At the moment it's only possible to have your reports in old-fashioned projects.
It should be possible to add/design reports to SDK-style projects. That should work no matter what target framework is (.NET Core, .NET Standard or .NET Framework).
I just received the email for the R3 2023 Release Webinars for 18th Oct 2023.
It does not mention about the report designer in the highlights, so will it be released or are we looking at another delay to 2024?
Adrian
Also, since the last update, the --roll-forward LatestMajor workaround has stopped working.
Now, running the command Telerik.ReportDesigner.Net.exe --roll-forward LatestMajor we got always this error and we cannot open our reports to change them.
Regards
Aldo
Hi all,
I want to share with you the good news about the current state of our Visual Studio Report Designer for .NET projects. In my last post, I explained that our Report Designer relies on specific design-time functionality that is not yet supported by Visual Studio's WinForms designer. Technically speaking, using a custom implementation of the IRootDesigner interface was not possible, and this is exactly what we rely on to build the report design surface.
I'm glad to share that the people at Microsoft's WinForms team have worked on the missing pieces and provided us with a solution. A version of the demo is publicly available in the CustomRootDesigners demo, if you want to have a look. Using this approach, we were able to reuse a significant part of our designer-related code and produce a layout, which is the same as the one produced by our Visual Studio Report Designer for .NET Framework. As an example, here’s how our Swiss QR-bill example report looks like, rendered in the new Report Designer:
And now to the concerning part: at this moment, the possibility to have a custom IRootDesigner implementation is not yet included in Visual Studio’s WinForms Designer SDK. Currently, our code works against a custom branch of Microsoft’s code and we use Experimental instances of Visual Studio 2022 to make it run. Based on our communication with the MS WinForms Designer team, it seems unlikely to have the needed functionality merged and delivered in a Visual Studio 2022 update in time for our R1 2023 release.
Still, we can assure you that we continue the development of our new Visual Studio Report Designer, adding the missing parts and polishing the existing ones. We will use this thread to keep you updated about our progress because we understand the importance of the feature and know how eagerly anticipated it is.
Stay tuned for more good news!
Ivan Hristov
Hi, after we update our dll, used as object datasource in the standalone report designer (as suggested as workaround) to NET 7, we cannot use the report designer to configure (or change) the datasource.
It crash with this message
We tried to copy dlls into the report designer folder, together with our dll, but nothing works.
We attached the full exception message
Please don't tell us, now that we switch to standalone report designer all our reports to workaround the leak of VS2022 editor, that NET 7 isn't supported...
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.
All best,
Ivan Hristov
Reporting Team
