There are 2 common ways of creating a report for use by SQL Reporting Services.
- Reports in SQL Reporting Services use the Report Description Language (RDL) which is an XML based standard for defining reports. Since it is simply XML, a report can be written using any text editor.
- SQL Report Designer which is available to those owning licenses for both SQL Server and Visual Studio.NET 2003. The Report Designer is a Visual Studio.NET 2003 add-in packaged with SQL Reporting Services and, when installed, makes available a Report project type in Visual Studio.NET 2003.