Visual Studio is a good option for designing SSRS reports. Now, that is. But years ago we had a different toolset. One of those around the 2009/2010 time was ‘Business Intelligence Developer Studio’. This was effecting a Visual Studio shell that had report templates for the various SQL Business Intelligence suite (e.g., SSIS, SSRS, SSAS.) and was installed from the main SQL Server installer. This then morphed in to SQL Server Data Tools which was available as a standalone package.

Q: Does SharePoint 2013 work on SQL Server 2016? A: No and no. #mvp (minimum viable post.) (* Except, it actually does work - it’s just not officially supported by Microsoft.)

Continuing the theme of obscure SharePoint gotchas you’re unlikely to encounter (unless, I assume, you’re reading this) here’s another. One environment was experiencing an issue whereby the SharePoint Tracing Service was constantly getting set to disabled. No amount of editing it in services.msc to set it to Automatic would ‘take’ - that is, you could enable it and start it and it would work - but then at some miscellaneous point later it would mysteriously revert to being disabled.

We were on a long weekend (2 adults, 2 young kids) from a neighbouring island. Looking for a little somewhere to hide and relax for a few days. We might normally have considered somewhere more - what we would thought would be - ‘upmarket’ - but given the prices decided to take a ‘risk’ on this - a so-called 3* property. About the only thing was a must for us was an indoor pool and this does limit your choices somewhat.

I recently had some fun and games trying to fix a broken SharePoint Search Service Application. Although I’m not entirely what caused the issue (other than, you know, SharePoint) although it may be to do with changing the Farm Passphrase but one way or another it was, fooked. I opted to just delete it and create a new one. This didn’t go well. A new application was created, but it, also, was dead. As many people have found, Central Admin and Remove-SPServiceApplication have a habit of doing entirely nothing when it comes to remove broken Search Applications.

I’m adding this here in the hope it may save someone a few hours of pain and hair-pulling. (i.e., what I’ve just been through.) If you use solution management in Central Administration in SharePoint - you’ll be fairly used to the whole add-spsolution / install-spsolution / uninstall-spsolution / remove-spsolution stuff that you either run from Powershell or the GUI. You will also be familiar with the fact that solution management depends on both the SharePoint Timer Service (SPTimerV4) but also the SharePoint Administration service.

This had been bugging me for a long time. I have an HP M377DW laserjet printer and after setting it up on my wifi network there was a spare ‘HP-Setup’ network hanging around in my local area. When I recently added an HP Envy 500 photo printer which did the same thing I resolved to hide them. I assumed it was something to do with Wifi Direct - a wifi-like protocol that allows you to printer directly to the printer without going through the main LAN.

I’ve wittered on before about how much I like the content organiser in SharePoint. It’s really pretty handy. Even creating rules that target other content organisers is possible. (With a little trickery.) But since it’s SharePoint, it’s not without its quirks. I like to do as much as my dev work programmatically as possible. Every now and then you think maybe you’ve hit something you can’t script and you’ll have to resort to adding a deployment step.

When you Add Feature in Visual Studio, it by default creates a ‘folder’ with some gubbins underneath it. By default this is Feature1. This is pretty ugly, but you may encounter a scenario where you cannot rename it. It seems to be based on other characters that exist in the path of the solution/project. For instance, we tend to use full stops to delineate a pseudo namespace. Now amount of Right-Click > Rename will sort it.

If you want to connect to MySQL from any device in your network that isn’t on localhost, then you may encounter an error: MySQL error: Could not connect to any of the specified hosts Bear in mind that e.g., a PHP web app or phpmyadmin will continue to work, since (assuming your web server such as Apache is running on the same server as MySQL) they’re technically running on localhost and will be able to connect.