Reporting services from MS are there.
From the presentation I saw it seems to cover a lot of ground. So it'll be a direct competitor to Crystal Reports.
Perhaps it's not as good as CR, yet, but it's free. The tools needed to develop with it will come with .Net.
So the big picture is this. New reporting tool from a major corporation and it's FREE,
How long before CR is tossed aside by developers? Like we saw in the past it's close to impossible to compete with free products. Remember when Netscape was on top of the browser game. Then came FREE Explorer. The rest is history.
I never used CR so I know that I'll never use it and concentrate on Reporting Services no matter what you tell me. Why am I so stubborn?
1) New interesting tool by MS. Whatever development tools released by MS is almost guaranteed to be used by a majority of developers, companies...
2) FREE
Once again there's a sad thing here. VFP developers won't be able to use the tools in the VFP environment. Another insult but we're used to those by now.
Perhaps in a future version there could be tools so that VFP developers can also work with the Reporting Services. I just hope here that I'm completely wrong and that we, VFP developers, will be able to have access to those Reporting Services.
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Save a tree, eat a beaver.
Denis Chassé