What is Crystal Reports for Visual Studio?

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio is the custom version of Crystal Reports that is available as part of the default installation in most versions of Microsoft Visual Studio (see Visual Studio Versions).

This special edition of Crystal Reports, which is included out of the box with Visual Studio 2002 and up, enables developers to create interactive reports for web sites and smart client applications that scale to meet the demands of end users.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio provides developers with a fast and productive way to create and integrate presentation-quality reports into applications, without leaving the familiar Visual Studio development environment.

If you upgrade to the full version of Crystal Reports you have access to additional features and an updated reporting component within Visual Studio.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio includes many of the features of Crystal Reports Developer. These include the ability to create reports, connect them to a CrystalReportViewer control, and programmatically interact with these reports using the Crystal Reports SDK.

Note

For a comparison of features between Crystal Reports for Visual Studio and Crystal Reports Developer, see Upgrade Options.