Elkoush M. - Reporting with Visual Studio and Crystal Reports

Mahmoud Elkoush has over six years experience in software development. He has used many technologies throughout his career such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle database, Crystal Reports, and so on. He has worked as a Project Manager in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for nearly two years, and currently works as the Chief Information Officer of Geomeric.

This is the first book that Mahmoud has written, and he hopes it will be the first of many.

I want to thank my wife because she convinced me to write this book and supported me a lot to produce it.

Mohammed Imran Alam can be described as a simple, hardworking, technology-enthusiast, and a fun-, family-, and God-loving person. He comes from a small village in India known as Adilabad and loves to mention his village whenever he gets a chance because he would like people to know about it. He had his elementary education in one of the best schools, St Joseph's Convent School, Adilabad, and he owes a lot to this school for making him who he is today, of course after his parents' upbringing. Other hobbies include playing and watching cricket, and he gives it his 100 percent when he is at ground playing this great sport. There are still a few teams in the US who think that he has still got potential to be a match winner, and constantly want him in their team. He hopes they don't regret their decision to include him in playing eleventh.

With regards to his career, he always thinks that it was his destiny to be landed in the field of Business Intelligence. After completing his Bachelors in ECE (Electronics and Telecommunications) from Osmania University, he landed an offer to work in Saudi Arabia to work as a Crystal Reports developer based on his credentials as an Oracle programmer. This was the first time he was introduced to Crystal Reports (Version 7 at that time), and it was like "love at first sight", with reporting and BI field of course. Since then, 14 long years have passed with him working on all kinds of products that are related to Crystal Reports. He has seen this beautiful product grow with with the introduction of Enterprise Software as a distribution tool for reports in different formats (which is now SAP Business Objects Enterprise 4.0) and with the implementation of other awesome products such as Explorer/Dashboard Design etc etera, all of which complement the core reporting.

He considers himself to be blessed with gifts from God, a beautiful wife, and three awesome kids who keep him going. He is also surrounded by very good friends that he made starting from his kindergarten days to his Engineering days. Twitter (@ReportExpert is his handle) and other social media sites make it easier to be in touch with them and he likes to keep in touch with everyone. Along with this great bunch, he is able to do some philanthropic work and help poor and needy people back home.

He has this personal message: "This is all I had to mention about me, thanks for reading it and I hope you will love this book and gain the knowledge you were looking for."

He writes some topics that are personal/technical on his blog www.imranalam.com. You are most welcome to read it and make comments. He likes to read all his comments especially if they are critical about a topic or article that he has posted, as that helps him understand their perspective and allows him to correct it.

I would like to thank my mom, wife, and kids, who have always sacrificed the quality time I could have spent with them.

Adeel Nasir is an IT professional with a total of nine and a half years experience in the IT industry on software/web analysis, engineering, development, and deployment. He currently works in a software company in Dubai as a Systems Analyst.

He is experienced in ASP.NET(C#), web services, and Microsoft SQL Server. He has also worked on Ultimus BPM suite (workflow automation tool) for three years. He also worked for one year in configuration/administration, development, and management of MOSS 2007.

He is a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist for TS: Microsoft .NET Framework - Application Development Foundation (70-536), Web-based Client Development (70-528), and Programming in HTML 5 with JavaScript and CSS3 (70-480).

He has been Microsoft's Guest Speaker at different universities and has written many articles on IT in different local magazines. He was one of the trainers of ASP.NET Workshop at a well-known university in June 2008 as well as managing training on ASP.NET 2.0 at the same time. He also judged the software competition called Bits Bytes and Colors 2007 at a well-known university.

He is also managing a blog (http://fuzon.biz) to help the IT community with the solutions of problems that they face. Actually, this blog is a mixture (fusion) of content on different categories, for example, technology, travel, news, fun, and much more.

He is also working with a bunch of IT professionals on a freelance basis to provide technology solutions. Details can be found at (>.

I would like to thank my family and friends for their continuous support in this regard.