To build a report you need to have the SQL Server Business Intelligence Devel¬opment Studio or Visual Studio 2008 in¬stalled. In either of these you can create a new SQL Server Report Project using the installed template.
The 2008 version of the design surface has been optimized for quick usage of entities.

First of all, the designer itself shows you where to start by providing a link in the middle of the surface asking you to define a data source and a data set. The data source is the place from where you wish to get the data to display in the report. The data set is the actual query you wish to run including any fil¬ters (WHERE clause), fields (SELECT columns) etc. A new and improved wizard allows you to do these tasks very easily.

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The interesting part is that you can now build a report without going into Visual Studio at all. This is useful when you wish to allow end users or DBAs to create reports, but do not want to install Visual Studio or even SQL Server on their machines. A new application called the Report Designer is available to install on end client machines and al¬lows all the functionality that is avail¬able through Visual Studio as well.