Younger Than Yesterday (ReportViewer in VS 2008)

  • Article

As most of you probably know by now, Visual Studio 2008 is now available. What you might not have noticed is a new version of the ReportViewer control and local /embedded report editing experience. Included with VS 2008 are the following new features:

Design-time: 

  • New Report Projects: Two new project templates for quickly creating reporting applications. When you create a new Report Application project, you get a blank report ( .rdlc) and a form with a ReportViewer control bound to the report.
  • Report Wizard: The Report wizard guides you through the steps for creating a basic report. After the wizard is finished, you can edit the report by using the Designer.
  • Expression Editor Enhancements: The expression editor now provides common sample expressions.

Run-time:

  • PDF Compression: The ReportViewer controls compress reports that are exported to the PDF format.
  • Local Print: The ASP.NET ReportViewer now includes the ability to print a report in local mode via an ActiveX control.

Documentation for the new ReportViewer is here. The new version runs SxS with the VS 2005 version. This means to use the new controls, you will need to change the references in your project to use the new ReportViewer control.  We will be writing a KB article about how to do that soon.

An important thing to understand is that the ReportViewer in VS 2008 is based on the report engine from SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, which means it uses the 2005 RDL schema and processing engine. Since SQL Server 2008 has not shipped yet, we will not be able to release a 2008 RDL version of the ReportViewer until next year.

If you are going to ship the new ReportViewer with your application, we now have an updated version of the redistributable to the web. The download page is here. For the ClickOnce scenario, the ReportViewer.exe  FWLink is also live.