Reporting-Services

One surprise in the release plans for SQL Server 2025 is that SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is being discontinued as a brand. If you have a paid license for SQL Server, you are now able to install Power BI Report Server. Previously, that option required you to have an Enterprise Edition license for SQL Server or a premium level license for Power BI.

But Reporting Services was also previously available for SQL Server Express. That will no longer be supplied, and there’s no option to use Power BI Report Server.

2025-12-10

I recently upgraded my laptop to Visual Studio 2026. The upgrade went quite smoothly except for one thing.

I received an error that told me that the RDLC Report Designer for use with SQL Server Reporting Services wasn’t going to work any more. In my case, we use that report viewer even without Reporting Services, by just uploading datasets in applications. I’ve found it very convenient. But I still needed the report designer so I could add new reports or change existing ones.

2025-12-02

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a wonderful product, that’s still really important, even though the product group in Microsoft hasn’t been showing it much love lately.

I was at a client site the other week, and while we were using Power BI (PBI) for their dashboards and general visualizations, we were looking to use SSRS for part of the solution.

What fascinated me, is that when they talked to the local Microsoft field staff, they kept being told how SSRS was old technology, and asking why they’d look to use such old technology.

2020-02-11

A friend of mine that works for Microsoft pinged me yesterday about how to strip HTML tags out of text he was trying to display in Reporting Services. He just wanted the text displayed. The typical text looked like this:

SciTech Software is a software development and consulting company. The company was founded in 1991 with the intention of creating software for scientific instruments, but our focus has shifted towards creating tools for developers.  

We have worked in close collaboration with <a href="http://****http://www.thermometric.com/">Thermometric** **AB</a> with some of our products, but now we concentrate on our own tool for the .NET Framework: <b><a href="http://****http://memprofiler.com/">.NET** **Memory Profiler</a></b>.  

We have extensive experience developing using C++, Java and C#. Currently, our main development environment is the .NET Framework.

I’d heard this could be done in Reporting Services 2008 so I tried it and it’s easy. I presume others might find simple instructions helpful:

2008-08-25