1dent1ty cHa0s: May 2006

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

MIIS Strategy: Interoperability Matrix

NOTE: This matrix has been updated here:

	MIIS 2003 Enterprise	SQL Server 2000	SQL Server 2005	SQL 2000 Reporting Services	SQL 2005 Reporting Services	Visual Studio .NET 2003	Visual Studio 2005
MIIS 2003 Enterprise	-	Required	No*	Required	No**	Yes	1036+
SQL Server 2000	Required	-	-	Required	No	Yes	Yes
SQL Server 2005	No*	-	-	No	Required	No	Required
SQL 2000 Reporting Services	Yes	Required	No	-	No	Required	No
SQL 2005 Reporting Services	No**	No	Required	No	-	No	Required
Visual Studio .NET 2003	Yes	Yes	No	Required	No	-	Yes
Visual Studio 2005	1036+	Yes	Yes	No	Required	Yes	-

* = Planned for Service Pack 2
** = Only with SQL Server 2005

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

MIIS Strategy: Interoperability with SQL, Reporting Services, Visual Studio, MIIS and the .NET Framework

It wasn't long after learning MIIS that I came across SQL Reporting Services and as usual it was after lamenting about the lack of "out of the box" reporting features in MIIS. Since MIIS is a SQL application itself, SQL Reporting Services was a natural progression for serving reports. However, now that Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 have both been released there is a fair amount of confusion regarding the interoperability between the various versions of SQL, Reporting Services, Visual Studio, MIIS, and the .NET Framework version. Given the state of things at the moment, I am seeing more and more MIIS implementations mixing Visual Studio 2005 with MIIS and SQL 2000; however this creates somewhat of a problem with Reporting Services. So let's try and straighten this out; here are a few current facts:

MIIS 2003 Enterprise requires SQL 2000 Standard or Enterprise Edition SP3a or better
MIIS 2003 Enterprise requires a hotfix to install on a SQL 2000 db with SP4 (if you're installing from scratch then you need an updated version of MIIS with SP1 and at least the 1026 hotfix)
MIIS 2003 Enterprise SP1 does not currently support SQL Server 2005 and, in fact, some reports of early testing claim poor performance.

So, it's pretty conclusive, MIIS needs SQL 2000, which leads us to Reporting Services:

SQL 2000 (all versions) includes a license for SQL 2000 Reporting Services
SQL 2000 Reporting Services must be obtained through MSDN or Select subscriptions
SQL 2000 Reporting Services requires .NET Framework 1.1 (SP3 I believe) but will work with .NET Framework 2.0 installed
SQL 2000 Reporting Services requires Visual Studio .NET 2003 to author reports (Business Intelligence)
SQL 2000 Reporting Services does not currently support auuthoring reports using Visual Studio 2005 (any version)

This gets us into quite a pickle actually since, as I said earlier, more and more MIIS implementations are using Visual Studio 2005 to build rules extensions for MIIS (which requires SQL 2000 - were you paying attention?). I think this is quite reasonable to believe that people would upgrade VS prior to embracing a new version of SQL Server - especially when the product you're implementing doesn't support the new version of SQL! Now, the newsgroups would have you believe that the reason you can't use VS2005 to build SRS2000 reports is due to the .NET Framework version (VS2005 requires .NET Framework 2.0) but I think that has little to do with the issue since you can choose which version of the framework your application runs under. I would guess that Microsoft just doesn't want to allow VS2005 to author SRS2000 reports in order to incent companies to upgrade to SQL 2005; after all, SRS is free, but upgrading to SQL 2005 means more licensing. I think this is a serious oversight and that Microsoft should allow Visual Studio 2005 to author SRS 2000 reports to ease the transition! So, speaking of the .NET Framework:

MIIS 2003 uses .NET Framework 1.1 (SP3) and all of the extension templates are based on Visual Studio .NET 2003
MIIS 2003 can co-exist with .NET Framework 2.0 installed but there are a few caveats

MIIS will load, by default, the highest framework version installed
If MIIS is running under .NET Framework 2.0, the Visual Studio .NET 2003 debugger will be unable to attach to the miiserver.exe process
You must either upgrade to Visual Studio 2005 (here we go again) or create a configuration file instructing MIIS to load the 1.1 framework instead:

Create a text file with the name "miiserver.exe.config"

Use the as a sample to restrict the MIIServer.exe process to use only the 1.1.4322 version of the CLR. [thanks to Arian Kulp for pointing out an error in this file and correcting it!]

So, where does that leave us? As soon as I can figure out how to make my matrix table look ok in the blog I'll post it.

NOTE: The matrix has been updated here: