NullifyNetwork

So I've been occupied as the schools came back over September and am just starting to catch back up, amongst the things to have snuck up on me are Silverlight and a lovely new report designer!

The Silverlight 2.0 SDK tools are here. They are badly missing any mouse interactivity on the design surface, which makes it seem like this is a big ploy to sell lots of copies of expression Blend to developers since that DOES support mouse control and addition of components.  Since Blend has one of the worst UI's I've ever come across (looks pretty but works like drawing in tar) I think I'll wait till this is fixed up or just edit the XML.  The ability to run C# code in silverlight and debug it properly almost lets Microsoft off but not quite.

However saying that Microsoft have released a new report designer for SQL 2008 Reporting Services.  It uses a slightly different schema for its RDL files than the 2005 report viewer but is an amazing standalone tool.  Hopefully after some work to support the format better (we work fine with 2005) work will be able to point clients at this so they can make their own reports more easily!