Month / December 2012

by Arvind Shyamsundar

“The operation has timed out” while using Power View in Excel 2013

This one is a quick tip. I recently upgraded to Office 2013 RTM and wanted to use the excellent Power View feature which is now an integral part of Excel! However, after I setup my tables (actually I used the Power Pivot data model) I was consistently presented with the below error message whenever I tried to open the Power View add-in: “The operation has timed out” with a title of “Power View error”.

If you encounter this, my tip to you is to reinstall the Silverlight runtime on your PC. I don’t know exactly why, but that was in some way causing the above issue. I hope it will save you a few hours of troubleshooting!

by Arvind Shyamsundar

Microsoft Report Viewer 2012 update: a ‘gotcha’ to be aware of

Something which I have been waiting for a long time has finally been released! The ReportViewer 2012 redistributable RTM package is available for download now!

Deployment notes

FYI, ReportViewer is used by Management Studio (SSMS), other utilities and also by any custom application which uses this to render local RDLC reports, or within a web application to view remotely rendered reports.

SQL 2012 installation deploys ReportViewer if the Management Tools are selected for installation. The other shipping vehicle for the ReportViewer control is Visual Studio 2012. This blog post pertains more to the case where we installed ReportViewer through the normal SQL 2012 installer.

FYI, you can view the ReportViewer 2012 assembly version at C:windowsassemblyGAC_MSILMicrosoft.ReportViewer.WinForms11.0.0.0__….. Right clicking on the assembly, and viewing the Details tab will give you the version of the DLL.

Note the ‘gotcha’

Now, the updated runtime release will deploy the equivalent of SQL 2012 SP1 binaries, so you get the latest and greatest bits! These should deploy a 11.0.3010 version for the Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms.dll file (and other files as well.)

Now, here’s the ‘note from the field’ thing which you can only get from me Smile If you just install SQL 2012 SP1 (without later running the above download) it does not seem to update the ReportViewer control. Normally this may not have much visible impact, but if you are like me, you may want to keep the runtime up to date due to the number of important fixes in such updated versions.

Test case

In my tests, just applying SQL 2012 SP1 installation did NOT upgrade the runtime to 11.0.3000. It was still at 11.0.2100. However, applying the above updated runtime MSI will upgrade the runtime to 11.0.3010.

Your checkpoint is that the version of ReportViewer 2012 assembly under C:windowsassemblyGAC_MSILMicrosoft.ReportViewer.WinForms11.0.0.0__….. should finally be 11.0.3010 or higher. (repeat this check for the other controls such as Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms as well.

Conclusion

So in short, if you use ReportViewer – either indirectly (like in SSMS) or directly (through custom applications developed using Visual Studio 2012) it is highly recommended to update your RTM ReportViewer 11.0 runtime to the latest version using the MSI from the download link.