I'm delighted to be able to say with confidence that I am now a certified expert in Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Visual C#.Net and Visual Studio.NET (070-315)

[UPDATE] after kind congrats from Thomas Williams I thought I'd say something about how I managed this feat

For anyone else wanting to do the same, be aware that the MS Press books DON'T cover everything you need to know in the exams. While they're a good foundation they miss out material or don't go into enough detail. I have read very good reviews of the MCSD/MCAD Training Guide by Amit Kalani if you want to be sure of not missing anything.

Of course, there's no substitute for experience of actually using the technology (which is a good thing of course – dump the braindumps).

This one add something interesting though, as it also shows how you might call an external assembly to generate the DataSet.

http://workspaces.gotdotnet.com/appworld

Another blogger of note has also come online,  lead developer for the Reporting Services product by the name of 'Tudor'.

"portal creation failed" group:microsoft.public.sharepoint.portalserver.* returns 86 results.

I have read most of them and few seem to offer any resolution, there are ALOT of very unhappy people out there.

Unlike most people I am only reaching a very early stage in the portal creation process, most seem to get past the 'extending virtual server' step, but I don't. The app pool identity has the required privileges on the remote SQL server (database creators role) and local admin rights on the IIS server.

22:41:32 Checking virtual server state.
22:41:32 Virtual server needs extend.
22:41:32 Extending virtual server 'http://myserver:8100/' using existing AppPool 'MSSharePointPortalAppPool'…
22:41:33 Failed to create portal successfully MY Portal

UPDATE: Travis advised that I should have removed WSS before starting the SPS installation but this document clearly states that during SPS installation "your virtual servers for WSS are automatically disconnected" it does not at any point indicate that you should first uninstall WSS completely. This is a valid point but not the source of the problems in this case.

UPDATE 2: Having completely removed SPS and WSS and restored our production sites from backups I have had more time now to inspect the server event logs.

It seems that at the stage when I was asked to configure the component assignments web/search/index/ (SPS Central Administration | Configure Server Topology), there are 'Information' messages in the event log (surely these should be warnings or errors?!) relating to errors with various SharePoint-related services (search service, alert service etc)

e.g. "..description for Event ID ( 0 ) in Source ( SharePoint Portal Alert Service ) cannot be found."

So there is no way to find out what the errors are, but in any case it seems a whole slew of services failed to get installed properly. What annoys me no end is that the 'Configure Server Topology' page gives you no indication that anything has gone wrong.

The reason I assume that these services failed to get installed is that immediately preceding these cryptic errors there are more specific errors as follows: 

"The configuration information of the performance library "C:WINDOWSsystem32infoctrs.dll" for the "InetInfo" service does not match the trusted performance library information stored in the registry" and there was a similar one relating to W3SVC

then one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to process the SharePoint Portal Alerts Notification Service performance library since one of the data blobs reported to have classes but had zero size"

and one of these:

"WMI ADAP was unable to retrieve data from the PerfLib subkey: SYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesSPSARPIPerformanceLibrary, error code: 0×80041009"

the same error was also logged for SPSAUTOCAT, SPSGATHERER, SPSGTHRSVC, SPSINDEX, SPSMATRIXPI, SPSSEARCH, SSO, subpi.

Then there was this (reported under the identity of the app pool service account being used for SPS/WSS):

"Windows cannot unload your classes registry file – it is still in use by other applications or services. The file will be unloaded when it is no longer in use."

and

"Windows saved user MyDomainsvcSharePoint registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use. This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account."

and then

"The worker process failed to initialize the http.sys communication or the w3svc communication layer and therefore could not be started. The data field contains the error number."

If anyone know why all this could have occurred I'd be interested to hear. In the meantime I'm probably going to call TechNet direct.

UPDATE 3: We had numerous issues with DNS and Kerberos authentication on our domain about which we raised a PSS call to Microsoft who dealt with the issue very efficiently. After also reinstalling W2K3 from scratch I then didnt have any problems installing SPS, thanks to everyone who replied with comments.

This all works great. I can supply the parameters which I have told the extension to request from the designer (via the implementation of IDbCommandAnalysis.GetParameters method), and the query designer screen returns the data into the results screen, but if I attempt to navigate to the report layout tab, or I click on the 'Refresh Fields' button within the Generic Query Designer, I get an exception.

I deliberately decided to Debug.Assert that the @DataSource parameter should not be empty, but it should not be empty anyway as I have already supplied it via the designer. Following my debug trace information I can see that ExecuteReader in being called, but that the parameters are being passed as empty strings. If I elect to ignore the error then I can see via the trace that ExecuteReader gets called a second time, this time passing the parameters as I have entered them, and all is well.

The solution of course is not to require there to be non-empty parameters, but surely this is a bug?

UPDATE: after lots more detective work I have discovered that presumably the Report Designer graciously handles any ArgumentExceptions, and just carries on and attempts the ExecuteReader a second time.

How did I discover this? I turned off my assertions and just let the code proceed, the code gets as far as trying to load the DataSet:

Try
   dataset.ReadXml(dataSource)
Catch ex As System.Exception
   Trace.WriteLine(String.Format("Error Reading XML into dataset: {0}:{1}", ex.Message, ex.GetType))
   Throw ex
End Try

but inevitably it fails because the dataSource parameter is a blank string, so I catch an ArgumentException and write a message to the trace as follows:

Error Reading XML into dataset: The path is not of a legal form.:System.ArgumentException

The Report Designer then carries on and repeats the call to ExecuteReader, this time passing the correct parameters and everything goes smoothly.

So, still a bug in my opinion (unless anyone can enlighten me otherwise) - but it works!

UPDATE 2:

Robert Bruckner has now kindly enlightened me as follows (see also this thread):

If you actually execute the query when ExecuteReader(SchemaOnly) is called
then the implementation is incorrect. For SchemaOnly execution, no parameter
values are passed in because no query should be executed – just the columns
should be returned.

When Refreshing Fields, the report designer first tries to determine the
fields based on ExecuteReader(SchemaOnly) because this should not affect any
database state (and it is cheaper). If SchemaOnly fails, then report
designer tries to actually execute the query and determine the fields based
on the returned dataset. In order to execute the query it has to pass in
parameter values.

Other than what I read in this thread, and this one so far no-one has written an extension for accessing a web service (or at least, if Bryan Keller hasnt found it the I doubt it's out there yet). So I doubt theres one floating out there for accessing info in WSS and I'll need to roll my own. I found these links which I think will prove useful, any other pointers would be welcome:

File Share Extension
XML Data Extension
Clarification on the Placement of CodeGroup Elements for Extensions
How hard is it to write Reporting Services extensions?

If I manage it I'll post and article here!

UPDATE: Ohad has listed some other useful links including two for extensions for custom ADO.Net DataSets by Gavin Joyce and by a GotDotNet community

UPDATE 2: I have converted the original GotDotNet sample to VB.Net and it works! Now to write one to work with web services and ultimately with WSS lists so I can report on WSS lists to my heart's content…

I thought I'd post in case anyone else was interested and maybe we could persuade codewheeney to share the code… Otherwise the concept is (partly) documented here

Dim targetWeb As SPWeb = SPControl.GetContextWeb(Context).Webs.Item("sites/IT")
Dim docLib As SPDocumentLibrary = CType(targetWeb.Lists.Item(New Guid(targetFolderGUID)), SPDocumentLibrary)
Dim docLibFile As SPFile = docLib.RootFolder.Files.Add(fileName, fileContents)
Dim docItem As SPListItem = docLibFile.Item
docItem.Fields("Category") = "General"

If I attempt to set the value of a field (i.e. a Column) in a List, the complier complains that:

Property 'Item' is 'ReadOnly'

Anyone know why I shouldnt be allowed to do it this way?!

UPDATE: the following code is what I was looking for…

docItem("Category") = "General"
docItem.Update()