If like me, you have a “can’t live with it, can’t live without it” relationship with Crystal Reports and have made a significant investment in reporting with their tools, you might be digging around the VS2010 RC looking for Crystal.

CR has been embedded into Visual Basic and Visual Studio for many versions. My experience goes back as far as Visual Basic 4, but in fact it started in 1993 with VB 2!

But it’s not in VS2010 RC. Well, kinda not in there.

Crystal Report is included in the project item templates:

But when you select it, something odd happens. Rather than a designer, you will get this window:

So it’s still available as a free extension to VS, just not built in. It’s odd that Crystal isn’t listed in the Extensions gallery that you can access through the VS2010 Extension Manager (on the Tools menu) or online at www.visualstudiogallery.com.

There’s an extensive blog post on the SAP website about Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010 which also lists new features, including a WPF report viewer.

I haven’t tried any of them out yet. What I’m most interested in is the design time experience with Entity Framework graphs. In VS2008, neither CR nor MS Reports recognizes navigation properties. A quick look at MS Reports (rdlc) in VS2010 suggests that this hasn’t changed. I’ll have to dig further at some point.

Remember… the data service is an item template, not a project template….and that it’s been renamed to WCF Data Services.

After you create a project (I usually use an empty web app to host the service), you can find the template in the Web section.

Or just use the handy search feature in the items dialog