We have been using .Net and Visual Studio for the last six years, and early on developed a number of web based reporting applications using the .Net version of Crystal Reports that was bundled with Visual Studio. My overall opinion of that product has been, to say the least, rather unimpressed. It seemed to be incredibly difficult and convoluted to use, we had to make security changes, install various extra software, and so on.

Now, we are moving to VS2008 and version 3.5 of the .Net framework, and the time has come to redevelop some of these old applications. The developers who used (and somehow mastered) Crystal .Net have long gone, and I am facing a decision - do we stick with Crystal Reports or move to something else. We also have the "full" version of Crystal Reports XI at our disposal.

The way we use the product is to product pdf versions of data extracted from various databases. While some apps use the inbuilt Crystal Reports viewer as well, this seems to be redundant now with the flexibility of grid views - but there is still the need to produce a pdf version of the data in teh grid for printing, or in Excel format to download.

What is the concensus? Is Crystal Reports .Net worth persisting with, or should we work out how to use version XI? Alternatively, is there a simple and low cost way to generate pdf reports without using Crystal? What good sources of "how to" information have others found and recommend? Are there suitable books, designed for VS2008 / .Net 3.5 development that you have used and found of benefit?

Thanks in advance.