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.