I am developing an dashboard application which will give insights of the data of an organisation. I am confused as to what will be the best approach in developing the Dashboard: a. Should i go for Crystal Reports b. Should i Use WPF Charts and display Data
Any suggestions please which help me go ahead with my design?
Regards Vineet More
It depends on your goals.
Using WPF and charting controls will likely be simpler to deploy since it's a client application (you won't have to worry about Crystal being setup correctly). They come with the framework and won't have any additional upfront costs and it should run seamlessly across workstations.
Crystal is nice though especially if you want to send the output to the printer as a report (this is where it's roots are and it excels at it). It's a pain to deploy locally and even more of a pain to deploy on the server (where it uses the C:\Windows\Temp directory during the report export process which you probably won't have access or permissions to on a server in the cloud... or have access to the registry to change that location).
Another option you can consider is using HTML and JavaScript with a 3rd party charting library like d3. You an render the content from your client app in a web browser control and make it look seamless with your app. This approach would also make it easier to move it to the web if you ever wanted to render it from a ASP.NET site (or really from any web language).