Porting to .NET Core: Report Server on New Technology Basis

The Report Server saw the light of day in 2014. At that time, version 1.0 was implemented using the ASP.NET MVC framework and was based on List & Label 19. But as the number of users increased in subsequent versions, so did the requirements and ideas for new features. Some of the customer requests were difficult to realize with the underlying technology. Many developers have certainly been faced with the same question: What should we do next?

 

Should You Migrate from .NET Framework? – List & Label with .NET Core 3.1 Support

In May 2019, Microsoft announced that it will no longer develop the existing .NET Framework. So the current version 4.8 will be the last release. From now on, the company will concentrate on the further development of .NET Core. For developers, the question arises: Is the release of .NET Core 3.1 a good time to migrate from the .NET Framework? The good news is that you don't have to do without List & Label when migrating. 

Full Support for .NET Core 3.0

.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.

Customer Wishes Implemented in the Ad-hoc Designer

Since version 3 of the Report Server, you can create reports quickly and easily with the Ad-hoc Designer. Since List & Label 23, this feature is also available for .NET developers for integration into their applications. Today I would like to show briefly which customer requests we were able to implement in combit List & Label 24 and Report Server 24 in the Ad-hoc Designer.

Supporting Cross-Datasource Relations

The .NET DataProvider concept allows to bind to almost any data source. Basically, it mimics a relational database management system containing tables, relations, sort orders etc. However, often you'll find yourself needing to combine data from different sources, e.g. a server log file that contains customer logins and a SQL customer database that contains all pertinent information about the customers.