8.1. Speaking in Code

One of the features of Reporting Services that gives it a tremendous amount of power and flexibility is its capability to speak in code—Visual Basic .NET code, that is. Valid Visual Basic .NET expressions can be used to control many of the properties of report items. They can even be used to control the query you are using to create your dataset.

For more complex tasks, you can embed whole Visual Basic .NET functions in your report. If that isn't enough, you can access methods from .NET assemblies. These assemblies are not limited to Visual Basic .NET. They can be written in any .NET language, such as C#.

Let's write some

-.-. --- -.. .

and have some

..-. ..- -.

NOTE

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, the ...

Get Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.