Things I mind about Reporting Services in SQL 2005

On the MVP summit we had a last day sessions (amongst others) about the new Reporting Services, and while I can’t tell you the details (don’t know what part is NDA and what is not) I can tell you that the guys are going in the right direction and really trying to fix some of the problematic things in the current version of Reporting Services.

On my way home I thought some more what I minded (=missed) about Reporting, so this blog post is an attempt to mention a couple of these things and hopefully someone from MS will read this.

Ok, so in no particular order:

1. Shared library within a reporting project - on each reporting project we have a number of repeating report functions, it would be great if we could write them in c# classes (and class files), reuse them accross all reports in the project and deploy them as a report solution or as a shared library which is linked to the deployed reports
   
2. Code editing - when editing code (functions, expressions, etc…) it would be nice to implement things like syntax highlighting, better intellisense (although that part is ok now mostly) so that in this day and age of modern IDE’s we can also use these features (althoguh every 5th level editor has these now)
   
3. Report localization - I work for a company which delivers multilingual solutions as well (often a Dutch company application also needs reports, UI and other things in Belgium for example or even plain English) - it would be nice if engine would support something like ASP.NET does

There are probably more things like these, but:

1. I can’t remember now
2. The guys from MS are really working hard and some of the big issues (for me) I’ve already seen as fixed

Cheers!