Reporting is one of the major tasks in any enterprise and reporting software occupies a prominent position in enterprise software suite.  There are multitudes of reporting software vendors; among them Crystal Reports has a large following with a variety of products designed for size and costs ranging from small business to enterprise.  It is relatively easy to retrieve data from a database and display it using any of the bound controls. This is especially so in ASPNET 2.0 where the amount of code you need to write has been drastically reduced.  However, to present the data in a formal, board-room friendly format and distribute it in hardcopy or for look-up is challenging.

Microsoft has been bundling Crystal reports ever since the VB days and it ships with every version of VS2005 as it did with VS2003.  It is well integrated with VS Studio 2005 and uses the VS enhancements in useful and intelligent ways.  It makes use of themes, smart tags, css styling, reporting source and data source control features, automatic data binding and many other features of ASPNET 2.0.  For highly functional and aesthetically pleasing, web and window based report generation, Crystal Report is ideally suited.  It is very versatile and can use data from a variety of databases and other non-traditional sources.  The version that comes with the default install of VS 2005 needs to be upgraded to Crystal Reports 11 to use even more enhancements.