MS Tech Days in Belfast - Reporting Services 2008

I'll be delivering a session on SQL 2008 Reporting Services in Belfast for MS Tech-Days on 26th March, 2009. If you want to register here's the link

https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032405487&Culture=en-IE

We've only got an hour and fifteen minuets and there is SOOO much stuff in reporting services 2008. I'm going to focus on the bits that are probably the most important if you are undertaking a reporting project and have some experience with the 2005 platform:

- Reporting Architecture Overview

- Report Engine Enhancements

- Report Builder 2.0

Report Builder 2.0 is such an improvement over 1.0. It is no longer the poor mans choice compared to to Visual Studio, and I'll show some areas where Report Builder actually does a better job than Visual Studio and visa versa.

Although I'll be mainly demo-ing report builder I must confess that we do a lot of report development and Business Intelligence here and Visual Studio is still the tool of choice from the dev perspective due to the Team Foundation Server Integration. We do however occasionally switch to Report Builder just to get some of those lovely new styles for charts.

Default Visual Studio Chart:image

Chart created in Report Builder 2.0 with Wizard.

image