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Crystal Reports has been part of Visual Studio since 1993, and is now the standard for reporting in Visual Studio 2005. It ships with every copy of Visual Studio 2005 and is integrated directly into the development environment. Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 brings the ability to create interactive, presentation-quality content to the Windows environment. With Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005, you can create complex and professional reports in a GUI-based program. Then you can connect your report to almost any database source, as well as to proxy data, such as a result set (for example, an ADO.NET DataSet). With the wizards included in the GUI designer, you can easily set formatting, grouping, charting, and other criteria. You can host your report in either a Web or Windows application, with one of the Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 viewer controls. Report presentation in both Windows and HTML 3.2 or 4.0 clients is highly interactive and provides you with features such as chart drill down, report navigation, and text search.

Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005 ships with an extensive SDK. You can use the SDK to interact with the report programmatically at runtime, by use of one of four possible object models:
ReportDocument, the more extensive object model.
CrystalReportViewer, the simplest object model.
Object models available through upgrade:.
ReportClientDocument, the most extensive object model.
InfoObject, a powerful object model for scheduling and configuring reports within the Crystal Reports Server or Modules Enterprise framework.