Telerik Reporting Q2 2008 SP1 is now live

My name is Rossen Hristov and I am a developer at the Telerik Reporting team. This is my first post and in it I would like to share some good news with you -- Telerik Reporting Q2 2008 SP1 is now officially live. We have spent the last month or so making sure that most of the issues that you have reported have been addressed carefully. This Service Pack is by far the largest we have delivered in terms of issues fixed and I would like to thank you for the great feedback that you have provided during the past months.

The first thing that I would like to start with is the highly improved barcode rendering. My teammates and I have managed to make the barcode image quality much higher than before and reduce the memory footprint at the same time. On top of that the rendering speed has increased as well. I hope that those of you using our tool to print various barcodes will be pleasantly surprised. Any feedback on the barcode front will be highly appreciated.

Moving on, the next thing that underwent a major overhaul was the Visual Studio Report Designer. Some minor glitches in areas such as copy-pasting in Panels, global and external style-sheet application, and the In-Place Editor have been properly eliminated. Some aspects of code-behind serialization and the StyleBuilder have been improved as well.

There are improvements in the data binding and processing domain too. Many of you needed to use data fields in page sections which is now possible. To achieve greater flexibility the processing engine now allows modification of a processing TextBox's Value in various event handlers.

The WebViewer now automatically registers its HTTP Handler for IIS 7 which should be great news for those of you who like to use the latest technology. Also, adding the WebViewer to a page at design-time does not produce a parasite link tag anymore.

The different rendering engines were greatly improved to allow smooth and precise rendering. The HTML Rendering Engine now handles GroupKeepTogether correctly. Excel Export should not produce the notorious "Attempting to merge range..." message no more. The PDF Rendering Extension now displays transparent images without any problems and the RTF one can handle Padding.

There are so many more issues that were resolved, but a blog post is probably not the best place to mention them all, so I encourage all of you that use Telerik Reporting to check the full Release Notes for this Service Pack.

As for those of you that have not tried the product yet, I encourage you to download it and give it a spin. You will be pleasantly surprised by the functionality it offers.