Dev team wanting to use ActiveReports over SQL Reporting Services

March 25 2012

I thought I would share an email thread I received from the RD (Microsoft Regional Director) Alias as some of you reading this blog may have the same type of question…

Question:

“I have a client where I have recommended SQL RS. They have some guys from their dev team wanting to use ActiveReports over SQL Reporting Services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveReports . It is a windows forms app and so I told them they should use SQL RS’s .RDLC . But they really are pushing for ActiveReports since they used it previously. I don’t know ActiveReports, so don’t know the pro’s and con’s?”

Answer from GrapeCity Program Managers, James Johnson and Jon Smith:

“We know many developers using ActiveReports love the event driven model and flexible API. Like Reporting Services, ActiveReports does integrate with Visual Studio and offers an intuitive design time experience for developers. Strengths we can see as beneficial over RS, would be that ActiveReports makes it very easy to generate report layouts at runtime, the ability to bind to various data sources out of the box, such as SQL Server, Oracle, ADO.NET DataSets, DataReaders, DataTables, as well as the Entity Framework among others, and its ability to be hosted in multiple platforms ranging from Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and Silverlight, to Windows Services and Azure.

We have a testimonial from a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, posted here: http://activereportsbuzz.blogspot.com/2010/09/scouts-activereports-testimonial.html

In addition to our data source support; it is probably good to contrast that with RDLC which only supports binding to in-memory objects, you cannot have the report store a query and use that. This adds more coupling of the report to the application and may not be something the developers want to go through.

Other contrasting features:

There isn't a Silverlight viewer for SSRS and if you want one you either need to write your own or buy a third party component.
There are also significant licensing differences as well, with ActiveReports having a developer license vs CAL’s for SQL Server. “

Technorati Tags: sql rs ssrs,activereprots,sql reporting services,vs,Visual Studio,datatables,Oracle,entity framework,azure,microsoft,licenses

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