session state DB.

SSRS Reports in IIS 7

Found out that when you add an SSRS 2005 / 2008 report using the Web Viewer control to a ASP.NET website running under IIS 7 and above that you need to add the ReportViewerWebControl.axd node to both the system.web and system.webServer sections of your web config. If you just add the ReportViewer control to your page, the error message will tell you to add a node into the system.web httpHandlers section. At this point, your report will display, but the page navigation and export controls are disabled.

Adding the node for the ReportViewerWebControl.axd to the system.webServer portion of enables the paging and export controls for your report.

Determine Tables w/o a PK

How to determine which tables in a database do not have a primary key. Needed this for a replication rollout.

SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES
EXCEPT 
SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS
WHERE CONSTRAINT_TYPE = 'PRIMARY KEY'

Woohoo! Back from the dead, and I'm not even a zombie... well, maybe a little. :)

New job - same technologies though - C# and SQL for the most part. Will post more later.

New Programming Font

I found Dina this morning (http://www.donationcoder.com/Software/Jibz/Dina/) this morning. Posted in a link on http://idehotornot.ning.com/ by Jeff Atwood (http://www.codinghorror.com). I'm going to give it a try for a while to see what I think. My initial reaction is I like the way it looks, but it doesn't go down as small as I had my previous font (Profont Windows - I was using 7pt). Dina stops at 8pt, so it's not killing me... yet.

Managing Epic Stories

An interesting discussion over on the ScrumDevelopment group recently dealt with managing "Epic" user stories. This is something we're trying to deal with at my job. Project Management seems to want to track the "parent" story so they can tell when the whole chunk of functionality is done.

The consensus on ScrumDevelopment seems to be that once you break an epic into chewable sized pieces, you get rid of the epic. Updating it just adds more overhead that you don't really need to track. You can look at the individual stories and see what functionality is done. The other main thought is that you won't necessarily implement all of the sub-stories of an epic at the same time. Some of the pieces may never get implemented, simply because they didn't hold much business value.

Link to the thread:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/messages/27490?threaded=1&m=e&var=1&tidx=1

Videos

I had watched Ken Schwaber's Google Techtalk a while back, but since I'm now at a company that's trying to be mostly Scrum, I figure it's time to watch it again.

Scrum et al.

While looking in that channel I found a couple of other videos that look interesting:

Agile Testing and Scrum Tuning.

I'll post thoughts on these once I get a chance to watch them.