Forum Discussion
HeinziAT
Nov 10, 2021Brass Contributor
What's the future of RDLC ("client-side SSRS", aka "ReportViewer")?
This is the information I could gather so far:
- Getting an RDLC renderer for .NET 5+ is currently the fourth highest-voted feature on the SQL Server user wishlist. Unfortunately, there are currently no plans to do that (see the comments here). There are some enthusiast ports/recompilations floating around on github and nuget, but they are not official.
- The SQL Server Reporting Services Team Blog is dead, the last entry is from 2018.
- There's a third-party company providing an RDLC renderer, but Microsoft acquired them in 2018. Nothing has been heard since.
- There is currently no ReportViewer designer for Visual Studio 2022. Getting one is currently the fourth highest-voted feature on the Visual Studio 2022 wishlist.
From a business perspective, I can totally understand that Microsoft is not giving this highly-loved feature the resources it needs. After all, they are basically giving away a great reporting engine for free, undermining their own SQL Server and Power BI sales. And they are not even hiding the fact that they'd rather have people purchase Power BI subscriptions, which is perfectly fine. They are a company, not a charity. Unfortunately, adding a dependency to a third-party cloud service is a no-go for many software development scenarios.
Thus, I would like to start a discussion on the following points:
- It seems to me that MS no longer wants people to use their RLDC reporting engine in new projects. Is this observation correct?
- If you have a large repository of RDLC reports in your project, what are your migration plans? Are there drop-in replacements from third parties?
- Would Microsoft consider open-sourcing the RLDC engine, so that the community can "keep the product alive" for legacy scenarios and prevent this from being a blocker in .NET 5+ migrations?
Best regards
Heinzi
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