Jochen Bartlau 
List & Label 28 provides some new features and improvements for .NET developers. Most important, we’re now supporting the just released .NET 7. Performancewise, the optimized use of byte arrays for images makes a noticeable difference. And there’s also news regarding the support of new data sources. Here’s a list of the new features.
This blog post was prompted by a discussion in our forum. One of our customers, who’s been using List & Label since 1995 (which actually goes back longer than my own experience!) sent us a message, telling us that due to fear of errors, he usually waits for up to a year after the release, before finally implementing a new version. Right here, I’d like to explain why I don’t think that’s a good idea, and give you a bit of an insight into our quality assurance. We want you to feel good about using List & Label in your applications on a daily basis.
To further improve our export formats, was one of the main areas we focused on with List & Label 28. Specifically, we added a number of powerful new features to the Excel export. Without any further ado, here’s what’s new.
As we keep getting requests to support calling List & Label from an Azure Function, and – due to several restrictions like e.g. GDI sandboxing – List & Label can’t be used directly in this context, I thought it might be interesting to explore another way to the cloud, this time using the Report Server. Using its REST-API, you can even create reports from an Azure Function. But let’s walk through the process step by step.
As with every version, there are way too many new features in version 27 to cover them all in separate blog posts. So here’s a quick summary of some of the rather hidden gems that still deserve some attention.
After paying some attention to the PDF export in version 26, we decided to give some love to the Excel export in version 27, by adding three often requested features.
List & Label’s chart dialog offers a load of possible customizations. However, as always, with great power comes great complexity. Even creating a simple pie chart could have taken some time if you’re not yet familiar with List & Label’s chart features. As you can already easily create crosstabs via Drag & Drop, and we just recently improved the table’s drag & drop features, offering a thorough D&D support for charts was the next logical step on our path to a simpler, more intuitive end user desktop designer.
This was a huge issue, that has been bugging us for years. While – generally speaking – List & Label’s level of printer control is unmatched by any competitor I know of, we always required a printer driver in order to execute this control. On the desktop, that’s all fine and well, as Microsoft conveniently provides the XPS Document Writer and – in more recent versions of Windows OS – the Microsoft PDF Writer. Those are always present and accessible. However, on the web and in the cloud, it’s a different story.
This is another often overlooked feature – you can add scripts to your projects and use your favorite language to do so. Since a couple of versions already, List & Label supports C# Scripts. However, the performance was less than perfect, making it a good choice for complex calculations but not so much for using it on a line-to-line base. In List & Label 26, we were able to push the performance quite remarkably – now using scripts is perfectly feasible.
Here we post about new features in our reporting tool List & Label and about general development topics.
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