Look at what you get for FREE when you install Microsoft Web Platform Installer (Web PI) 2.0 Beta. There is so much you can do with these tools.

Sometimes, its hard to find these packaged items on the web/msdn which enables you to ramp up/develop rich internet web applications. For example, how many times you rambled for IIS setup when you don't have I386 folder unavailable/OS DVD is not available!

The good thing is, the installer keeps all softwares up-to date and it takes care of order of installing these softwares/tools.

Sounds interesting?! wanted these softwares for building a PoC for your customer, what are you waiting for?!

What’s bad: restarting the machine after each installation!

Consider you have a SQL Server Table with some multiline text data. And that data contains carriage return in it.

Now, if you want to display that data with carriage return in SSRS 2005 textbox, there is no direct way to display it.

Because SSRS 2005 uses VB engine to render the data, where it doesn’t understand line feed-->CHR(10) or Carriage Return -->CHR(13) characters.

So, what is the alternative?

Well, simple we need to use the Replace() function available and replace the specific characters with VbCrLf

ex:

=Replace(First(Fields!YourField.Value, "DataSource"),CHR(10),VbCrLf) –>This worked for me.

or

=Replace(First(Fields!YourField.Value, "DataSource"),CHR(13),VbCrLf)

In my case, The user was entering the data into SQL Server Database from an InfoPath form and wanted the carriage return to be persisted in the report. And in this case, CHR(10) worked instead of CHR(13).

Good to see SSRS 2008 added lot of rich text functionality, where you don't have to deal with these kind of silly things..,

Happy Reporting!