Actually I think that's quite an important topic. Reporting is indeed critical. Just curious... why are you doing this with Paddock and not somebody like Craig B who has enormous experience with Crystal and has himself written a more generic book on the topic? Also are you talking about LINQ at all?
Also just curious, are you advocating use of SP for reporting or are you using SPT or similar to allow more flexibility? I know that it is regarded as normal these days for users to be able to craft reports on data to which they have access without having to call for a program change or IT assistance. Just curious.
How is Rod Paddock, btw? Last time he was here, he proposed a shoot-out comparing VFP and dotNET data access to SQL Server. Perhaps we should actually do that with examples against dbfs and SQL Server. Rod is fine, busy as usual, balancing work life with family life. His son Isaiah turns 1 next month.
Yes, reporting is a critical topic - and one that's often overlooked. For some project stakeholders, reports are THE REASON for the application. I've always jumped at the chance to be involved with the reporting pieces of an app, because they help me stay attuned to business requirements and user expectations.
Apress read my column in CoDe magazine, and asked me about writing a book. Naturally, I told Rod about it, who suggested additional chapters to cover other reporting tools like ActiveReports and SSRS 2005, and volunteered to write those chapters. [His chapter on SSRS is outstanding]. Rod was also great to have as a general sounding board.
The book is about building distributed reporting solutions, so there are a few chapters each for all the different layers. It's not a book on report writers, but on the reporting process. The goal of the book was to be about 5 mini-books in one, with a large number of code samples. The book is aimed at developers, not power users.
To answer your other question, it has two chapters on writing stored procedures in T-SQL 2005. I disagree that SPT has more flexibility. [I'm not opposed to SPT, I just stress SPs as a general practice].
No, the book doesn't cover LINQ.
Kevin
