Traffic was bad so we had a slow start to the night, but since we had 3 presentations on reporting we had to get started at 6:30.  Jim started the night telling everyone what we had in store which was Active Reports by Jim, Steve with PDFLib and XSL-FO and finally me with Reporting Services. 

Jim started out with Active Reports which gives the end user the ability to create the reports in addition to the developers.  The end users can create the report, but you will need to create the datasource in the back end ahead of time.  You can pass in classes or objects instead of a datasource for people that use things like CLSA.  Once you install active reports all you to do is add a new file from the Add New Item selection and then if you are familiar with access you are good to go.  If you know Microsoft Access, Crystal Reports, or Reporting Services you should be very familiar with Active Reports.  To add it to a winform all you have to do is create a winform and add the report to it.  Active Reports by Data Dynamics. Standard Edition is about 499 and the pro version is 1299 per developer.  All of development for Active Reports is integrated into Visual Studio 2003 so you don’t have to add anything new.  The system comes with an end user designer with the professional version and gives the users the ability to create a report without have to install Visual Studio, but gives the same look and feel.  Some things it doesn’t do well in version 1.0 is charting, they don’t give you the source, support is great, very quick and prompt,  you don’t have drill down functionality.  The features that Jim really pointed out was the fact that you can program against the entire coding model.

Although traffic was bad we still had a big crowd eventually show up.  Note to self: A good thing to do would be to do a performance test against the reporting engines that most people use today.  We had an announcement for Book247 at a discount again.  If you show up to a group you may have a chance to get this discounted cost. 

Next up was Steve with PDFlib.  This presentation was all about creating PDF files.  The version he uses is a COM component, but there is a newer .NET version.  He pointed out that there are 3 ways to create a PDF file from a website 1) through an application like RS 2) component 3rd party product 3) XSLFO.  He went on to show us the 3rd party version called PDFLib which costs 450 bucks.  This version writes a file to disk with the information that you give it.  We were able to see some of the object model for PDFLib, but when it comes down to it there are many options out there and it just comes down to price and features.  He pointed out that these libraries do have a great place for on the fly changes and these libraries let you change options based on user input.  Finally we got to see a small look at XSL-FO which is taking data and changing them to a formatting object.  There aren’t many processors out there yet because this is still a new standard.  The one that we were shown was an apache version that we had to run from the command line.

Finally I went on to show how you can use Reporting Services in your projects and how you can use the web service to embed the information into a webpage or winform.  This is a good idea if you don’t want the end user to know the URL address or you want to have the report look like it is part of your webpage.

--Brendon Schwartz

P.S.  I promise Matt will be back soon to do the review =)