Where’s the new Report Viewer?

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Previously, I posted that we were working on an updated version of the report viewer control for Visual Studio 2010.  With beta 1 now available, I have naturally started receiving questions wondering why the report viewer that is included in beta 1 is essentially the same thing that shipped with Visual Studio 2008.

I want assure everyone that our plans have not changed.  We will ship an updated report viewer in VS 2010.  Unfortunately, the timing just didn’t work out for us to get this update included in beta 1.  Our current plan is for the updated viewer to appear in beta 2.

I’ll be talking a lot more about the new report viewer features once beta 2 is available.  But I do want to at least provide an overview of the work we’re doing.  Below are some of the new features or changes we’re making.  This is certainly not an exhaustive list.

  • Support for the 2008 RDL schema in local mode.  This will give you all of the new features available in RDL in SQL Server 2008, including tablix, rich text, updated chart visualizations, gauge, and many others.  We’ll be including the updated report design surface for local mode as well.
  • Support for ASP.Net AJAX.  The report viewer will use AJAX to update its various regions (report, toolbar, etc).  You will also allow be able to include the entire ReportViewer control in an UpdatePanel.
  • Updated API.  We’ve received a lot of feedback on missing APIs or scenarios that are difficult given the current API.  We’ve added a number of new events and methods to help, including a new JavaScript API for interacting with the ReportViewer in the browser.
  • Significantly improved browser compatibility.  We’ve put a huge amount of effort into improving our support across browsers.  We’ve seen plenty of reports of extra scrollbars or other problematic renderings in Firefox, Safari, and standards mode in general.  The initial feedback on these changes has been very positive.
  • Usability and “look and feel” enhancements.  The viewer needed a minor facelift.  It got one.

As always, if there is a particular feature or problem you’d like us to address, we want to know.  Please send feedback via Microsoft Connect.  Our team reviews that feedback weekly.