Steven Wright Blog

A while ago I worked on a project to improve a website indexing within search engines. The project was initiated because there was a noticeable usage downward trend for the site. The main reason was the site was not being listed within relevant searches by search engines. This was because our content didn't emphasize the keywords within the search due to our HTML layout; URL structure and crawling errors. One aspect of the project was to improve the site layout and provide more information publicly.  The layout improvements were: to include the use of headers to highlight search keywords; a simpler layout to reduce HTML errors.  Providing more information was to help increase coverage of keywords.  Another improvement made to the site was the restructuring of the site URLs.  By making the URLs more human readable and converting the site search functionality to use ASP.Net routes. A site map was introduced to enable to help the search providers index our site of o...

I have been working with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services, since its first release, within many of my projects.  One of the biggest tasks, that I find with writing a report is the testing the reports and making sure the data that is displayed is correct.  My method of developing and testing reports is as follows: Write the queries, outside Reporting Services, for creating the report data set(s) with the parameters defined which will be configured within the report. Define the parameters that report data set would create and assign a valid value. Execute the queries. Inspect the results to make sure that they meet the expected results. Repeat with a new valid value or fix any issues. After one or two or even three passes that have worked then I take the queries and put them into report data sets. Then I define the report layout. Then I preview the report make sure it’s still correct Then I release to our te...

I have been working on a POC using SQL Server 2008 and Google Maps.  The POC was to use Geo Spatial technology to illustrate our Geo Spatial data easily.   I will talk about this in more detail in another blog post as I would like talk about a problem I faced while creating this POC.  The problem I faced was how could I get my Geo Spatial data, which was stored within SQL Server 2008 using the new geography data type, into  "static" HTML? So I thought that SQL Server HTTP Endpoints for SQL would be great thing to use to solve this problem.   As all I was after was xml document to stream over HTTP.   There was no business logic needed so all the .Net would be is just another layer acting as go between.  Also I didn’t what to waste time on what code which wouldn’t have added any value. So I created my stored procedure to produce an XML document that I found usable by using the For XML Path.  Then I started to look at h...

I have been working with MSBuild and the Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks to deploy my current project’s databases.   Some of the SQL scripts that are executed within MSBuild need parameters to be set to create the database objects, which the Microsoft.Sdc.Tasks.Sql.Execute method supports.   To use parameters within MSbuild and SQL.Execute; firstly create an item group (<ItemGroup>) then create element of any name as this will become the name of the item that can be referred to in MSbuild.   Within the new element an attribute has to set called “Include”, then create two other elements called “name” and “value”.   Here is an example: <ItemGroup>             <schemaName Include=”true”> <name>@pTableName</name> <value>’sys.Objects’</value>             </schemaName>        ...

I have been working with SSIS using the XML Task and XML Source Adapter. I was getting an error say that an element is was not defined. When I check the XSD, which was using import / include schemas, I found the element was difined but not in the main XSD schema the adapter was pointing to but another schema which was being imported. The probelm was with the schema were the element was defined not being invaild for the XML Source Adapter, that was the real probelm, as soon as I corrected the imported schema the error was resolved. The probelm with the imported XSD schema there was some DTD define at the being of the file and XML Source Adapter does not support a mixture of DTD and XSD.