I spent the last week in Colorado and took advantage of the airplane time to explore SQL Server Reporting Services. I'm very impressed.
To make the most of my experimentation time, I picked up a book by Brian Larson entitled SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services published by Osborne -- I chose his book because he worked on the development of the product and the other Reporting Services book they had in stock was a Wrox (now Wiley) book and I've been burned by some of the old Wrox titles in the past (a lot of fluff and pages and pages of needless source code, etc). Anyway, Larson's book is a very gentle treatment of the subject and it makes no assumptions about the readers' programming ability. Sometimes books like that bug me, but this time I didn't mind because I was just skimming through it and I found I could breeze through a chapter in about 15 minutes a pop. I'm sure I'll outgrow Larson's book (I almost have already, in fact!), but it got me up and running very quickly with the product and that's hard to put a price on.
After 2 hours of messing with it and digesting a considerable chunk of the book I was officially impressed with the Report Services product and had nearly forgotten what Crystal Reports was all about. I've played with some charting and graphing controls in my day, like those from Infragistics (which is a pretty good product), but I found the integrated report environment of Reporting Services to be overwhelmingly easy and cool to work with -- the best reporting “toolset“ I've found. I know my customers will be awestruck by the 3D rendering! Granted, I can't do all the bit-twiddling customizations that I could do with a graphing control that I had written myself, but I haven't delved deeply into the Report Services product yet and just maybe I'll find that I can customize to my hearts content!
Even if Report Services isn't as extensible as I hope, it's still a great method for creating powerful and dynamic reports. If it turns out to be quite extensible (and I'll let you know what I find), Report Services could become an essential part of the business applications I build. If it isn't extensible, then it's still pretty darn cool and warrants consideration for analysis of your data. Assuming the client has invested already in windows web servers and SQL Server 2000, it's a no-brainer!
I already slightly cringe whenever I hear a customer say they're running a database other than SQL Server -- now I have another reason to back my instincts up. As I've said before, when SQL Server 2005 comes out the divide between SQL Server and “the others“ will widen much further!
In closing, let me say that I really appreciate the PDF Export option in Reporting Services. I've been part of a few PDF generation efforts and used a few intermediary libraries (like PDFLib and some of the higher priced ones) and writing your own implementation of the PostScript generator (or however Microsoft went about it) is not easy at all. In Reporting Services, the PDF generation works seamlessly and vividly recreates the reports originally rendered as HTML and graphics.
Now, I haven't tried to deploy any reports to a production environment yet, so my rosey tune may change in the weeks to come. I'll be doing some test deployments in the next few weeks, so I'll keep you posted.