My first interaction with client-side Reporting Services (RS) started with the release of the Visual Studio 2005, beta 2. RS was by far my favorite feature from the “what’s new” list—and why not? Before RS, the only out-of-the-box client-side reporting alternatives were Crystal Reports or writing your own reporting solution using the .NET printing classes. When the beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2005 appeared, I was working on a financial system for one of my clients. After spending some time with this tool, I was able to create some neat reports ranging from simple invoices to a complicated balance sheet. One of the prime motivations for me to write this book was to share my experiences with you. I tried my best to bring in all sorts of different reporting scenarios to help you learn all the cool features of RS. I sincerely hope that this book will reduce your learning curve and that you can also bring the sample projects’ functionality into your projects. This book will take you step-by-step on a journey of report authoring by using practical examples from real-world business cases. You’ll also learn how reports can be processed by various clients developed using Visual Studio.
This book will focus on the design of practical reporting projects using the Visual Studio IDE and on viewing the reports using the supplied ReportViewer control. This means that you, the reader, must be comfortable with the development methods of your favorite client. The approach adopted in this book is simple: You’ll learn hands on, while doing the examples. Major emphasis is applied to small details of report authoring, and when it comes to clients, minimal attention is given—they’re covered only to the extent that they look good as hosts for our authored reports.
All reports in this book have some real-world touch associated with them; that is, you will not learn the dry way: “What is data grouping?” Instead, you will learn with a pinch of a spicy flavor, like this: “How does this regionwide sales report use the reporting technique called data grouping?”