In what is becoming typical telerik announcement fanfare (or lack thereof), the first publicly available CTP of telerik reporting was released late last week. Telerik reporting marks telerik's entrance into a brand new product area, one filled with strong competitors like Business Object's Crystal Reports and ComponentOne's Reports for .NET. To the table telerik brings its reputation for making powerful and easy to use .NET components with outstanding support and a loyal community of developers likely to quickly embrace the new tool.
Since its announcement in June, reporting has been the one product that I am most looking forward to implementing in my projects. The CTP is definitely not ready for "prime time reporting" with its limited support of report element types and incomplete API, but it affirms that this product is coming along nicely and will likely be ready for production around the Q1 2007 r.a.d.controls release. When it's ready, telerik reporting should enable you to define reports with a visual designer that integrates into Visual Studio and display reports with included WebForms and WinForms report viewers. A number of export formats are planned too, including HTML, Word, Excel, PDF, and TIFF.
If you are eager to get your hands on the new product, you can download the first CTP and read all of the release notes here. The next CTP will be available in December and it will be followed by Beta 1 in January. I will post some screenshots of the November CTP later this week for those who don't want to download and play. If you are among the daring downloaders, what do you think of the tool so far?
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