It's a pretty classic problem. The company I work for has numerous business reports that are used to track sales, data feeds, and various other metrics. Of course this also means that there is a conglomerate of disparate frameworks, ASP.net pages, and areas where these reports can be found. There have been some attempts at consolidating these into a single entity, but nothing has stuck yet.

Since this is a common problem, and I am sure solved innumerable times, I wanted to see what others have done. For the most part these can be boiled down to the following pieces:

• A SQL query against our database to gather data
• A presentation of data, generally in a data grid
• Filtering that can vary based on data types and the business needs
• Some way to organize the reports, a single drop down gets long and unmanageable quickly
• A method to download data to alter further, perhaps a csv file

My first thought was to create a framework in Silverlight with Linq to Sql. Mainly just because I like it and want to play with it which probably is not the best reason. I also thought the controls grant a lot of functionality like sorting, dragging columns, etc. I was also curious about the printing in Silverlight 4.

Which brings me around to my original question, what is the best way to do this? Is there a package out there I can just buy that will do it for me? The Silverlight approach seems pretty easy, after it's setup and templated, but maybe it's a bad idea and I can learn from someone else?