TechEd Boston--My Chalktalk on the ReportViewer
So, they tell me that I'm doing a chalk-talk on the new ReportViewer control in Visual Studio. That's cool as it's one of the most interesting additions to the Visual Studio tools suite. The question is, how the heck and I going to do an hour-long presentation without a demo, or a projector to show it with? I'm thinking about bringing hand-puppets. Check the schedule for the exact times but I asked for Tuesday or Wednesday morning sometime. I'll probably get 0-dawn 30. I expect that most folks will want to know how much of the work they've invested in the Reporting Services RDL-based reports can be leveraged with the ReportViewer.
I wrote quite abit about that issue in my new (as yet unpublished) book "Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server". The ReportViewer chapter is over 70 pages IIRC and takes the reader through the mechanisms used to
transmogrify RDL into RDLC. Frankly, that's the easy part. The problem is the RS UI handles a whole series of issues including prompting for parameters, running pick-list population queries, populating the pick lists, setting
defaults and valid options and a lot more. All of these tasks have to be picked up by the Windows (or Web) application unless you simply want to use the ReportViewer to address the Reporting Services engine and pick a report to view. We'll certainly have time to discuss those issues and understand where SQL Server Express (Advanced Services Edition) fits into the picture.
Questions? Ask or see me at TechEd.