Reporting Services

I am still having trouble getting Reporting Services to work in Sharepoint integrated mode. So, I decided to swap to native mode and try to display Reporting services Reports using WSS 2.0 Report Viewer and Report Explorer Web parts. All this I am doing in a test environment on an Image got from Microsoft, with MOSS 2007 and Reporting Services 2005 SP2 installed.

For this I followed the following article:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms159772.aspx

However, when I tried to run the following, I was getting an error that said, it was already installed.

STSADM.EXE -o addwppack -filename "C:\ Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Reporting Services\ SharePoint\RSWebParts.cab" –globalinstall

But, I could not see the Report Viewer and Report Explorer Web parts in the “Add Web Parts” dialog box, when I tried to add them to my Sharepoint Site. I searched all over internet and found the following blog entry:

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/sqlbi/archive/2005/01/23/6802.aspx

I followed it and changed my STSADM command as below and ran it. In my case, as I had MOSS 2007 loaded on the same machine as Reporting Services SP2, the STSADM was found at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN. So, I changed to this directory in command window and ran the following command.

STSADM.EXE -o addwppack -filename "C:\ Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Tools\Reporting Services\SharePoint\RSWebParts.cab" –url
http://mysharepointsite/

And :) it worked that time. It said it installed fine. When I went back to add web parts, I could now see both the Report Viewer and Report Explorer Web parts. Next, I followed the first article above and setup the Report Manager Url and Report Name properties for the Report Viewer webpart and can see the Report
fine.

See image below:

Network Connectivity from/to Virtual PC

As we were trying to understand how to use/implement and work with Sharepoint, few things were unveiled. We almost knew from the beginning that we had to use a Virtual PC environment for our development otherwise use another PC/Server with WIN2003 OS. But, were not sure exactly how to configure it.

When we finally got Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, loaded it up with an image that my friend got from TechEd-2007 with MOSS 2007 , Visual Studio 2005, Sql Server 2005 loaded on it.

All that was well. Now I needed to make my host machine and guest machine talk to each other. By default the Virtual Machine was using the the Shared Network from my local machine and I was able to connect to Internet from VM fine.

However, I could not see the file structure on my virtual machine from my host machine. I researched and found that I needed to install Microsoft Loopback Adapter on my host machine and configure it on my VM as the second network adapter, leaving the default Shared Network adapter as the first one on the VM. As soon as I did this, I could access my virtual machine like below from the Windows Explorer: file://myservername/C$ where myservername is the name of my virtual machine.

I used the following link to configure above:

http://blogs.msdn.com/anandba/archive/2005/12/09/502246.aspx

This may not be the only way to see the Virtual Machine's file structure though and the only reason to install the loopback adapter. Still Learning.......:)