Customer Reviews

Pro VS 2005 Reporting using SQL Server and Crystal Reports (Expert's Voice in .NET)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I greatly anticipated the release of any new book with Visual Studio 2005 and Crystal Reports. I had to do much of my Crystal Reports development by looking on the internet and a lot of it is for VS 2003.

But I'm a Visual Basic Developer - so I guess either I learn C# or wait for a book that teaches both.

Nothing on the cover says that it is a C# ONLY book. And there was no option to look inside the book - I went on sheer faith...

The book does have a lot of good reading about report technology and a design model to follow when creating reports.

NOW you can read this review if you are a VB developer like myself. And a word of advise - Just Learn C# too. :)

A great help because I originally bought the book for Crystal Report help. Now, my office is switching to Reporting Services and it's been a great guide.

I am a VB developer who doesn't do very large-scale applications, but I have found the real-world solutions that are in this book to be a great help. It has a rare blend of coding, architecture, SQL, and reporting examples that is hard to find in books these days. I have applied many techniques discussed in this book in my day to day activities. Kevin has also made himself very available on different internet forums to help discuss topics discussed in the book.

Kevin is an author that I trust to provide great, helpful information and I look forward to future publications.

Programmers debate endlessly certain topics object oriented design, service oriented architecture, Java vs. .NET, C# vs. VB .NET, IE 7, etc...But a topic that never comes up that should is reporting. As Kevin points out there is more to writing a report than just the time in the designer. So this book fills a very important niche to help make programmers developers and not just code monkeys.

The book starts with some nice pointers to gather the requirements for a report and then it transitions into a pleasant introduction into T-SQL for gathering the data for the reports. Then a large portion of the book goes into some of the infrastructure options going into generating reports, typed data sets vs. un-typed data sets, web services, and remoting. The chapters on Crystal reports are very thorough and leave the reader with a very solid foundation. There is even a chapter that goes into SQL Reporting Services. The book ends with chapters on how to integrate the reporting tool into an application and how to deploy it to clients. There is even a framework with some very nice productivity classes for .NET and Crystal Reports that can be downloaded as part of the code for the book.

If you develop reports or are just getting into developing reports (lots of programmers have to at some point) this is an excellent book to pick up.

Perhaps some more advanced users will find it helpful. It was not helpful to me because it contains one big example. There are several drawbacks to this approach. Among them are that the explanations all relate to the example and are therefore incomplete. Another drawback is you are stuck reading the book from beginning to end pretty much.

I keep trying to use the book, but it is inadequate for my needs, even after reading it cover-to-cover. I recently tried to find information on Section Expert. This important element of VS Crystal Reports does not occur in the contents or index of the book. The one contents listing for sections explains how to use Section Expert for the example case. This left out a description of more than half of the options available.

The book is obtuse in that it is a cascade of information without an overarching vision. It's not until page 169 that it presents a diagram that shows a system overview. The rest is a lot of details: point here, click there, without a clear explanation of the mission.

WHY am I creating Strongly Type Datasets, what are the alternatives and where in the whole process does this fit in? There is no explanation of the .Designer.cs file that Visual Studio generates. It seems that is essential for populating the report, as it is the report object.

You can't jump in anywhere, as it presents an entire system from the ground up. And it starts at the bottom in the stored procedures in the database and slogs through to the reporting, when it would have benefited greatly from some simpler complete examples, or even the same one, slimmed down to one chapter and then expanded throughout the book.

It also inexplicably devotes chapters to other report engines, when the title contains "Crystal Reports". And it discusses advanced techniques before it has covered all of the basics.

It also, like many, many other computer texts, makes no allowance for maintenance projects. It assumes you are starting out from scratch. Great if you've got that kind of job, but they are extremely rare. More typical is coming into a project or system that has already been build and being asked to maintain or enhance it. This book is worthless for that since it lacks:
1) A roadmap or overview of the possible technologies
2) Reference material or a way to skip around to what you need.

If you are looking for a purely academic book, that you can read in the course of a semester and learn things just one way, this is it.

Kevin and Ron have hit it out of the park with this book. Anyone looking for a step by step guide to building an application using the latest technology from Microsoft will do well to own this book. The clear explanations of the different topics covered make this a joy to read. I am looking forward to more by this dynamic duo. Thanks APress for another great book.