Thursday, September 13, 2007

Telerik Reporting getting major updates, new features in Q2

While a lot has been said lately about the RadControls for ASP.NET and WinForms coming in Q2, little has been mentioned about the forth coming updates to Telerik Reporting. If you recall, Telerik Reporting was originally introduced to the world in the Q1 2007 release, so it is still a very young product. When version 1 released, the foundations for a great reporting product were established, but many tasks were still much harder to do than necessary. Our developers recognized these problems and have been working hard to make version 1.5 in Q2 a big step forward. And when you look at the list of features they're delivering, I think you'll agree they have succeeded:

  • New integrated expression builder
  • New filters with helpful presets (like 'show top X clients by sales')
  • Support for conditional formatting
  • Built-in support for report parameters (finally!)
  • New integrated "New Report" wizard
Those features on their own would be huge (I'm especially happy to have parameter support and a report wizard), but the developers have gone a step further. In addition to all of these new major features (and obvious bug/performance improvements), they are also shipping two report converters in Q2!

With Telerik Reporting 1.5, you'll be able to automatically convert existing Active Reports and Crystal Reports to Telerik Reports directly from the "New Report" wizard in Visual Studio. And even though you'll need the latest version of those two report formats to use the converters when this ships, it is definitely a good sign of things to come.

If you looked at Reporting at Q1 and were turned-off by some of the missing features, definitely take some time to look again in Q2. The Reporting team is doing a great job of establishing Telerik Reporting as a first class reporting product and I can't wait to see what they'll manage to deliver in version 2. For now, start counting down the days- Telerik Reporting 1.5 ships early next week with the rest of the RadControls.

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