Hmmm, looks like I'm in trouble as two of my Windows Forms apps write to the app.config file (in fact I've got a whole class just to simplify doing this), and I've just found out it's not a good idea. IanG (via the Daily Grind) has written a pretty concise summary of why I shouldn't be doing this. One of the downsides to writing to the config file that Ian highlights is that users typically don't have permission to write to the same folder as the executable (under the Program Files folder), and he is spot on - standard users in our organisation...

Ken Cox comes up with a great idea to win prizes in those “draw-a-business-card-out-of-the-hat” giveaways that sometimes happen at user group meetings - a deluxe 6” by 4” business card. Kind of hard to miss in amongst those other bits of paper!

This week I've had the opportunity to write a batch file which is run from the rs.exe command-line tool to administer Reporting Services. As far as I can tell, there's 3 ways you can create folders or deploy reports or change settings in Reporting Services: from within Visual Studio.NET; using the Report Manager web interface; and using rs.exe (which is itself a wrapper for Reporting Services web service calls). I use the first way to do simple things like deploy reports until our virtual folder structure got deeply nested, where I switched to the second way - design and build the report...