Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services is a complete platform for creating, managing, and delivering reports from a variety of data sources.

Reporting Services offers comprehensive functionality for processing, formatting, and rendering data in a variety of traditional and interactive reporting formats. Applications can take advantage of Reporting Services functionality in many ways, from accessing an existing report within an application or portal page, to embedding report processing and design capabilities within a stand-alone application.

SQL Server Reporting Services is designed to be programmable and extensible. Report definitions use a published, extensible XML-format called Report Definition Language (RDL), and Reporting Services offers a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web service for managing and accessing reports.

Creating Reports

You can create reports for your application by using a variety of tools. These include the Report Designer tool integrated with Visual Studio 2005, or the new Report Builder ad hoc tool, and then deploy them as part of your application installation. Your users can also use these tools to extend the set of reports that you provide with your application.

Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports has been part of Visual Studio since 1993, and is now the standard for reporting in Visual Studio 2005. It ships with every copy of Visual Studio 2005 and is integrated directly into the development environment.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 brings the ability to create interactive, presentation-quality content to the Windows environment. With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005, you can create complex and professional reports in a GUI-based program. Then you can connect your report to almost any database source, as well as to proxy data, such as a result set (for example, an ADO.NET DataSet). With the wizards included in the GUI designer, you can easily set formatting, grouping, charting, and other criteria.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 ships with an extensive SDK. You can use the SDK to interact with the report programmatically at runtime, by use of one of four possible object models:

• CrystalReportViewer, the simplest object model.
• ReportDocument, the more extensive object model.
• Object models available through upgrade: