Being the geek I am, I wanted to take a detailed look at the reports in the new Scrum template. Rather than wait for guidance to be posted, or call up my friends at Microsoft (again), I thought I would do my own experimenting.
- I downloaded the Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 – Preview 3 process template from the Team Foundation Server 11 Beta into C:Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0.
- I launched SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) otherwise known as Visual Studio 2008. (I can’t wait for this to be unified into one IDE someday).
- I created a new Report Server Project named ScrumReports.
- From Windows Explorer, I dragged the eight .rdl reports …
… into my Reports folder in Solution Explorer. This makes a copy of the .rdl files under my project.
- I then created two shared data sources with the exact names that the reports will expect.
- TfsOlapReportDS: a Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services connection (Data Source=vstfs;Initial Catalog=Tfs_Analysis)
- TfsReportDS: a Microsoft SQL Server connection (Data Source=vstfs;Initial Catalog=Tfs_Warehouse)
- Now I can open any of the reports in the designer and study the layout, built-in fields, parameters, and datasets. I can also preview the reports.
- I then drilled-down into the various datasets to learn their purpose and how they fit with the report.
For larger datasets with larger queries, I copied/pasted the code into this cool online SQL formatter to improve readability:
