I wrote this book from the perspective of a programmer wanting to learn how to integrate reports within a .NET application. I've been working with Crystal Reports since Visual Basic 3 and it's always been difficult to find technical information on report writing. I spent a year and a half researching what .NET programmers need to successfully create, implement and deploy a Crystal Reports application. I even put the book on the internet for everyone to read for free all of last year. This generated an incredible number of emails from programmers telling me what they liked, disliked, and what was missing from the book. I learned that there are two distinct types of .NET programmers using Crystal Reports. The first type of programmer doesn't have much experience with Crystal Reports and wants a series of tutorials to help them build reports from scratch. For this programmer I wrote 13 chapters which teach you everything about adding reports to ASP.NET and Windows applications. It starts with the basics of building reports to adding charts, crosstab reports, sorting and grouping, subreports and using the formula editor with Basic syntax and Crystal syntax. The second type of programmer has been using Crystal Reports for years and is mostly concerned with how to do technical runtime customization of reports. For this programmer I researched and diagrammed the undocumented report object models. I included dozens of examples in both VB.NET and C# to show you how to modify reports, manipulate different data sources (XML, ADO.NET, ODBC, OLE DB, stored procedures with parameters), modify formulas and report parameters, and integrate .NET with the RAS and RDC. The dozens of emails I received when the book was online were instrumental for doing a major revision of many chapters before publishing the book in hardcopy format. Since releasing the book I continue to receive more emails from people. They regret that the free book isn't online anymore, but understand that it couldn't last forever and that the hardcopy version is even better. I hope you like it and that it helps you achieve your reporting goals. September 2004 Update: Due to high demand, I did a second printing of the book. I took advantage of this opportunity to go through the book and remove all grammatical errors. The content is the same, but the typos have been corrected.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0
Very good reference book:
After finally managing to get hold of a copy of this book, I have to say that it has saved me a ton of time and energy. Within a few days I was able to create production reports using Visual Basic 2005 and Crystal Reports. The second half of the book was much more valuable to me than the first because it deals with programming reports directly through VB code. I did find the chapter on deploying reports is somewhat dated. I had to go to the SAP website to get up-to-date information on how to do this. This... more info
great book. terrible product.:
The book is outstanding. packed full of real time, practical info. Brian's online forum is the best. The problem is crystal reports itself. It repeatedly crashes my VS2005. Business Objects is selling an enterprise server product which delivers CR reports thru the browser. My guess is BO wants to discourage users from using asp.net to access their reports. As someone using CR for the last 6 weeks to design reports, I would much prefer to ditch the product and try other Windows reporting... more info
Not bad - not good, but good support!:
Like many other people I purchased Visual Studio 2005 and tried to use the bundled version of Crystal Reports but found the supplied and online documentation to be inadequate. I bought this book because the description references the bundled version of Crystal Reports and also that it covered both the declarative and programatic approaches to developing reports. Having read much of the book I find that all the examples and screen shots are from the stand-alone version of Crystal Reports with no attempt... more info
Crystal Reports [..]:
If you want to create professional looking reports using Crystal Reports, this is the book to read. It is easy to read, and examples are excellent for all programmers.
I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in using Crystal Reports to generate professional looking reports in a short period of time.
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