List & Label Cross Platform — Reporting for Linux and More

List & Label Cross Platform for Linux and more

Maybe you’ve already seen it on our social networks, our website, or in our livestream: at combit, we’re currently working on a new, future-oriented offshoot of List & Label — a cross-platform reporting solution that will also run on Linux. The official name is already fixed: List & Label Cross Platform (LLCP). The product is primarily aimed at developers who are looking for a reporting component that supports hosting on Linux servers.

New Service Pack 29.001 for List & Label and the Report Server

header service pack 29.001

The new Service Pack 29.001 brings several new features and improvements. The .NET Sample Center user interface has been completely redesigned to provide additional information and links to the samples. Also new are special “signed” NuGet packages that contain signed List & Label assemblies. The OdbcDataProvider now supports a custom ParameterMarkerFormat to override or correct the format provided by the driver.

New Data Provider for Azure Cosmos Database

Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed Microsoft NoSQL database for modern app development, which is growing in popularity. Various APIs are available for connecting to Cosmos DB, as for example SQL API, Cassandra API or MongoDB API. Since we’re already able to connect to MongoDB or Cassandra through their own data providers, we’ll use the SQL API for the provider.

Distribute Emails via Office 365 / Microsoft Graph with List & Label

Microsoft is putting more and more obstacles in its Office 365 package, making it difficult to send SMTP emails “just like that” with basic authentication (see e.g. here) and with MAPI/XMAPI in the cloud anyway. But on-premise also brings new challenges (have you ever dealt with our Cross-Bitness-Proxy for x86 applications and x64 Office? 🙂 ). So it was about time to offer a new, up-to-date solution for the very frequently used email delivery.

What’s New for .NET in List & Label 28?

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.

Deploy Report Server on an Azure Container Instance and using it from an Azure Function

Report Server Azure Container

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.

New Service Pack 27.003 for List & Label and the Report Server

In this summary you will find the most important new features and improvements in Service Pack 27.003. The individual entries were taken directly from the English Readme. A detailed list of all changes can be found in the ServicePack.pdf in your installation as well as in the Service Pack download section.

No More Printer Driver Dependency: The New Printerless Mode in List & Label 27

App to the Cloud with LL 27

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.