I used to believe that Crystal Reports is the best report building platform available and it used to hold true until Crystal Reports was taken over by Business Objects and started tinkering around to fit it's enterprise reporting platform. It got heavy bloated and unstable.
Performance in a winforms app became horrible. Crystal Reports XI was a disaster. They even had to release the software and called it XI-R2.
In that version they even tried to embed flash based reports. I still could not get a rationale around it. I still don't get why that feature is required at the expense of everything else.Now coming to the point why on the earth SAP want to kill Crystal Reports? They are moving the location of updates every time they release a new version and Google doesn't index their downloads area. So I thought of posting few these locations in the interest of fellow developers - Ordered by DescendingCrystal Reports 2011 Support PackagesCrystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010Support Pack 3. This article summarizes why one has to switch to VSTO while listing reasons why many developers still feel VBA as a better choice.Before getting into the discussion of if VBA or VSTO are better, Let's have a look into the popular alternatives to VBA for Office Development.: Set of tools to simplify development of MS Office based solutions. Works with Visual Studio Professional Edition and above.: Fundamental COM Assemblies for Office for.Net programs to be able to communicate and contro office applications.: Read, Write and Create documents in their native XML format and is good if you are just creating documents.
Crystal Reports Professional Edition Version 9.2.2 Download
This is the preferred API to create and deliver Excel or any office document on the DotNet based server side. Downside is that developer has to think in a different object model.: An Open source SDK originally aimed at developing Excel UDFs using C#. This is now being developed as an open alternative to VSTO which doesn't require V.