Microsoft Reporting Services in Action

It is a detailed and practical guide to the functionality provided by Microsoft Reporting Services 2000. It systematically shows off many powerful RS features by leading you through a dizzying variety of possible uses. Following a typical report lifecycle, the book shows you how to create, manage, and deliver RS reports.“I encourage you to use the ideas in this book and take Reporting Services to the next level.”

Synopsis

I have been cherishing the idea of writing a book on .NET since my initial encounter with .NET when I was involved in the .NET early adopter program. Towards the end of 2003, the planets were aligned in my favor and I was thinking seriously about how to materialize this idea. Initially, I was planning to write a book on WinForm development which would walk the reader through the implementation lifecycle of a distributed WinForm application.

Around that time, I got my hands on a beta 1 copy of Reporting Services and was immediately hooked. No matter what application you are implementing right now, chances are it manipulates data of some sort. The problem with data, though, is that you always have too much of it. For this reason, reporting is an integral part of every complete business application. Yet, report-enabling applications is often regarded as a tedious chore. Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services changes all of this.

Reporting Services (RS) is a great piece of technology. With RS, report authors can create reports as easily as you would do it in Microsoft Access. But make no mistake. Reporting Services is a sophisticated server-based oriented platform and its feature set goes well beyond that of a desktop reporting tool. To use RS effectively, you need to have a solid grasp of how it works and how it can be integrated with different types of client applications. I hope this book makes this endeavor easier.

While I contemplated what the book scope will be, it dawned on me that I could bring the most value by following my heart and approaching Reporting Services from a developer’s point of view. I put myself in a position that many developers could relate to. Here I am as a developer, consultant, architect, who is tasked with adding reporting features to a given application. How would I do this?

To reflect this idea, my book takes a solution-oriented approach and more than half of it is devoted on integrating different types of applications with Reporting Services. While you are reading the book, you will find a common pattern. It starts by discussing the requirements and design goals of a given reporting scenario. Then, it discusses the implementation choices, and, finally, it explains how the solution is implemented.

What’s inside

• Extend RS with custom code to add report forecasting
• Expose reports as RSS feeds
• Develop a WinForm-based Report Wizard
• Write an ASP.NET web control for client and server-side report generation
• Create reports off ADO.NET datasets
• Deliver reports to Web Services
• Customize RS security
• Evaluate RS performance and capacity
• and much more…

Inside the book

Table of contents	Chapters (1 and 6)	Errata
Foreword	Index	Book reviews
Preface	Source code	Old Forum

How to purchase

• Buy it from the publisher
• Buy it from Amazon
• Buy it from B&N