This is what $240,000,000,000 cannot buy you!

This is what $240,000,000,000 cannot buy you!

1. Undo/redo
2. CUA clipboard control (Ctrl-Ins/Shift-Ins) copy/paste
3. Mouse wheel scrolling
4. Type-ahead picking

You are probably puzzled of what the hell I am talking about? Well, welcome to Business Intelligent Studio's expression editor. Microsoft with its total market value to date of $240B is infuriating developers around the world by dropping support of the items above.

Typed 200-300 characters into your precious expression and made a mistake? No undo for you! Type it all over, slave! Apparently coding a keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Z for Undo was too expensive for MS. They saved how much... $10?

Isn't it wonderful when there is simply no place for comments in the report projects of SSRS? Instead of doing it intelligent way and representing report projects in C# or (puke!) VB, they chose generated XML. Having an error in the build log, referring to the entities you do not have in your project? Click on it, let's see if it takes you to the source. No? Well, sucks to be you.

Did you expect that typing into a code completion drop-down box would select the matching entries? Well, you are in it for a surprise. It kind of does, but picks up wrong entries and skips the right ones. QA was asleep.

Bottom line: SSRS is a miserable knock-off of glorious Crystal Reports that Microsoft stole, a bastard child packaged for free with SQL Server just so that Microsoft could put a check mark on 'comes with reporting services'.

It is not surprising that SSRS is the most hated reporting environment in the developer community.

UPDATE: Microsoft, if you are reading this (wishful thinking - you are so full of it that anyone else's ideas are of no value to you, specially customer's...) then please find that off-shore subcontractor who wrote SSRS expression evaluator, give them a kick in the teeth and take them to court to sue away all the money you paid plus damages. They performed UNPROTECTED evaluation of each Iif() parameter. This is what Iif() WAS SUPPOSED TO PROTECT AGAINST!!!

Posted by: LinuxLies at 09:08 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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