Chapter 28: Crystal Reports with Visual Studio .NET

Overview

Although most agree that it got off to a slower-than-anticipated start, Microsoft s Visual Studio .NET development environment appears to be gaining ground as the current state-of-the art in Microsoft-oriented development tools. Organizations find its true object orientation, rich integrated development environment, and from-the-ground-up language independence (among other things) to be worth its disk-space requirements and required effort to learn a new environment.

Crystal Reports has played a prominent role in Microsoft development environments in the recent past. Crystal Reports has been bundled with previous versions of Microsoft Visual Studio products (perhaps the sole exception being the concentration on the Microsoft Report Designer included with Visual Studio 6 ”Crystal Reports was still available separately on the program CD). With Visual Studio .NET (VS.NET), Crystal Reports has once again taken on a prominent role, being an integral part of the VS.NET package right out of the box.

Note  

While this chapter covers VS.NET usage in Windows application creation, one of the major benefits of VS.NET is the similarity between web and Windows development environments, including Crystal Reports integration. For this reason, you ll find that this chapter is very similar to the last portion of Chapter 22, which concentrates on Crystal web development.