Reading this book, you will not learn Tufte’s art of displaying quantitative information [1], but you will gain a basic knowledge of Microsoft’s drag-and-drop approach to quickly build a simple and standardized representation of your data with the help of Reporting Services, Microsoft’s latest technology for the developer’s toolset.

The book begins with an introduction on the architecture of Reporting Services, outlining the differences between server-side and client-side components. Although the book focuses on client-side reports, it includes a chapter on how to design, deploy, and interact with server-side reports as well. All the projects presented in the book share a common approach to designing a report in Visual Studio, and can be summarized in three steps: design the report layout, connect to the report’s data source, and bind the data to the report. The most common layouts, used in everyday reports, are sampled throughout the book: form/page, tabular details, multicolumn, grouped data, matrix/pivot table, chart/graph, and drill through.

Two chapters cover the building blocks of reporting with Visual Studio: the report designer, and the various report controls, including the ReportViewer (the control used to display and interact with a report in Windows Forms and ASP.NET Web Forms applications), datasets, and the ADO.NET data access technology. Instead of using the ubiquitous Microsoft Northwind SQL Server sample database as a data source for the examples, Sayed provides his own RealWorld database, available at the publisher’s Web site with the source code of the book. The reader should download and install the database in order to use the source code, and follow and enhance the examples provided.

After the introductory chapters, Sayed analyzes the various report layouts introduced by applying them to simple working reports, implemented using the types of applications supported by Reporting Services: Windows Forms, ASP.NET Web Forms, Web services, console applications, Windows services, and Web parts. There is a chapter for each application type, with a brief introduction on how the application works and a few projects that build a report with the “three steps” rule.

While the data source for all the examples is a SQL Server database, a separate chapter covers other kinds of data sources that Reporting Services supports, such as Extensible Markup Language (XML), Microsoft Access, and Oracle.

Readers with no experience in Business Objects’ Crystal Reports might find the chapter on a side-by-side comparison of Reporting Services and Crystal Reports of interest, this being the best known tool used to create reports (it is shipped with Visual Studio). At least for simple projects, Reporting Services seems to be the simpler and quicker of the two.

At the time this book was published, Visual Studio was in its 2008 beta cycle. The book includes two chapters on using this beta version of the integrated development environment (IDE) on the most common application types: Windows Forms and ASP.NET Web Forms.

The book ends with an appendix on Visual Studio.

Sayed uses a step-by-step approach in all of the projects presented, with numerous screen shots to guide the reader, making this book a perfect tutorial for beginners with a basic knowledge of Visual Studio, SQL, and C#.