Fellow blogger Jay Kimble has been writing about his experiences with reporting services.

I however, have not had a positive experience so far with reporting services, and so this weekend I decided to install and run the trial version of Active Reports .NET.

To be fair, I followed the same process that I used for SQL reporting services which is follows:

1. Installation
2. Integration into Visual Studio
3. Simple report with grouping/subtotals
4. Display of report on a webpage

Installation

SQL Reporting Services installation is a god awful mess.  You have multiple reboots, very strict “clean install” requirements, and it tends to bomb for alot of people.  Now any installation program that has these problems, and seeks to modify my very stable sql server and IIS setups makes me very very nervous.  My install also got hosed because I don't run my development IIS on port 80 so it created it's own default website with virtual directories and I had to manually move these over to the “real” workspace.

Active Reports .NET on the other hand installed perfectly.  The msi was easy and fast.  It had no problems with my non port 80 IIS install and it doesn't modify my sql server.

Advantage: Active Reports

Integration With Visual Studio

Both of these products integrate with visual studio.  They both require you to register the .dll in the toolbox to get the web view control, etc.  Both add their type of report as a project in the add new selection wizard.  No problems here, nothing unexpected.

Advantage: Tie

Simple report with grouping/subtotals

Report design is pretty similar between the different tools out there.  At first glance, it's equally easy to dive into either of these two designers.  However, the Active Reports toolbox items are a little more robust than the Reporting Services ones.  Consequently, I found that the look and feel I generated in the Active Reports report was better faster than the one I built in Reporting Services.  I read no documentation for either product, I have to say that Active Reports was more intuitive.

Advantage: Active Reports

Display of report in a webpage

This is where the biggest differences showed up.  SQL reporting services is tightly integrated with sql server.  When you want to show a sql reporting services report on a webpage, you have to drop the viewer control on the form, then manually enter the location/path information etc for the report.  I found the pathing to be set up very strangely, and failed several times on build before I got it right.  Not very intuitive at all.

In contrast, active report files belong to your project, not to sql server.  I created a folder in the project called reports and built my report file in there.  Then on a webform I dropped the view control in and was able to select the report I created from a dropdown.  I fired up the page with no code and it displayed just fine.  After my reporting services experience this was a breath of fresh air!

Advantage: Active Reports

Conclusion

So far, it seems that Active Reports .NET is the superior product.  For those of you that are cost sensitive, you'll probably want to try out the free SQL Reporting services.  Active Reports .NET Pro does cost ~$1,300 per developer (there is no royalty distribution fee unlike crystal which is good).  Active Reports also lets me change my datasource at runtime which solves a major problem for my business

Granted I've only spent about 8 hours with each product, I will be spending more time with both going forward and probably post some additional experiences.  The newbie experience heavily favors Active Reports though.  You can find the trial version at http://www.datadynamics.com .