Recently quite a few of our users have been asking if they can show all of the report details at runtime, instead of having to drill down all the groups, opening and closing as they see fit. Well, the answer is yes, and its very easy to implement. Parameters are you friend The first thing to do is create yourself a new parameter in the report, and call it something like par_expand_groups. Give it the following options: Now, you need to make this parameter control weather or not the group is ... Read Full Story

I while ago I wrote an artical (here)about the new Web slice feature in IE8. A few people have asked about a plugin for WordPress, and the other night I finally decided to have a go. Head over to http://www.beakersoft.co.uk/wordslice for all the info, or to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordslice/ for the download and the install notes. Hopefully in the [...] Read Full Story

I have recently had the unfortunate experience of having to try and clean up a network that has been hit by the conficker virus.It is a pain to get of and caused us a lot of problems, this is a quick guide to how we went about cleaning it up. This might not work exactly the same for you but it might give you some pointers. Accounts locking out This was the probably the biggest pain for us. One of the way the virus spreads it’s self is on smb shares, to it tries to access these shares b... Read Full Story

I have been doing some work on an asp.net project that connects to a db with full text indexing enabled on a text field. We are building the app up so that users can run advanced searches using the info in this filed. While debugging the app, i came across a problem that i thought i was catching and trapping, but my app seamed to be ignoreing the problem and carrying on running so i was getting some strange results. I was running some sql similar to this: SELECT Count(title) as rec_count FROM... Read Full Story

Me and a couple of the guys i work with a decided to have a good at writing our own software, and making it available online. We are going under the (rather good i think) name of we3soft, and you can get at our website by visiting www.we3soft.com We have got quite a few ideas/applications in the pipeline, and hope to start working with some of our local businesses on some of there projects. At the mo we have only one application (and its in beta) avaialble for download on the website. It goes... Read Full Story

Not sure how many of you have hit this, but recently we have had a problem with users not being able to print out reports from the browser. When they hit the print icon after runnig a report, they are given the message ‘Cannot load client print control’ Turns out that one of the patches Microsoft issue out (on a seemingly never ending basis) breaks(well, blocks) the activex. The patch in question is the ActiveX killbit one (i cant remember the kb number), there appears to be a pro... Read Full Story

First off, i apologise for not blogging for a while, ive had quite a few other projects on over the summer, plus holidays so I’ve not really had time. Hopefully now I should be able to get back into it with a bit more frequency. Anyway on to the topic of this post. Most applications nowadays will automaticly go onto the web and check to see if there is a new version, and if there is offer to download/install/visit page etc. I was looking for a simple way to do this using the dotnet fram... Read Full Story

Hot on the heals of the last version, Spiceworks 3 has been released. You can see a list of the new features at http://spiceworks.com/3.0/ and download it at www.spiceworks.com Here’s a list of some of the new features that interested me The interface has been cleaned up quite a bit from the previous version. There are also a couple of new features such as the ‘Glide’ function, it’s kind of like the iPod artwork browser. The network scanning has speed has been improv... Read Full Story

I am in the process of writing a reporting service that will be used across our whole company. The problem I have is there is not one central database all the reports will run of, each division has its own separate one. Lucky the database schema’s are consistent, but I needed a way of: a) setting the report data source at run time and b) letting the users control the database they want to connect to. Some high level user need to be able to access multiple databases, while others will ju... Read Full Story

I’ve been in the situation a few times with ASP.Net applications where someone says to you ‘I got this error on screen when I did x, I don’t know what it said but i couldn’t work.’ Odds are you have got an unhanded exception in your web application, but how are you meant to debug it when the error has long gone? Elmah (error logging and error handling modules for asp.net) may well be your saviour. Download it out now from http://code.google.com/p/elmah/ So, what ... Read Full Story