I had a very challenging time getting Telerik Reports to work with my business objects. I'm not the only one -- see this thread: http://www.telerik.com/forums/how-to-use-object-data-source-in-report-designer This could be improved by: 1. Don't make users manually edit <Telerik.Reporting>. Create a UI in the designer where DLL's can be manually selected. 2. If there are errors loading the DLL's in <Telerik.Reporting>, tell the user, rather than failing silently, which is the current behavior. Importing reports from DLL's has the same silent-failure behavior: if there's something not quite right about the DLL's (wrong architecture setting, for example), you just see "no reports to import" rather than the actual error (bad file format, or whatever). I think a little work on the user experience around custom business objects would make new users who want to use the stand alone report designer in this way much happier. I was really surprised and frustrated that a modern product would fail like this with no exposed error messages.