Unlike other products that we've reviewed in .NET Developers Journal, Crystal Reports enjoys an almost unique relationship with Microsoft Visual Studio in that a copy of Crystal Reports has shipped with Microsoft Visual Studio since 1993.

It's interesting to note that Business Objects and Microsoft have recently announced that this relationship will continue with the inclusion of Crystal Reports into Visual Studio .NET 2005 (Whidbey), which may surprise some considering Microsoft's recent move into the reporting domain with their SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services.

One of the greatest things about the version of Crystal Reports provided with Visual Studio is that it is a fully functional product in its own right, providing a solid reporting foundation for the small or independent developer.

As your applications demand increased performance, scalability, and security you can easily migrate to more advanced versions of Crystal Reports, such as Crystal Reports 10 Developer or Crystal Reports 10 Advanced Developer, without changing a single line of existing source code.

Crystal Reports has long been known as the cornerstone of enterprise reporting and Crystal Reports 10 continues this legacy providing significant reasons for upgrading your reporting engine.

Crystal Reports 10 builds upon the industry-proven stability of Crystal Reports 9, allowing for a seamless migration to Crystal Enterprise and the Report Application Server - known in version 10 as Crystal Enterprise Embedded - with only a single additional line of code to specify the location of the Crystal Enterprise Embedded server instance.

Crystal Enterprise Embedded, included with the Advanced Developer edition, allows for report processing to be easily migrated from the Web server to a dedicated report processing server.

In previous releases of Crystal Reports the printing of reports required the presence of Adobe Acrobat Reader upon the client machine; in version 10 this dependency has gone through the addition of a small ActiveX control which is downloaded to the client computer.

In much the same way that MSDN online has been a huge success for Microsoft developers, Crystal developers rely on the huge array of code samples and information available on the Developer Zone Web site (www.businessobjects.com/products/dev_zone/default.asp) and the associated .NET and Java zones that provide platform-specific developer information.

Crystal Reports 10 fully integrates into the Visual Studio environment, allowing visual components such as the Crystal Reports Viewer to easily be placed onto ASP.NET web forms or Windows forms. Online help is integrated into the Visual Studio .NET environment and will show as another node below the installed MSDN library.

Those of you who have read other reviews I've written for .NETDJ will be aware that I'm a huge fan of printed documentation, and on the whole I was very impressed with the printed manual that was shipped with Crystal Reports 10. That said, though, the printed documentation is aimed more at report authors than at the application developers integrating Crystal Reports into their application.

Considering that the focus of the printed manual is on the report author, I'd like to take the unusual step of recommending a good Crystal Reports book aimed at the .NET programmer. Crystal Reports .NET Programming by Brian Bischof details many aspects of using Crystal Reports in .NET applications using ASP.NET, Windows Forms, C#, and VB.NET.

Company Info
Business Objects
North American Corporate Headquarters
3030 Orchard Parkway
San Jose, CA 95134
Tel: 800 527 0580;
408 953 6000
Fax: 408 953 6001
www.businessobjects.com

Sales: 800 877-2340 or 604 681-3435 between 7 am and 5 pm PDT
Monday through Friday

Summary
If you've used either the free version, which ships with Visual Studio .NET, or Crystal Reports 9 before then it is definitely worth looking at migrating your existing reporting to this version. It provides some excellent new features, such as the DHTML printing and Crystal Enterprise Embedded, and also simplifies the implementation of many of the features available in previous editions.