Deleting a Windows Service

While I typically stick with Microsoft products there are times that I must drift. I'm currently working with a client that is using Cognos for their metadata and presentation (reporting and analysis) layers. I ran into an issue this morning while trying to upgrade their version of Cognos. Unfortunately there is no automated upgrade process between the version they have and the one they want to upgrade to. This meant uninstalling the old and installing the new. In the process I could not start the Cognos service because the previous version already had a service registered with the same name. I tried uninstalling and reintsalling a number of times but to no avail. Eventually I decided to manually delete the service. I did this with the following commands (entered at a command prompt):

This command lists all the registered services on the machine
sc query state= all findstr "SERVICE_NAME"

This command deletes the service
sc delete service_name

If necessary you can also delete the service from the registry. You should be able to find the key in the following location:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services

SSRS Rendering Extension - Pipe Delimited

It's very easy to leverage the existing Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.CsvRenderer.CsvReport,Microsoft.ReportingServices.CsvRendering type to "create" a new rendering option in SSRS that uses a delimiter other than a comma. Below is an example of adding a "CSV" renderer that uses a pipe ( | ).

Simply add the following to the Render section of your rsreportserver.config file to add the option for rendering a pipe delimited file.


<Extension Name="PIPE" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.CsvRenderer.CsvReport,Microsoft.ReportingServices.CsvRendering">
    <OverrideNames>
        <Name Language="en-US">CSV (pipe delimited)</Name>
    </OverrideNames>
    <Configuration>
        <DeviceInfo>
            <FieldDelimiter>|</FieldDelimiter>
            <NoHeader>false</NoHeader>
        </DeviceInfo>
    </Configuration>
</Extension>
   
Note the FieldDelimiter tag. This is where you can set your delimiter to the character of your choice.

Be sure to include the OverrideNames tag but feel free to change the value. Once you have completed the change, restart the Reporting Services service to reload the newly modified config file.