Update - the 'Legal Stuff' section has been updated to describe the simplified EULA process.
Update - the runtime blog is Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 Runtimes.
Update - licensing blog is Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 Licensing.
Update - the Beta is Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 Beta Now Available.
June 21 Updated the dates.
Dates
The beta release has slipped a couple of weeks and we now plan to release it April 16th. In addition, we're scheduling the production release for the first half of November.
Legal Stuff
An additional clickthrough EULA is required for this beta release. This is in addition to the EULA built into the installer. No personal information is required - it's a simple accept/reject EULA. Once the software is in production, only the standard EULA built into the installer will be used.
Runtime Engine for the Beta
While the beta will not include a runtime engine, we will be documenting how to use the freely downloadable CR 2008 SP2 MSI and ClickOnce runtime in combination with CR for VS 2010 reports. We are testing this scenario with our beta release process right now. These are 32-bit runtimes only. Both 32 and 64-bit runtimes are in plan for the production release.
Whats New In The Beta Release Compared to CR Basic for Visual Studio 2008
The following new features will be in the beta release, and will be supported in the CR 2008 SP2 MSI runtime:
- Optional parameters. Parameters are no longer required to have a value. If you reference an optional parameters in a formula, you must check that it has a value first with the new HasValue() formula.
- Parameter Panel. The runtime engine supports a parameter panel on the left-hand side. You can optionally place parameters on the panel.
- Saved data selection filters. We've always been able to filter data with the record selection filter. This is used at the time that data is fetched. We've introduced a new saved data selection filter that will allow you to filter the data after its been fetched. This is very powerful when combined with the parameter panel, because it allows for filter of data in the report without triggering a data refresh.
- Sort controls. You can now create sort controls that sort the data in the report, again without triggering a data refresh.
- Dynamic and cascading parameters. You can now populate a list of values dynamically from a data source. You can create a multi-level cascade of list of values as well.
- Combine landscape and portrait pages in a report. Individual sections can have different page orientation settings.
- Size pages by pixels.
- Formula driven margin settings for the entire report.
- 'Clamp' page footers. If you have a report page with only a few detail records on it, this feature will 'pull up' the page footer so it's right underneath the last detail record, making the report easier to read online.
- Hierarchical grouping. If you have a tree like record structure in your database, you can now create a group structure in Crystal Reports that mimics that structure.
Whats Different Compared to CR Basic for VS 2008
The major difference, other than the initial beta limitations is that there will be no merge module (MSM) runtime available with CR for VS 2010. The biggest reason for this is the complexity in embedding the VC runtime into our MSM. It no longer became feasible for us to embed the VC runtime into our MSM (we can do it for our MSI runtime), so that put the responsibility of embedding that dependency on the developer. This led to a lot of complexity at deployment time on the part of the developer. We're adding new features to our MSI runtime to allow it to do much of what the MSM could do. I'll blog more about this in the future.
Whats Planned for the Production Release
.NET 4.0 Framework support for the runtime engineWindows 7 certification64 bit runtime engineWPF ViewerAPI improvements for RDC customersFuture Blogs
We'll be going into more detail on these powerful new features and how to make the most of them in the coming weeks.
Thanks for reading and for using Crystal Reports!
