SQL Server Reporting Services is the customizable reporting solution for report designers and programmers. This hands-on guide will get you up to speed quickly so you can design, deploy, manage, and even customize reporting solutions. You can create powerful reports without programming knowledge and extend reporting solutions using VB, C#, and ASP.NET.

Packed with detailed examples of building reports, designing report solutions, and developing deployment strategies for interacting with various platforms, this book prepares you to take full advantage of this revolutionary tool. Plus, you'll learn how to extend practically every feature of Reporting Services by implementing your own security architecture or adding custom data access.

What you will learn from this book

• Details of programming reports and report scripting
• Advanced report design, including drill-down reports, nested lists, drill-through, links, and dynamic content
• High-level strategies for business and support systems
• Rendering reports using .NET code, .NET IO namespace classes, and URL rendering deployment strategies to handle hardware, software, and platform considerations, licensing issues, and scaling options
• How to design reports for mobile services
• Various tools used to define data sources and semantic metadata models
• How to use parameters and expressions to define creative report solutions
• Advanced object-oriented programming techniques, with examples in C# and VB 2005.

Who this book is for

This book is for report designers, developers, administrators, and business professionals interested in learning the advanced functionality, report server administration, and security issues of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

• What Can You Do with Reporting Services?
• Introduction to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services 2005
• Reporting Services Architecture
• Basic Report Design
• Designing Data Access
• Advanced Report Design
• Report Solution Patterns and Recipes
• Reporting Services Report Models
• Report Builder
• Report Management
• Report Server Administration
• Integrating Reporting Services into Custom Applications
• Extending Reporting Services
• Appendix A: Migrating Access Reports
• Appendix B: Reporting Services Object Model
• Appendix C: Transact SQL Command Syntax Reference
• Appendix D: Transact SQL System Variables and Functions