We are currently taking our current flagship product which is an illustration system for life insurance companies and doing a complete redesign/rewrite for .Net. In our original system we used Active Reports for the reporting tool and have been fairly happy with it.
Moving forward though we have found that Active Reports.Net actually runs slower than its non .Net version. Our reporting was always the slowest part of our system and we were hoping to figure out ways to speed up our reports, so that news was not promising.
I was curious as to see what others are doing in regards to reporting for their .Net applications. Enterprise solutions such as the new SQL Server reporting tool is not an option as the license and framework must support royalty free distribution to desktops. The output must support PDF, and having an RTF option would be nice.
I just got done reading Sam Gentile's blog about distributed programming and was kind of curious how people solve the problem of passing data through tiers?
Right now the project I am working on is a full scale, enterprise application that spans multiple tiers and is configurable to have the tiers be on different boxes. We did look at using the DataReaders or DataSets to pass our data around, but found them to be very bloated and decided to create our own serializable object that we can pass back between the tiers.
How do you do it?