.NET Reporting - a Preview of Report Templates for WPF Silverlight WinForms and ASP.NET

This is going to be for me the most productive and useful addition to Winforms that I have seen in quite a while.

Thanks Ray. I no longer have to wade thru webinars, talkfests, videoed advertising etc to understand, let alone implement the great reporting functions bundled with my subscription of DevEx.

Please try to add more templates for your other great tools.

Keep up the great work Ray ...

This looks excellent. Our end-users will be able to easily create their own reports just as easily as creating a new word document from one of the many office templates.

Can't wait for 2011.2...

Seriously the reporting suite is getting better and better with every release and i think julian should take the whole reporting team out for a meal to say thank you from his customers.

Only 2 missing features to go and this will be the best reporting tool on the market.

Missing features i hear you say???  Simply it needs to be able to read from \ output to RDL and have some drill down capabilities within the reports.

We have a full reporting server wrote around the DevExpress reporting suite and the only missing thing that is stopping us from rolling it out across our multiple call centres is the drill down abilities.

Can the end user report designer also load these templates?

+1 for simplified drill down like crystal

Also, multiple 'bands' for the same level, like multiple detail bands for the same data. Much needed, long requested...

+2 for drill down capability

I am waiting for the day when selected fields in report can be exported as adobe acroform fields in PDF export.

@George: Bad idea. This is actually a great end-user feature but end-users can't use it. Great. Why not ive versa? First for end-user report designer and then for VS designer. Would make more sense for me.

@George: Also, how should I then use this in XAF? XAF forces me to use the XtraReport designer - I can't use VS to design the reports.

I've got to agree with Robert here - surely this should be available in the end-user report designer where it will be of most use to those people who need it most. It's a real disappointment to hear that this is only available in the VS designer - seems a bit pointless now!

I have to agree with the comments above by Mark and Robert.  When i read this article i stupidly assumed that templates would be available to my end users :( this is pretty much a pointless feature to me personally as we have a blank report that is already used as a template when i am designing reports in XtraReports.

Robert, no worries on that front.... :) We are planning a way to allow for end users to use templates. This is something we believe  is needed as well. And this is something we will be working towards for the release after.

Ray, Azret, glad to hear it - I'm happy to wait  a release or 2 for it, so long as I know it is in the pipeline then I'm delighted.

First thanks for your wonderful work, As I was planning to do something a like in future.

But since you are doing it can I share my ideas and compare them with yours:

1- In my application (mainly XAF) in reports view the end user will click a button.

2- End user then will be able to browse a custom url (based on config or code).

3- Then user can select a report to download.

4- After download user can colon the report and edit it in the designer.

5- Application can check for new versions of downloaded reports from the URL configured.

So now how that compare with what you will do?

And We write the missing parts? Or we will wait to 2012?

How about this guys: I can personally write the code that integrates the EUD with the template engine by our 11.2 release. The reason why I am so confident in this is because I've already done it ;)

Look for a blog post this week.

This looks very interesting. WHat I have to do is map legacy reports (text) can I do that with this new product?

We are thinking of going to an excel sheet first with the legacy program providing formatting codes.