What Do 64 Interim Releases Have to Do with Today’s Quality Control?

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.

Web Report Viewer for Preview in Web Applications

web report viewer desktop

Up until version 27, you were able to use the HTML5 Viewer in your own .NET web applications in order to display a report preview directly in the browser. Interactive user actions such as drill down, filtering data using report parameters and much more were already possible. But the technology that was utilized for this is getting older now, as for example the jQuery framework. With the new Web Report Viewer, we have created a modern, highly compatible replacement, which has been available since version 27 (year 2021).

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 27.002 for List & Label and the Report Server

The new service pack for List & Label 27 brings many enhancements and improvements especially for the new Web Report Designer as well as for Delphi and .NET developers. In addition, the new drag & drop interface for charts now also supports the selection of an aggregate function. The report template preview in the Report Server uses the new Web Report Viewer, styled according to the applied Report Server customization. Read our blog post for more highlights. The individual entries have been taken directly from the English readme.

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.