I had my company buy the ubiquitous Dundas components for me to fulfill some reporting requirements in a C# application, and I don't regret it one bit. The Enterprise Edition bells/whistles came in particularly handy, so I recommend the upsell if you ahve the budget. I didn't have occasion to work with the OLAP stuff (included with the Enterprise bundle), but have proposed that for consideration in the the scoping of some upcoming projects utilizing these and SSAS.
The coolest things about the tool are (a) tight integration with VS2005 IDE and (b) the point at which they stop the declarative code overhead and push you to the codebehind. It's a fine line, this latter thing, but they dance on it well - just enough to satisfy rapid "you mean like this?" prototypes for peers and project managers with the flexibility to databind and do whatever custom manipulations you want in the background. A black box for sure, but at least it's open on one side. And that was plenty.
One disappointment, and it's really a minor one in the grand scheme of things, was with their Gantt charting options. I worked with the declarative and set tons of variables behind the scenes, but wound up abandoning it Sunday night to build my own C# Gantt library using GDI+ (at the absolute inside of everything) with nested gridviews. I had two people advise me on separate occasions, one before and one after I wrote the GDI components, to "just build a table and fill in the cells." But we're talking about 100+ projects with lots of resources, along with a complicated color scheme on the bars for individuals->depts->project roles. (And did I mention unique shades per resource name? :) Managing (and rendering!) that much HTML, when I could do it better in managed code, makes no sense to me.
I was thinking to myself, "I wonder if I can port this app to PHP..." the entire time and of course the answer is yes (likely with fewer function calls), but all in all the Dundas product gave me a good start on producing glossy, extensible charts from an ever-dynamic dataset. Now if I could just get these GDI-rendered labels to line up...
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