Visual Studio Report Designer vs. BIDS (business intelligence development studio)

  • What are the different between Report Designer(Visual Studio) vs. BIDS (business intelligence development studio)?

    When should one be used than another?

    This is not about "report builder"

    Thanks,

  • They are very similar with the following exceptions:

    -VS Report designer does not include a preview mode and it saves files with a different extension, rdlc.

  • In this case, there is no reason to use VS for report. Is that true?

    Thanks!

  • Seattlemsp (6/11/2012)


    In this case, there is no reason to use VS for report. Is that true?

    Thanks!

    Correct.

    In fact, aside from the lack of a preview feature and the different file extension, a lot of times when you develop reports in VS you'll get strange errors if you try to open them later in BIDS - or worse, when you try to deploy them to your Report Server. At least, this has been my experience with 2005 and 2008.

    Best to just use the right tool from the start.

  • Scott Murray-240410 (6/11/2012)


    They are very similar with the following exceptions:

    -VS Report designer does not include a preview mode and it saves files with a different extension, rdlc.

    As I understand it, RDLC is somewhat similar in functionality to the Crystal Reports plugin in VS. As in - it allows you to embed reprot functionality and generation directly into a *local* application. As in - you can push the report generation aspect to the local machine rather than using the "remote mode" (which executes and renders the report on the SSRS instance attached to this DB).

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?

  • Great to understand those two different tools more.

    Thanks a lot!

  • I thought that BIDS was basically opening VS with the SSRS Templates as a default project/solution type? We have a user now that has Visual Studio but does not have SSRS report project available ... it only has the VS report. Is it possible to have the regular version of VS use the same report project that is automatically available in BIDS?

  • ELLEN-610393 (6/22/2012)


    I thought that BIDS was basically opening VS with the SSRS Templates as a default project/solution type? We have a user now that has Visual Studio but does not have SSRS report project available ... it only has the VS report. Is it possible to have the regular version of VS use the same report project that is automatically available in BIDS?

    I would recommend installing BIDS; as mentioned already, even if you get SSRS projects working in VS the results aren't always ideal.

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