Card Print in C#

I'm going to develop a small windows application using C# .NET in VS 2010. The app should read the personnel's d开发者_JS百科ata and fill a card layout's fields and then user can click the print button in order to print the card. What is the best solution for printing the card and displaying it to the user?

Like all thing in programming it depends on how much work you want to do. In our app (not sure if I am allowed to post a link, so better not) we take the data from user in a fairly standard form and then use standard graphical style calls to draw the card. This same code can then either draw into an image control for showing to the user OR to a printer device to produce the final output. We have (several) abstraction layers so that the calls for drawing into either type of output are the same.

In general we have found it much more productive to develop our own custom solutions rather than rely on a reporting component. The custom solution is easier to change and in most cases the functionality actually required takes only a day or so of work.

ReportViewerControl http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms251671.aspx is a possible candidate. it is free of charge if you have Visual Studio and it can export the report in PDF too. You can bind to a custom DataSource ( it does not need a Database behind ) and when it's done customizing takes minutes.