Daily Archives: March 17, 2008

Crystal REports 2008 Service Pack provides integration with VS2008

Just Rambling

In my article, What Visual Studio Developer Should Know about Crystal Reports 2008, for ASPAlliance, I pointed out the fact that CR2008 integrates with VS2003 and VS2005 but NOT VS2008 and that this would be eventually be rectified with a Service Pack.

Thanks to Guy Barrette’s blog post “Will the real Crystal Reports 2008 stand up?“, (and because I still can’t figure out how to subscribe to the Crystal Reports team blog), I learned that the service pack that fixes this is out.

The Crystal Report’s blog post about the service pack [Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 0] details the changes. Those related to Flash integration and Business Objects Enterprise connectivity aren’t of interest to me, per se, but the VS2008 integration definitely is. It also says that CR2008 now runs on Windows 64 bit O/S.

The blog also points out that “It is also now available through the Update Service.  Use Help > Check for Updates within Crystal Reports 2008 to update your version. “ but since my 30 day trial ran out I didn’t realize this. Now it’s time for me to see if the other showstopper problem for me has been resolved.

I’ll report back.

EF & LINQ to SQL queries against spatial data (not SQL Server 2008 though)

Data Access

[thanks to Roger Jennings for the correction about spatial data]

Samir Bajaj, a developer on the Entity Framework team has begun his blog with a bang.

He describes a sample application (available on MSDN Code Gallery) that can switch  between LINQ to SQL or ENtity Framework, highlighting the differences between the two.

The application targets an business case that he is very familiar with  – searching  a database filled with drawings which are based on a collection of shapes. Samir has a background working for a CAD company and explains that it is a common task to search for drawings that contain particular shapes.

Thanks to SQL Server 2008’s new spatial data, this gets really interesting.

Added: While SQL Server 2008’s spatial data may have been an inspiration, it will not be not supported by LINQ to SQL or EF in the near future, so Samir is using his own techniques with SQL Server 2005.

Check out his blog post and then the app, called Sketchpad (requires SQL Server 2008 CTP)