Report Builder vs. ReportViewer

There are some notable differences between Report Builder 2.0 and the Windows Forms or ASP.NET-hosted ReportViewer control. Report Builder handles all connection operations and executes the Report Definition Language (RDL)-embedded queries from the client. In the ReportViewer control, your code handles these operations. You must write and execute client-side code to open a connection and return a suitable data structure (e.g., a data table) to be passed to the ReportViewer control’s Local Report Processor. You can also use ReportViewer’s Server mode to simply point to an existing cataloged report and get SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to return the HTML code. Another significant difference is that with Report Builder 2.0, developers (or users) don’t have to install Visual Studio or the SQL Server business intelligence (BI) tools, nor do they have to know how to program in Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET) or even C#.