Since my Access days, I've believed in renaming important* controls in reports. Now that I use Reporting Services daily, this practice still holds: ambiguous names like "Textbox1" or "Textbox112" become "ReportName" or "FinalBalance", "table1" becomes "WidgetSalesTable", and "chart1" becomes "MonthlyTrendChart". As well as better organising the report while in development and adding only a small amount of time to actually do, renaming controls is useful to me later when I'm maintaining a report as I can see which controls contain which data points. There's one further advantage to renaming controls in a Reporting Services report: because reports are stored in XML format,...

Recently I investigated a Reporting Services problem where a user first ran a report with one parameter, then switched applications to do some work, then returned to the report and attempted to run it with a different parameter. The end result was that they received an "execution xxx cannot be found (rsExecutionNotFound)" error. I too see this "execution cannot be found" error intermittently, sometimes after coming back to a report I'd run earlier and clicking "Back" or trying to expand a section on the report, and sometimes when my browser loads up tabs from a previous session. And The Reason Is You Behind...

Recently my boss said something like: There are two types of developers - ones that are into their tools, and those that just use the tools. You don't need to be the first type to get the job done. With regards to most of the programs I use, I'm the first type (and proud of it). However there's some things I have no desire to get into, and would rather just use; DOS batch files, Oracle TNSNAMES.ORA configuration, HTML help authoring, to name a few. That one little quote also touched on a tendency that I have to spend too much time fiddling...