Nice Kindle 2 Case
I don't plan on product endorsements often on here, but thought I'd share this. Magenic gave all of us Kindle 2's for the holidays this year. I've been hunting for a case since I got mine and wasn't impressed with a lot of the stuff I was seeing on Amazon. The quality wasn't there or it was just too expensive.
I was in Staples today and spotted this: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0007VPG6U/growinglifestyle/ref=nosim It's a Swiss zip folio that has a perfect area for a kindle and a couple other pockets. Only $30 too.
Repeating Tablix Headers In SSRS 2008
So I've been trying to figure out haw to repeat headers in a Tablix. I don't do a lot of SSRS stuff and the report I've got is moderately complex, it does a bit of an involved grouping situation with a few sub reports for details and then a Tablix to repeat individuals under each details section.
The Tablix has Repeat Column/Row Headers properties in the property pane but they are useless. During my searches I saw something about these properties being for when the report is too wide, not too long.
Anyways, at the bottom of your report designer there should be the grouping info pane. Click on the black arrow in the upper-right corner of the pane to enable "Advance Mode" Doing this shows static group items in your grouping pane for things like header rows. Find the static item that corresponds to your header row and check the property pane. There will be a "RepeatOnNewPage" property, set it to true and headers should repeat, at least they did for me.
Hint: If you can't figure out which static grouping could be your row header, watch the report designer as you click on the different groups, it will highlight the one you just selected in the designer.
Blog Refresh
So this used to be my personal blog. After a while that moved so my fiancee and I could blog together, this site has been languishing for quite a while. I've kept meaning to repurpose it as a tech blog, and now I finally got around to it.
I've upgraded to WordPress 2.7 and am working on getting this mirrored at Magenic's blog server. The first thing I'll probably be talking about is my trials in writing IM functionality into a kiosk using the UCC SDK.
Writing an IM client for Office Communications Server
So I've been working on adding in IM functionality for the kiosk software I wrote and maintain at Magenic. At first I planned on using the Office Communicator Automation API. It all worked in my proof of concept, except for one thing.
I couldn't figure out how to determine when I was receiving messages. I could start conversations, detect when they'd been started with me, but not when I actually got a message.
Not too mention it felt kinda dirty because you're really just automating the Office Communicator App, so you have windows popping up all over the place. In my case they would have been all behind the kiosk app so I wasn't too concerned, but it still felt unclean.
My research led me to the Unified Communications Client API, which sounds like it's what I wanted from the start.
Moral of the story, if you want to do more then simple presence and conversation initiation in your application, use the UCC API.
About the UCC API:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb878684.aspx