Hi Eman,

I'm glad my post helped.

The bidirectional conversion of reports between the Visual Studio Report Designer and Standalone Report Designer is available for years and the process is described in How to import reports created with the VS Report Designer and How to import reports created with Standalone Report Designer. Reports made with Visual Studio can be imported in the new Standalone Report Designer for .NET and we do not plan to change this - quite the opposite, we have plans to improve the import process. In fact, we've always suggested to use the Standalone Report Designer for report authoring, because of its declarative report definitions which are framework-agnostic. True, the Standalone Report Designer by design does not have event handlers and does not support custom code, but in almost all cases these limitations can be mitigated.

So, to confirm - our plans are to preserve the importing logic from and to Visual Studio Report Designer. You will be able to import your type definition reports from a .dll into Standalone Report Designer for .NET, and you'll be able to import them back to Visual Studio Report Designer for .NET, when it's available. Naturally, all the restrictions imposed by the import process will still be applied. As for the process itself - it's handled by the convenient Wizards in both Standalone Report Designer Open File dialog and Visual Studio Import Wizard, and takes just a few clicks to complete, so I'd say it's far from complex.

Regards,

Ivan Hristov

Hi all,

My name is Ivan Hristov – engineering manager in Telerik Reporting. I would like to share with you what is the current state of the Visual Studio Report Designer for .NET Core and why we did not manage to release it as planned. But first, please take a look at the GIF below:

This is a Telerik Report Designer running in Visual Studio in a project targeting .NET 6. As you can see, there are lots of things working – design surface with rulers and toolstrip, Properties tool window, complex expandable editors for collection objects, and more. Selecting, moving, and resizing the report items is also implemented. We were convinced we are moving in the right direction until we found out that some of the major architectural decisions we made at an earlier stage, were not fully compatible with the new Visual Studio WinForms designer, resulting in poor design time experience and performance issues.

Naturally, we changed our approach to solve these problems, however the Visual Studio WinForms designer for .NET Core is brand new and while Microsoft had done a great job with it, at this point of time it seems that its capabilities are not yet on par with the full framework designer, especially for the complex integration that Telerik Reporting has with it.

The good news is that the awesome team at Microsoft was already planning to introduce support the integration that we rely on, and we’re currently closely collaborating with them, trying to find a resolution.

However, we did not stop there as we wanted to still be able to allow our clients create reports, using their .NET Core business layer. Therefore, we managed to rebuild the Standalone Report Designer targeting .NET 6. Although it still has some limitations, which we will address in future releases, this approach can be used in the interim to create reports. We also will soon share resources on how this Standalone Report Designer can be used as a workaround to edit existing compiled reports for that people that have urgent need to do that and cannot wait for the Visual Studio Report Designer to come to life.

With this rather long post, I hope I managed to explain what problems we stumbled upon while implementing the Visual Studio .NET Core Report Designer and how we tried to solve them. We understand how important it is to you and we’ll continue working on delivering a fully-featured and reliable Visual Studio report designer. We will make sure to send updates in this thread as we have them.

On behalf of the whole Reporting team, I would like to thank you for your patience and understanding. As always, you are more than welcome to share your thoughts and we’ll be happy to answer.

Hi Adrian,

Our engineering team members are putting their hearts into this feature and I am confident we will have the core functionality released in mid-September. What will be most probably missing are more or fewer popup editors as each one of these requires explicit wiring and its development time accordingly. You would be able to use the Property grid toolbox instead for most of the functionality.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

Hello Ade,

Thank you for sharing your feedback with us.

Here you can find some articles that are related to connecting to Entity DataSource:

- Connecting to an Entity Data Model with the EntityDataSource component

- Use Telerik Reporting in .Net Core with Entity Data Model

Regards,
Neli
Progress Telerik

Hi Aldo,

I agree that the VS designer coverage of .NET Core/5/6/7 projects is fundamental and gradually became a must along with the high .NET adoption. This is why we started R&D on this task back in the R2 2021 release cycle (~14 months ago) and committed to providing updates on the progress.

The technical reality is that the designer has a huge code base which we need to adapt to the new visual designer architecture that Microsoft introduced. We're continuing to refactor our design-time code, splitting it to fit that client-server architecture. This part of the process is the foundation of the design-time support and cannot be partially released. The main part of our development capacity is currently dedicated to this feature, which makes me believe we will be able to have it released in R3 2022. Even if not 100% functional, we will make sure to have the core functionality in place, while, for example, some specific editors might still not be available.

Meantime, we can try helping with the difficulties you experience implementing the proposed workaround with a parallel .NET Framework library. Others could have such as well. Let's help the community.

Our ultimate goal is to have the same seamless experience when you open your .NET Framework reports in the new .NET Core Visual Studio Designer, so no "porting" or "converting" would be necessary.

Thank you for understanding.

Milen

All,

Thank you for expressing your concerns about that feature. I completely understand your pain and want that implemented no less than you all. Still, I will have to announce that it is still not ready for release despite our efforts. Stay tuned to this thread as I will announce here our progress. We are targeting now the R3 release due in mid-September. Thank you for being our loyal customers. 

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

Hello Deepak and all,

It is the last thing I would like to announce, but the designer will not make it in the January release. We have solid development on that feature but we did not manage to implement all the editors and design surface functionality in the new VS designer paradigm. It just appeared the scope and complexity of the implementation exceeded our expectations. That said, it is still not ready to serve you, our users. I am rescheduling it for the mid-May release which I sincerely believe is an achievable milestone. Meantime please refer to this workaround to be able to edit CS reports and use them in your .NET Core 3+/.NET 5/.NET 5 projects. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regarding the particular question, Deepak, yes, the designer targets both VS versions 2019 and 2022.

Have a great year all of you,

Milen
Progress Telerik

Hello all,

It is our process for an item to go through Under Review -> Unplanned -> Planned. Apologies for the misunderstanding. Having in mind the technology trend and the votes for this feature it is one that we will put serious effort into to release in R3 2021.

Regards,
Milen
Progress Telerik

Hello all,

Our plans do include it for 2021. We will post an update once we have a more granular estimate.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik

We are keeping a close eye to the efforts of the .NET team that works on the Windows Forms designer on .NET Core. Yesterday they've introduced a preview version of the designer - it looks promising, but there are still lots of missing features. For example, containers, resources and component tray are not yet supported, and they are mandatory for our reports designer. We are sure that the subsequent versions of .NET Core Windows Forms designer will add the missing features, but its current state is just not fit for our needs. Please rest assured that we understand how important this designer is for our clients and as long as it is released with all the necessary components, we will do our best to include it in the next version of Telerik Reporting.

Regards,
Ivan Hristov
Progress Telerik

Hello Dmytro,

Currently, the .NET Core frameworks do not support the design time components we need for our Visual Studio Report Designer. Without these components we cannot provide a quality design-time experience. We believe that VS team will gradually fill the gaps between the .NET Framework and the .NET Core, publishing more and more designer classes. As soon as the necessary components become available we will make sure our designer is working when hosted in .NET Core and  .NET Standard projects.

Regards,
Todor
Progress Telerik