GrapeCity wins Multiple Awards from ComponentSource

ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread are ComponentSource’s #1 best-selling .NET reporting and spreadsheet products, and GrapeCity is the #1 software publisher in Japan and #3 globally

Kirkland, WA - March 30, 2010 - GrapeCity announced today that ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread, two award-winning products from their PowerTools Division have won multiple awards from ComponentSource®, the world's largest marketplace for reusable software components and development tools.

ComponentSource’s Top 100 Awards for 2009 rate leading software publishers and their individual products according to the total dollar value of orders placed globally by its customers during the year.

Example awards won by GrapeCity and its products – ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread are:
2009’s Top 100 Bestselling Products AwardsActiveReports for .NET — Ranked #1 in Japan, #7 in Top 10 Worldwide
FarPoint Spread for .NET Windows Forms — Ranked #2 in Japan, Top 25 Worldwide
FarPoint Spread for ASP.NET — Ranked #8 in Japan, Top 50 Worldwide
2009’s Top 100 Bestselling Publisher AwardsGrapeCity (Japan) — Ranked #1 in Top 5 Publishers
GrapeCity (Worldwide) — Ranked #3 in Top 5 Publishers
These and other awards make ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread #1 best-sellers on ComponentSource in their respective categories.ActiveReports—World’s #1 best-selling .NET/COM reporting tools
FarPoint Spread— World’s #1 best-selling .NET/COM spreadsheet components

Commenting on the GrapeCity awards, Sam Patterson, ComponentSource CEO, said, “ComponentSource® is pleased to announce that GrapeCity has won multiple ComponentSource Bestselling Publisher and Bestselling Products Awards for 2009-2010. These awards are based on the total dollar amount of orders placed by our customers over the past year through our three offices located in Atlanta, GA, USA, Reading, England and Tokyo, Japan.”
Patterson went on to say, “Given their world-wide popularity and claim to the title of ’World’s largest component developer,’ GrapeCity prides itself on providing state-of-the-art, technically solid products.”
Commenting on GrapeCity’s success, Rick Williamson, General Manager of GrapeCity’s PowerTools Division, said, “We would like to thank ComponentSource for acknowledging our contributions. We are committed to rapid innovation and creation of even more business value for our customers. We will continue to work with channel partners such as ComponentSource to help grow the developer components industry worldwide.”

Jeff Penchoff likes both ActiveReports and Spread

"As a long time user of your Spread COM product I have always been pleased with the flexibility and user friendly aspects of the control and it is great to see that your (Spread)Windows Forms control continues this tradition!"

"Now that you are part of the same company which created ActiveReports (another product I have been a user of for a long time) I look forward to creating feature rich applications which will benefit my customers and my company. Excited to get started!"

Jeff Penchoff
Manager of Software Development
Asset Systems, Inc
http://www.assetsystems.com

Lee Armitage appreciates ActiveReports technical support going out of their way to help him

"I would like to let you know that your technical support representative has gone out of his way to help me convert a large quantity of reports that were created in an ActiveReports version from 6 years ago into your most current version. He was always professional, courteous, and most of all expedient in his work to get them converted."

Lee Armitage,
Software/Database Engineer,
Linx Software, Inc.
Tucson, Az

Meet GrapeCity at Microsoft PDC

Join us at GrapeCity's Booth #815 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) from November 17th, 18th, 19th, where both ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread team members will be present to preview latest technologies and answer your questions.

The FarPoint Spread team will be there to showcase Spread 5 for Windows Forms beta, to be launched in December. It's a great time to attend the premier Developer Conference by Microsoft and meet the people behind our products.

Or you can just say hello and play some Bingo, we are giving away a total of $1000!

If you are already registered for the PDC, see if there’s still time to register for the Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. We’re giving away the grand prize of an HDTV!

It's not too late to attend! You can register from the PDC Site.

Join us at the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Virtual Tech Briefing

Join us, along with Microsoft, for the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Virtual Tech Briefing, a one-day virtual event showing you what you need to know about this new release – just out in beta.

Following the Microsoft presentation, we will be presenting our session entitled, “Deliver Complete .NET Business Intelligence Solutions by combining Spreadsheets, Reporting and Data Visualization in Microsoft Visual Studio”.

This session will for the first time ever, bring together world class development tools and components such as ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread, both by GrapeCity in one single demo to show how to rapidly develop business intelligence applications with Microsoft Visual Studio.

