Thanks to Scott and Derick who helped me understand SQL Reporting Services a bit more. I didn't install the samples, until today. Scott pointed out that there is a WebControl that will allow you to use a rdl report from a Web app. The WebControl just renders an IFrame which pulls the URL from the reports server. That's fine, and I managed to get it to work fairly easily, except that I had to use the other sample, RSExplorer to find out my report server path to the report and get it correctly entered.
Anyhow, I'm pretty excited about the Potential for the tool, but I'm not going to convince anyone here to switch from Crystal with what I've seen so far. As a matter of fact, I hate to say it, but Crystal still has one big advantage over SQL Reporting Services, and that is that a developer like me can deploy a report without worrying about setting up an additional server environment to do the report rendering. Now, there's a caveat to this, because Crystal for .NET does in fact set up an additional virtual server for you when you run a setup and add the Crystal .msm files. And this process is so buggy, and hard to work with that developers might opt for the manual setup of SQL Reporting Services anyway. Add to that all of the other Crystal bugs, like temp files filling up, strange permission problems, etc, and it may be a no-brainer.
What I think we need is a stand alone runtime for the simple deployment of a report. All it would need would be to render a .rdl report at runtime. No scheduling, etc. What would be really cool is if this could be an optional component of the .NET framework that I could simply add to a web project... Another thing that would help would be a conversion tool for Crystal reports to .rdl files. Anyone know of anything in the works?
-Brendan