I don’t write that many Crystal Reports but when I do it is a refreshing change. They integrate nicely with Raiser’s Edge and as I showed with my previous post you can write code that will open up a Crystal Report and run it without having to run an export first. You can use any data source instead of a Raiser’s Edge export. The formula language is quite intuitive if you have worked with VBA, VB6 or VB.NET (and simple enough for those with any other mainstream language experience). However, the other day I need to pad a number with some leading zero. In VB.NET there is the String.LeftPad method which works really well. No such luck with Crystal.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
Off Topic – Praise for Evohosting
This is completely off topic but I want to shower my web hosting provider with praise. Why now? Well no particular reason other than I have been thinking about doing it for a while. When I lived in the States I had my website on one of the big providers. It was OK but when I ran into problems they could not fix it, they left me waiting and my site was down. It left a bit of a bad feeling.
I now have my website with Evohosting and have done for the past several years. The contrast could not be different. I am not quite sure how large they are but they give the impression of being very personal. In my previous hosting their emails would be signed off as “support staff” or something equally generic and impersonal. With Evohosting I know the names of those that contact me. Their response times to queries are always very fast and I have yet had a problem that they could not help solve. I am not sure about how much these things should cost but they have always struck me as being very competitively priced for the packages that they provide and certainly for the service that they offer.
In a world where people rant and have a go at bad service Evohosting is a refreshing change. Thanks