The Possible Future of Reporting Services

by Dmitry Kirsanov 15. October 2012 06:04

Today, if you’ll visit the MSDN Labs, you won’t find there much about Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. The reason is simple – Microsoft doesn’t consider reporting to be the edge technology. The frontier of changes and fountain of creativity is somewhere else. Usually what you see in there is something that is complex or very important for Microsoft. Neither is a category for reports.

However, I recognize the trend, which is, although relatively distant, could shift the position of Reporting Services and perhaps make it more widespread, potentially adding more jobs to the market.

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Automating Deployment of Hyper-V based Microsoft Labs

by Dmitry Kirsanov 6. October 2012 14:22

Microsoft Certified Trainer logoThis article is about free software I made to automate the deployment of exported Hyper-V machines. More precisely – Hyper-V machines of labs for Microsoft Official Curriculums (MOC), used by students at Microsoft official training classes. It should be interesting for MCTs (i.e. Microsoft Certified Trainers) out there, whose job is to deploy labs in form of Hyper-V virtual machines, as well as for system administrators having the same duty of periodic installation of Hyper-V virtual machines. The installation procedure of a pack of Hyper-V machines could be extremely time consuming. Or should I say - used to be.

I will speak about it as about the solution for a lab deployment problem, but if you are working with other virtual machines, just think about the similarities with your scenario.

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