I installed Reporting Services today... The media part of the install is a slightly confusing, because one setup app is used to install the clients for Visual Studio AND the server components for SQL Server 2003. When I installed the server components, it barked at me for not having Visual Studio on my server machine. I ended up not having to install it there, but this wasn't entirely clear from the setup. Of course, I never read the readme doc, so I'd imagine this is all covered there. The architecture seems pretty cool. It looks to be very scalable, by putting bits and pieces on different servers.
Once the server was up, I installed the clients on my dev machine, and quickly created and published a report to the report server. It's very straightforward, and intuitive to use. Especially if you've had any experience with Crustal. I was able to get to the reports, schedule them to run, and notify me by email when they finished, ala Crustal Enterprise.
What I expected to find, but didn't, was a way for me to bring a report into an existing web project. I thought I'd see a user control to allow me to pop my report onto an web form. I also expected a way to use the report without having to publish it to the reports sever. I'm not done looking, but if there is such a thing, it's not entirely obvious where it is or how to use it... Am I thinking about this thing the wrong way? Am I missing something?
Brendan