Tables and numbers and colorful graphs and...

A while back, I needed to generate some reports off of a small database I maintain. I needed them to be updated frequently, and didn't want to spend a lot of time putting them together.

Of course, I could have used Crystal Reports. But it just didn't seem right - I keep a large number of knives at home, and should I ever desire death by a thousand cuts, I'm sure it could be arranged on my own time. No reason to mix such activities with work.

So based on a recommendation, I decided to give SQL Server Reporting Services a shot. Installed it on my desktop, threw together a few reports, and that was it. It was quick and easy, and I was happy. Until it suddenly stopped working. I messed around with keys and permissions and database users, and after about a day it was all working again... until, roughly a month later, it suddenly wasn't. This went on for some time, and then, one day, it was time to bring the reports out of development and make them available to other people.

And I balked. Here it was, running on a local machine that had no other users, no onerous loads, a machine that, most days, ran only one very light application... and it was still breaking periodically. Did I really want to put up with babysitting this thing on a remote server? No, I decided, I did not want that.

So, back to the drawing board. Of course, I didn't exactly have time to research and learn a whole new reporting framework. Heck, I didn't have time to do much of anything - any work would have to be done while waiting for builds to complete or tests to run on other projects. So I buckled down and started coding: I needed a few basic statistical routines, a histogram routine, some tables, and a few graphs. Some quick-and-dirty C# took care of the stats, quick-and-dirty HTML for the tables... and the newest addition to my toolbox took care of the graphs.

I'd first run across ZedGraph a few years ago, when John Champion posted his article on The CodeProject. While it looked nice enough, I had no need for such a thing at the time, and forgot about it. But now, running across it in a frantic Google search, it looked like just what I needed. A couple of hours spent playing with it confirmed this notion: it fit my simple needs like a glove, quickly turning the dry, drab reports into slick, colorful affairs, ready for inclusion in any presentation. Best yet, it fit neatly into the quick-and-dirty ASP.NET code I'd already written.

A full day spent hacking (during the aforementioned gaps in testing...), and the new reports were ready. Fast, ridiculously simple, and perfectly suitable for XCOPY deployment.