I was so looking forward to the trip to Germany to speak at the European PASS Summit

on April 22nd. Two of my abstracts had been selected several months ago; a spotlight

session titled “Cooking with SSRS”, based on our new Reporting Services Recipe book;

and “Implementing a Self-Service Reporting Solution with SSRS”. Unfortunately the

fine people of Iceland decided to share some of their country with the rest of Europe

in the form of volcanic ash and all of the flights in and out of western Europe were

cancelled for several days. At the last minute, the conference organizers arranged

for 15 US and non-European based speakers to deliver their sessions via LiveMeeting

and webcam. Rather than enjoying Wienerschnitzel and the scenic Rhein, I had the pleasure

of presenting my sessions from the comfort of my home office in Vancouver, Washington.

I woke up just after 1 AM Pacific time to deliver my first session (10:45 AM European

time) to an audience of about 50 conference attendees in Neuss, took a nap and then

dialed-in again for my second session at 6:30 AM. Since I didn’t ever make the transition

to European time, needless to say, I’ve been a zombie the rest of the day.

I’ll post video and my PowerPoint decks soon. In all, I think both session went well.

The first session started a little late because Donald Farmer’s key note went about

20 minutes long. Donald can get away with that. Both sessions were well received and

I had a lot of questions.

Demo’ing Report Builder in Low Resolution

I had one hiccup during the first session while demonstrating new features in Report

Builder 3.0. This application was designed to run in high resolution mode and even

at 1280 x 1024 pixels, the dataset dialog is too big to fit on the screen. Running

at 1024x768 to match the projector resolution with an extended desktop over LiveMeeting,

it was near impossible to get to the dialog controls and click the OK button. I had

practiced earlier in the same resolution without using LiveMeeting and was able to

solve the problem by maximizing the window. During the second session, I found a work-around

by moving the dialog to the second screen on my extended desktop, resizing it and

moving it back or just hitting the OK button on the second display – live and learn.

Let’s hope they don’t slaughter me in the evals for one small screw up.

Weblog by Paul Turley and SQL Server BI Blog.