Datasheet

A Brief History
In the beginning, a small company in Vancouver called Crystal Services developed a DOS-based report-
ing add-on for ACCPAC accounting in 1988. A few years later, in 1992, the company released Crystal
Reports, touting it as the “world’s first Windows report writer,” and it wasn’t too long after that
Microsoft standardized Crystal Reports as the reporting engine for Visual Basic. The rest is history.
Within a year of that historic partnership between Crystal Services and Microsoft, over a million licenses
of Crystal Reports were shipped, giving it a foothold within the developer community and ensuring its
long-term success. Since that time, Crystal Reports has evolved alongside the available platforms and
development tools, moving from floppy distribution to CDs, from 16- to 32-bit, and from a
.dll print
engine to ActiveX control to embedded designer to Automation Engine to .NET Classes.
Over the years, through the transition of the company from Crystal Services to Seagate Software to
Business Objects, the user interface for creating reports hasn’t changed much; the basic features are still
the same, even though the look and feel of the icons and menu bars may change depending on the UI
design standards of the day. What have really changed over the years and releases of Crystal Reports are
the functions and features that have been developed, culminating in a product that can easily hold its
own with just about every other report writer on the market. To have a look at some of those features,
we are going to delve into exactly what you can do with Crystal Reports .NET.
What Can You Do with Crystal Reports .NET?
To start with, Crystal Reports .NET includes an integrated Report Designer available within the Visual
Studio IDE (shown in Figure 1-2) that you can use to create report files (
.rpt) to integrate with your
application.
Figure 1-2
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Crystal Reports .NET Overview
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