>>>>>What do you know about this issue of .rdlc reports versus .rdl reports? I am confused about whether I can just create these local .rdlc reports and then upload them to the hosting site along with the rest of my app files and if they will then work when a user hits the site? I'm confused about this whole notion of Report Server and SSRS that I keep seeing.
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>>>>The ReportViewer control in Visual Studio creates RDLC files under the hood in your website. ASP.NET and SQL Server 2005+ will generate reports on your website w/o needing Reporting Services (SSRS) installed on the SQL Server. Almost everything I do is done using the ReportViewer control.
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>>>>If you want users/administrators/etc to be able to create new report templates (RDL files) w/o using Visual Studio, then you need SSRS installed (this creates its' own website for reporting). This allows a fair amount of ad hoc reporting for the users, and has a pretty good rights model so users can't screw everything up w/o working at it.
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>>>>If you want to build reports for your website, use the ReportViewer control and build them (RDLC files). You have full control over the report, and at the same time it has built-in capabilities for grouping, expand/collapse, export to PDF/Excel, etc. VERY nice!
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>>>>RDL and RDLC are just the file extensions - you don't need to worry about them because VS or SSRS will create them for you.
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>>>Wow! This is great news!! It sure was looking complicated there for a while but you have brought me a great sigh of relief by telling me about this.
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>>>Now I will try to deploy a simple report to the hosting company and see if I can make it work.
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>>>Another question... Say I get it working and the user is viewing a report, and they want to save it to a PDF or Word Doc on their local hard drive. Can they do that from within the report viewer? Or do I have to add features on my aspx page to handle that?
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>>They can save to PDF or Excel (nicely formatted) directly from the reportviewer. Word would require a third party control I assume (never had to do it - we always use PDF)..
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>Do your DataSets come from a .xsd or have you ever worked with untyped datasets, like the kind you can pull form a LinqToSql?

I use the XSD datasets. I'm not going to play with LinqToSQL since it may or may not be a dead end depending on who you talk to. Datasets work.