Including Crystal Was NOT a step forward.

Hi Andrew,

For many including Crystal Reports in Visual Studio.NET was like getting a chocolate cake.

For many others it was as if the cake was stale, mouldy, and had a nest of wasps living in the middle of it that you only found when you went to eat it...

I take it you fall into the second category?

Very nicely put.

"For me it began with MS Access v1.0 back in 1992."

There are several niche markets in reporting. The hot sector currently is enterprise reporting (mass-scale reporting) with a focus on analytical tools. Large BI businesses don't run on Windows (even if the report itself may have been created with a designer on Windows).


"if you're not working in an Intranet environment where you know what the client PC's have installed, and there's all those extra clicks for the users who simply want a "Print" button."

There are so many customer needs out there, that it's impossible anyway to come up with a package that does it all. In fact, what you need is an open infrastructure instead of a retail product. That's my understanding of reporting services and the ability to extend the import, the renderers, the delivery and (as officially stated) in a next version the processing. I think that having a formula expression for every single tiny report property (whether formatting or calculation) is a good indication of the openness of the product. That kind of technical product enables reporting with formulas and stuff, and then a slew of VARs can build solutions for their customers without requiring any change on the product itself. I am so fed up with old-style reporting tools that have at least 50% of their behaviors hardcoded once for all, and not versionable that I think it's not even funny anymore. That said, the company that will come up and import the flavors a comprehensive set of the top 5 reporting formats (crystal, bo, cognos, ...) should expect to skyrocket. It's hard though, and there are legit concerns as you might guess.

"now we have SQL Reporting Services available for free (assuming you have SQL 2000)."

No. You need Sql Server 2000 CAL and you need a VS.NET licence as well. Why the hell should someone need VS.NET only to create a report?



"With the release of .NET we got a 5-user license of Crystal Reports built in"

Don't expect this to change in the near future. A PR made a few days ago said that Crystal (now owned by BO) will remain bundled with VS.NET in the foreseeable future (and is in Whidbey).

Here is one more piece of reporting history made by ActiveReports.

Sometime after the release of VB5 Data Dynamics release ActiveReports, the first integrated report designer for VB with full support for code behind. Modeled after the access report designer.
ActiveReports was improved throughout the years and ending up with a complete rewrite in C# for the .net platform. Useable in WinForms and WebForms, Easy to Deploy, Royalty free distribution and includes an end user report designer control.

You written exactly the pain that I have gone through until I found Reporting Services.

I heard from on of our customers that MS plan to make RS a product they can sell seperate from SQL2K/Yukon in the future. Any truth in this?

^_^,Pretty Good!