Building a full reporting system for WinForms & WPF with List & Label

reporting system for winforms and wpf apps

Desktop business applications eventually hit the same reporting problem: users want new reports, PDF exports, Excel output, print previews, and layout changes without waiting for another release. For development teams, that usually means a choice between piling up custom export code or building a reporting framework from scratch. List & Label offers a more practical option: embed reporting directly into your WinForms or WPF application while keeping control of your data, permissions, and user experience. This guide shows how to integrate it in a way that is practical, scalable, maintainable, and built for real-world line-of-business software.

New in List & Label 31: Export Reports to S3, SharePoint and OneDrive

cloudstorage provider s3 ms graph

With List & Label 31, exporting reports to cloud storage becomes significantly more flexible. Instead of temporarily storing reports locally and then processing them further via a custom upload process, export is now possible directly to modern cloud storage targets. As soon as applications run in containers, on servers, or generally in more distributed environments, local file paths quickly become impractical.

Building a scalable reporting backend with List & Label Cross Platform

Reporting sounds simple until it has to generate invoices, statements, customer PDFs, and scheduled exports reliably across containers, tenants, and production workloads. At that point, reporting stops being a side feature and starts becoming backend infrastructure — which means the real challenge is no longer how to generate a PDF, but how to build a reporting service that is stateless, scalable, and easy to run in modern environments.

Stop outgrowing your .NET reporting: How to avoid “We have to rewrite this”

chat between devs about rewriting reports

Most .NET teams don’t set out to build a reporting subsystem that needs rescuing. But “just generate a few PDFs” can quietly become a tangle of layout logic, export workarounds, and growing technical debt—until someone says, “We have to replace this.” Here’s how to spot that pattern early, and how to avoid backing your application into a reporting rewrite later.

We’re evolving: List & Label Cross Platform

List & Label Cross Platform for Linux and more

Maybe you’ve already seen it on our social networks, our website, or in our livestream: at combit, we’re currently working on a new, forward-looking offshoot of List & Label—a cross-platform reporting solution that will primarily run on Linux. Internally, we call this project List & Label Cross Platform (LL-CP). It is aimed primarily at developers looking for a stable, high-performance, and modern reporting solution.

Embedding Fonts in Project Files

embedded fonts in project files header

Applications are increasingly deployed in Docker environments or directly on the web server. With doing so, it’s often challenging to provide fonts. In particular, installing fonts in Docker containers can be a tedious task, as previously documented here in our forum. Fonts often can’t be easily distributed or installed on web servers either. This creates a situation, particularly with company-owned fonts, in which not all required fonts are available by default.