Oh my... I've gotten very far in building my first real Asp.Net WebForms app. It all works fine as a basic CRUD app. Now, it's time to start generating reports that my client wants. Uggh! It seems like a whole new boatload of crap I now have to learn.

It looks like one way to create a report in a .Net is using Sql Server Reporting Services and it appears that the report designer is integrated into Visual Studio. So, in Visual Studio I spent some time playing around with its Reporting project template by adding a new "Reporting" project to my solution. It immediately starts all this crap about creating a DataSource and then it wants to create DataSets. Since my app uses the "LinqToSql Business Object Wrapper" from the "Westwind Web Toolkit for Asp.Net" to do all the data access, I have no stinkin DataSource or DataSets in the app. So, just to play along, I let it create some of those horrible things and now I have this smelly .xsd file in my project with a few TableAdapters in it to match the tables from the SQL Server. Yuck! Anwyay, I finally got a report designer surface to show up in Visual Studio, and just to test it out, I dragged a field from a one of those DataSet/TableAdapter thingies onto the surface.

I kinda stopped right there. I'm really not wanting all this extra and redundant overhead in my project.

So, all you veterans, how does one best go about getting a few simple reports for his app? I need something the user can preview from the app, and send to his local printer. PDF would be great, but I'm not so sure just printing a HTML generated page would bo the right choice. I may also need it to be e-mailed to them, which I can handle sending the e-mail, as long as I am using a tool that generetes a file on the server that I cand send in the e-mail, then erase.

I plan on using DiscountASP.Net to host this app, so whatever I choose must be able to be hosted on their servers also.

Any help pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated.