Reporting in WPF

NetContractor

New member
Joined
Jan 13, 2009
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Programming Experience
10+
Is it just me or is anyone else very much dismayed at the lack of real line of business capabilities of WPF?

I am producing a line of business app, which early on was decided to use WPF. Admitedly this was partly my decision, because the client needed a windows solution; my background was ASP.Net development so I thought the nearest thing would be to use WPF. Having been around for a few years I never dreamt that it would be so poor.

I have hit so many stumbling blocks along the way. Working for a small client, in the middle of a recesion, they do not have the budget to purchase every third party tool and utility, so I have had to work with what Microsoft makes available in .Net.

Firstly, I got hit with the Datagrid. Not being released until late October, i still get an error trying to add a combobox to it. I am waiting for version 2. the (free) Xceed grid is not much better, with its own (different) set of inadequecies.

Now, I thought that any line of business application would require some sort of output. I need to produce invloices. The requirement is that one or more invoice is printed at one time; each one consists of a customer, seller brand, page header, items, and sub totals, etc. (typical invoice stuff). There seems to be no reporting mechnism in WPF. I have tried Crystal, but apart from hating their run-time deployment issues, and the fact that it doesnt seem to work with LINQ, I am at a stumbling block there. I have tried RDLC in VS 2008. Fortunatly that works with LINQ, but the designer seems very weak, and the functionality of the whole thing is not a patch on Crystal (I hate to say). I have considered building XAML but I need to export to Excel, and have page headers. I am at a loss and the sh-- it about to hit the fan.

Is this just me being stupid? Because WPF seems great at funky, good looking demo applications; but not true line of business apps?

Cheers
 
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