Chapter 1: Crystal Reports.NET Overview

Overview

Crystal Reports has enjoyed a long association with Microsoft and has shipped with Visual Basic (and subsequently Visual Studio) as the default report writer since 1993. Developers have traditionally had a love-hate relationship with Crystal Reports - they loved the functionality it provided and the free runtime license, but hated having to upgrade to the latest version to get the features they required, and the fact that reports could not be created or modified programmatically, but only through the UI (either the developer UI with Visual Studio or with the consumer UI with the Crystal Reports retail package).

Just as the release of Visual Studio .NET represents a significant leap for the Microsoft development platform, the release of Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET is also a milestone for the Crystal Decisions development team. Following the Microsoft .NET strategy, the product has been redeveloped to take advantage of the .NET Framework and is now a fully featured product in it's own right - developers no longer have to wait to upgrade to the latest release to get the features they need.

In this chapter, we are going to take a first look at Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET (Crystal Reports.NET), including how the product is different from other versions of Crystal Reports, how to find and run the sample applications that are included, and where to find the tutorials that will get you up to speed with the product. We will also take a look at the new Crystal Reports.NET architecture, and learn how it fits into the .NET Framework.

Whether you are an experienced application developer looking to move to Visual Studio .NET or you are developing your first application and have never heard of Crystal Reports, it all starts here.