Registration is free! Register now at CodeProject.com - http://www.codeproject.com/webcasts/vs2010Beta/

GrapeCity sponsors .NET Community Event at PDC

GrapeCity will be the Grand Prize Sponsor for the INETA Birds-of-a-Feather Community Roundtable at the Microsoft PDC on Tuesday, 11/17 from 6:00-7:00 pm. GrapeCity will be donating a HDTV as the grand door prize at the event.

INETA provides structured, peer-based organizational, educational, and promotional support to the growing worldwide community of Microsoft® .NET user groups.

Learn more about INETA web site, ActiveReports and FarPoint Spread set of award-winning, best-selling .NET spreadsheet, and .NET reporting and business intelligence tools for Microsoft Visual Studio.

GrapeCity acquires FarPoint Technologies

GrapeCity today announced that it has executed an acquisition agreement with FarPoint Technologies, Inc., developer of world’s best selling and award-winning Excel-compatible spreadsheet software components for Microsoft’s development platform. Under the terms of the agreement, GrapeCity will be purchasing all FarPoint products and the resulting revenues.

The decision was taken based on a long standing relationship between the two companies since the very first time the FarPoint Spread VBX component was launched for Microsoft Visual Basic over a decade ago. Since that time, GrapeCity has exclusively localized, marketed, sold and supported FarPoint Spread in Japan making it one of their top selling component product in Japan.

GrapeCity is also the world’s largest component developer and seller by company size and revenues. So when the time came for FarPoint owners to carefully weigh their options aimed at growing worldwide even beyond the success it enjoys today, joining GrapeCity was a logical next step.

The FarPoint team, just like the Data Dynamics team last year will become part of GrapeCity and continue serving mutual customers. All FarPoint Product Managers, Sales and Marketing personnel and other FarPoint team members will continue the good work under the GrapeCity name starting October 1st, 2009.

This is great news for customers of both Data Dynamics and FarPoint as it brings together two technology pillars - "Reporting and Business Intelligence" and Excel compatible "Spreadsheet technologies" that form the underpinning of most data processing and data visualization needs of today's business users. Customers can look forward to seeing more synergies between the two product lines in the months to come even as both product lines will continue to grow in exciting ways.

To learn more, read the joint press release, and more coverage by SD Times and the Visual Studio Magazine.

ActiveReports 6 and the GrapeCity Factor - A look back and what to expect in future

With the soon to be launched ActiveReports 6, this seems an appropriate time to take a step back and look at what the GrapeCity acquisition has meant for Data Dynamics and what it implies for the future.

The ActiveReports 6 launch marks a major milestone in two respects. Firstly, it is a reflection of the commitment to not only continue the product development and support but in fact, take ActiveReports, Data Dynamics Reports and Data Dynamics Analysis to the next level in terms of their strategic direction and overall product features, quality and support.

Read the full article on the ActiveReports Blog.

About GrapeCity and ActiveReports

When GrapeCity acquired Data Dynamics late last year and the GrapeCity name started appearing in all Data Dynamics promotions, it was a relatively unknown name for a number of customers who probably wondered who GrapeCity was.

As it turns out, GrapeCity's name is very familiar to a number of US and international Component and Developer Tool vendors.

Read the full article.

Microsoft Case Study on ActiveReports

Microsoft today released a new Case study highlighting Precision.BI's use of ActiveReports and other .NET reporting and Analysis tools from GrapeCity-Data Dynamics to speed the delivery of a new Healthcare Business Intelligence product to its customers.

Precision.BI needed powerful analysis and reporting components for its healthcare business intelligence solution. The company found what it needed in third-party components from GrapeCity, including functionality that enables users to explore huge quantities of data and to generate rich reports on an ad hoc basis. Precision.BI plans to continue taking advantage of GrapeCity’s rich components and excellent support as both companies migrate their software to Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3.
Read the full Case Study (PDF).

ActiveReports rapid XML processing options

Chillisoft describe in their latest blog on how they leverage the flexible code model of ActiveReports to roll an optimized XML+XSLT solution.

----Extract---
ActiveReports provides the XMLDataSource option for sourcing your data from xml. My knowledge of all its ins and outs is not substantial, but I ran into two significant problems in a recent project which led me towards an alternative, innovative approach.

The first problem is that an xml document does not guarantee a structure like a database does. Xml’s flexibility in the layout of elements is beautiful on one hand but hard to fit into a report that expects a fixed structure.

The second problem in my case was the use of sub-reports to cover for different structures in the xml document. I won’t get fully into the detail, but where an element holds recurring sub-items, you can use sub-reports to list all the items. The trouble is that a significant number of sub-reports kill your report generation performance. I had a particular problem where my first report would take 15 seconds to generate on the server, and then degrade by another 5 seconds every time I ran it again. This is of course totally unacceptable for a frequently used report.

