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There are five major APIs that you can use to program report server access, and this course will cover two of them. First, we’ll look at accessing reports using a custom URL, which is the same way Report Manager provides access, although you can use a shorthand version of the URLs for easier programming. You’ll learn the structure of the URL, and see various ways to build the URLs and some of the many options available as querystring parameters. Then you’ll learn about the ReportViewer control that is available in both Web and Windows Forms .NET applications. You’ll learn how to use the control with both server and local reports, which are reports you build directly in Visual Studio for that application.

This course assumes that you have a basic familiarity with the concept of relational databases and a basic understanding of what SQL Server is and the high-level tools in it, as well as how to create and manage objects using Management Studio. You should also have a basic understanding of how SQL Server implements security, including its authentication and authorization schemes, and how to assign permissions on securable objects to principals. You should know the fundamentals of Transact-SQL to write queries to retrieve data and join data from multiple tables, and how to execute scripts using the query editor in Management Studio. It will be very helpful, but not absolutely necessary, to have experience with .NET development using Visual Studio 2012 or 2013 for the portions of the course that deal with SQL Server Data Tools. At the very least, we’ll assume that you are well familiar with the Visual Studio user interface.