Someone tuned me into the Visual Studio ReportViewer control that I could use to create reports against plain .NET classes. At first I didn't take it seriously. I mean, yeah right. When was the last time you saw a robust reporting engine that worked against something more than a DataTable or DataSet. I mean.... I've even seen reporting engines that worked against arrays of values. But this....I've been waiting for it for a while. And I'm glad to say that it is finally available! REAL reports against plain old objects. Any class in .NET. You can report against it, write aggregation summaries, custom descend expressions into child objects, even charts and graphs! And the best thing is that it is all FREE with Visual Studio. Hell yeah!

Here's a video of me creating my first report.

Under the covers, it's all using the data binding framework that I'm already deeply in love with. Now they just extended it with an acceptable layout engine and some expression evaluations. How could it get any better? The reporting engine uses .rdlc files, so these files can probably be stored outside of your application. Eventually someone will write a desktop app to allow users to customize these little guys and we'll have user-defined reporting. Oh, and it works as well in web-based environments as in windows ones.

OMG. I thought I had lost it long ago. Oh, what am I talking about??? My EMPEG! I thought the hard drives had died a long time ago. So I started taking it appart and got to the point where I had to figure out which hard drive had died. What do you know? They both worked great. So I put them back in, and everything powered up and it started playing music again! It's WONDERFUL.

My Car stereo runs Linux....again.

Too bad it dosn't fit in my current set of wheels. Time to go get a new car!