Full Support for .NET Core 3.0

.net core 3.0

.NET Standard and .NET Core have been around for a while now. We jumped the bandwagon early and offered beta support since LL23 while officially supporting the new framework since List & Label 24. With the advent of .NET Core 3.0, Microsoft announced that the .NET 4.x releases will be the last of their kind and .NET Core 3.0 – which will later simply be called .NET and will be named ".NET 5" in its next release – is the place to go. We're already there.

Customer Wishes Implemented in the Ad-hoc Designer

Since version 3 of the Report Server, you can create reports quickly and easily with the Ad-hoc Designer. Since List & Label 23, this feature is also available for .NET developers for integration into their applications. Today I would like to show briefly which customer requests we were able to implement in combit List & Label 24 and Report Server 24 in the Ad-hoc Designer.

Supporting Cross-Datasource Relations

The .NET DataProvider concept allows to bind to almost any data source. Basically, it mimics a relational database management system containing tables, relations, sort orders etc. However, often you'll find yourself needing to combine data from different sources, e.g. a server log file that contains customer logins and a SQL customer database that contains all pertinent information about the customers.

Our TTFHW is Just 30 Seconds!

Have you ever stumbled across TTFHW? This is an important nerd metric, meaning "time to first hello world". Basically it tells you how long it will take you as a developer to get to your first hello world success using a platform / API.

Introducing Enterprise Level Logging Support

For you as an enterprise application developer, logging is probably one of the essential features of your app. It enables you to trace and see what the user did just before the app went blank, and see if the typical user answer "I haven't done anything" proves right or wrong. To support you in this task, logging was built into List & Label from the very start.

Intelligent Franking with Internetmarke

The process of getting snail mail ready for posting can be rather tiresome. You print your letters or invoices, enjoying the fine work you have done designing them in List & Label, and then? Even in our modern times you lick the stamp, assuming you have the right one at hand, and stick it on the envelope. How very old-school is that? With the upcoming version 22 of List & Label this process can be elegantly automated through Internetmarke, a service to pay for postage online by German courier company Deutsche Post AG.

Building a Better Databinding Ecosystem for Delphi

Data provider for Delphi

The IDataProvider interface for .NET has enabled many features that are not available for all of the other platforms so far. Most importantly, it brings multiple report containers and nested tables. For C++, we've included a sample in LL21. This is sadly missing in Delphi. In addition, the current Delphi data-binding engine still works against the BDE, a technology that has been deprecated quite a while ago by Embarcadero.

Lightning Fast Aggregations for .NET

Aggregation within reports is a hot topic. While it is very convenient to just aggregate what you see it can become very expensive if huge amounts of data are involved. Think of sales statistics for your products – you don't really want to iterate through all order details in order to just get the total sales for your article. This is a task databases are optimized for.