The report builder in Visual Studio got a face lift in 2008. I haven't run into anything significant that I can do in 2008 that I couldn't do in 2005, so I must assume this is yet another attempt to drive coders mad.
The first change I noticed was that the data tab was gone from the report. Yes, they included a menu item called Report Data waaaaaay down at the bottom of the view menu in an entirely successful attempt to hide it. Luckily, the GUI designers are powerless to totally foil our productivity, because the guys who actually code this stuff could care less about the interface. Enter the control key! I soon discovered that CTRL + ALT + D pops that sucker right up. It is now a dockable window with all the data objects in it and the ability to drag and drop to the report. You have to create a datasource over here before you can create the datasets (what is the shared datasources in the solution explorer for again?) but once you figure out the redundancies, it is pretty smooth sailing.
You may ask yourself, "Self...why didn't they just add the functionality to the server explorer?" Well, that would be too logicial. However, if you answered yourself you might want to take a crack at GUI design :^))
Did this help you? If so, please leave a comment!
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