Steven Wright Blog

In October 2009 I created 2 codeplex projects which I would to tell you about: SQL Server Reporting Services MSBuild Tasks (ssrsmsbuildtasks) A few years ago I created some tasks for MSBuild to help deploy reports for my project, details can be found here ,  since then my tasks have been re-used in a few other projects within my company.  However lately we have been doing a few projects which have made use of Reporting Services integrated mode with SharePoint, which meant that my tasks were unusable as they only work with a native mode report server. So I have been updating them to include support for an integrated mode report server.  Also before I added the integrated mode support I took some time to rewrite my original native mode tasks as well.  The re-writing of the tasks includes some improved understanding of MSBuild by making more use of Item Groups and metadata for setting of report server properties of the report items being deployed.  I placed the tasks within code

Within any application lifetime management methodology, the reports are a useful tool to help see how well , or not , the project is progressing.  Within the Scrum methodology the reports which are used for tracking progress are the burndown reports.  In the Scrum for Team Systems process templates for Team Foundation Server these reports are available to help with managing the project.  With a manual run burndown report when an unexpected trend in the burndown happens, there is an option to manually add an annotation.  This would help during a retrospective when talking about why the trend oddity occurred.  Within our previous versions of the Scrum for Team System templates our burndown reports would only show the end of each days aggregated totals.  Any unexpected totals would have to investigated to understand the underlying cause.  Previously this would have involved either using Team Foundation Explorer to review the history and comments; Using Excel Pivot Services to query the