Here then was my innovation … combine ActiveReports and XSLT. ActiveReports provides the RichTextBox, which has an Html property to which you can assign the Html you generate from your XSLT.

Read the full blog posting.

Microsoft Solution Brief on ActiveReports

Microsoft today published a Visual Studio Partner Solution Brief on the ActiveReports Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) Suite by GrapeCity that will be available on Microsoft and GrapeCity-Data Dynamics web sites.

It features customer quotes, a historical perspective on .NET reporting and business intelligence (BI) challenges, and how ActiveReports and related tools from GrapeCity have helped customers solve the problems by tightly integrating with Microsoft Visual Studio for the .NET development plaftform.

Download the PDF version of the Solution Brief.

Win a Trip to Microsoft PDC!

INETA is sponsoring the INETA Component Code Challenge, with the winner receiving a scholarship to Microsoft PDC 2009 in Los Angeles, CA. All you need to do is build the best application using one of ActiveReports, Data Dynamics Reports or Analysis product and another component.

The Details:

Build a .NET Application (WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight, Compact Framework, etc.) using at least 2 components from at least 2 different approved vendors (yes, GrapeCity is an approved vendor) then make a 3-5 minute Camtasia video showing your entry and describing what components you used and why your application is cool. The INETA judges will review the submissions and the best two will win a scholarship to Microsoft PDC 2009 in Los Angeles, CA, including air fare, hotel, and conference pass.

The submission deadline is 08/25/2009 at Midnight Eastern and the winners will be announced on 09/14/2009.

Entries will be judged on four criteria:

1. Effective use of a component to solve a problem/display data
2. Innovative use of components
3. Impact using components (i.e. reduction in lines of code written, increased productivity, etc.)
4. Most creative use of a component

See the contest page on the INETA web site for more details and full rules.

That’s it. So what are you waiting for? Show them how you are using ActiveReports or other GrapeCity-Data Dynamics products today and possibly win a free trip to PDC. Good luck!

Jeremy Yoder's team totally depends on ActiveReports programmability

“Why do we use ActiveReports? In a word: Flexibility. There is simply no other reporting product on the market that allows so many elements to be altered programmatically. This enables us to make an end-user product that relies almost entirely on GUI interfaces, which we programmatically translate into fast running reports, whether it’s via customized control properties, our own report wizards, or dynamically created subreports, all of which are done by our users with a few mouse clicks.”

He further describes the "slick" development features in their reporting module built using ActiveReports that he is especially proud of:

1. Report Wizards
2. Dynamically created underlying queries (via a stored proc)
3. Control wrappers for use in the property grid (which uses the Tag field for customized properties)
4. Ability to create formulas that can be reused in different reports
5. Generate other labels and summary fields when user places fields on the designer
6. GUI interface for almost everything, including subreports with multiple links
7. Ability to filter each report “on the fly” before it’s run via pre-created filters and/or individual field selection
8. Generate crosstab reports after the user specifies the X, Y, and D fields, and possibly other fields on the designer
9. Customized toolbars: For placing report controls, editing control properties, and a treeview list of views/fields with multiple tabs based on field type
10. The user never writes scripts, but he does it programmatically for various features, such as tying to subreport, make numeric fields red if less than zero, etc.
11. User defined font defaults to apply by section as fields are placed on the designer or generated
12. Export/Import reports in their entirety with all relevant subtables into a single XML file
13. Ability to run reports in a “Void” format to show the report layout without exposing potentially sensitive data


Jeremy Yoder,
Software developer,
Software Unlimited, Inc.

ActiveReports 6 Beta Launch!

We are happy to announce that ActiveReports 6 beta is now available for download on the GrapeCity-Data Dynamics web site.

The Standard Edition of this premier .NET reporting tool features new Report Designer enhancements that make it even easier to design reports. New Designer features include Cross-section Controls, Snap Lines, In-line Text Editing, support for repetition patterns, image annotations, and a number of Text and Label enhancements.

It also features new Bar Code Control support for Reduced Space Symbology (RSS) Bar Codes and External Stylesheets for sharing look and feel between reports.

The Professional Edition gets even more powerful and easy to use for end users with:

1. A First-time Flash based Report Viewer
(Click on the image to see full screenshot)



2. Advanced PDF reporting features such as support for Adobe's Digital Signatures and version timestamps
(Click on the image to see full screenshot)



3. Redistributable End User Report Designer help for End Users

4. Nifty toolstrip controls for the End User Report Designer.

Learn more on the Download Page.