Brussells Development Blog

Well I’m sure many of you have at least heard about CS3 if you haven’t already obtained a copy for use. But many out there, including me, have had nothing but problems with installation(s) of CS3. We use it here at work and let me tell you, one computer will install with ease, and the next 2-3 will bomb every time.

Some tips and steps I have learned the hard way myself over the past few weeks.

1.) If you bomb before even launching the installer, or weird exits with no notice you can try this. NOTE: I was on Vista when these happened. You can launch a command prompt (DOS) with Administrator rights, this is important. Get into your Windows\System32 directory and use the following 2 commands.

> regsvr32 jscript.dll
> regsvr32 vbscript.dll

2.) If you get all the way through the installer only to find at the end only a few common apps installed but the core apps selected failed. Then you may have the problem I have been seeing which involves Error Code 2, and many others. TIP: you can find your error codes in the log files contained in your c:\program files\common apps\adobe\installer. You’ll see a zip file there which contains the log files. Now the process I did may not work for you, it seems to be a hit or miss but I’ll go over every process I did to get it to finally work.

• * Uninstall all Adobe applications from the Add\Remove Programs section in your Control Panel. Yes I know, a bit drastic but you can try leaving some if you have the patients to sit there for all the repeat processes to figure out how to fix it.
• * Download the Adobe CS3Clean script. Search Google for the link to it on the Adobe Site. NOTE: You may have to download the Microsoft Windows Install Cleaning program to get it to work.
• * Run the script, I used the un-documented Method (4) when prompted. It only shows 2 options, but trust me there is Method 3 and 4 you can use, 4 being nuke anything with Adobe in it’s name off my system.
• * Repeat last step a couple times to make sure everything is in fact gone, Vista can be a little quirky with this sometimes.
• * Now heres the kicker ! I had to turn off all virus scanning and firewall software. I have McAffee  so I manually turned it all off, then went into Task Manager and manually stopped all processes that are not system core ones required to be running.
• * Once I did all the above I basically had a flawless install.

Hope all this helps you, I know it was a lot hours\days of figuring it out for myself but I eventually just followed my above steps and got it working every time.

I see a lot of questions asking how to set a report to show in landscape mode verses normal mode. It’s actually easier than you would expect. Simply view the properties of the Report Object, and modify the Page Size setting to read 11 x 8.5 inches as shown below.

Now save and preview in Print Mode. You should notice that your report appears to be in Landscape mode ( wider than higher ) so when a user views the report or hit’s print his default mode is set to Landscape. Easy as pie.

Enjoy !,
Brandon Russell

We recently released our latest version of our Web software here at work, which meant I’ve had some free time to learn more of the Advance features of Reporting Services 2005. One thing I wanted to check out was the subscription service. While playing with it I noticed that you could setup a schedule to have a report auto generated and then emailed to whom ever you choose.

The options available was a full To:, CC:, BCC:, Subject:, and Message: fields. Immediately I seen one of my most demanding tasks of running a custom monthly report and emailing it to the CEOs become one less thing on my plate. Long story short, the first of August the schedule fired off the auto generated report to the CEOs and CC’d me and my boss. It worked like a champ. I even told it to export it as a Adobe Acrobat format. I immediately received an email from one of the CEOs giving me praise for remembering it on time when he hadn’t and even taking the time to lay it out nice and neat in PDF.

It’s a shame he doesn’t know I let the server do all my work and I took credit, but isn’t that how it’s suppose to be =p ?

So if you haven’t had a chance to explore the capabilities of the Auto scheduler and Email functionality of Reporting Services, maybe you should. It could save some time on your demanding plate and bring a little more praise from your co-workers.