Microsoft plans to release significantly updated and improved versions of both the Winforms and ASP.NET Report Viewer controls in Visual Studio 2010. This is going to include the long awaited local mode support for the new report processing engine, originally released with SQL Server Reporting Services 2008. Most importantly, this provides RDL 2008 features (e.g. tablix, enhanced charts, gauge, rich text) in local mode without connection to a report server. If you wanted to use RDL 2008 features with the report viewer controls available before, server mode was your only viable option, because report processing is performed remotely on a Reporting Services 2008 server.
Below are some of the other new features or changes who are coming as well.
- Support for the 2008 RDL schema in local mode. This will give you all of the new features available in RDL in SQL Server 2008, including tablix, rich text, updated chart visualizations, gauge, and many others. The updated report design surface for local mode will also be included.
- Support for ASP.Net AJAX. The report viewer will use AJAX to update its various regions (report, toolbar, etc). You will also allow be able to include the entire ReportViewer control in an UpdatePanel.
- Updated API. A number of new events and methods to help are added, including a new JavaScript API for interacting with the ReportViewer in the browser.
- Significantly improved browser compatibility. A huge amount of effort is put into improving support across browsers.
- Usability and “look and feel” enhancements. The viewer got a minor facelift.