Visual Studio Express Edition by Microsoft is a popular software development enveronment. It is popular also because it is free. By the way this tool as all that is free has some lacks. In particular complexities with using some add-onces, third party components.

For example many popular component-packs for .NET have reporting tools in set. Often they use developers environment of Visual Studio (fully or partially) as the visual report development environment. But such way is impossible in Express Edition.

FastReport .NET uses another approach. There are own fully independent report designer which can be called from application (from Winforms Edition and higher). That is Visual Studioàs envirinment does not need for visual design of reports. read more...