Well, not much really...

Here's the list from the docs...

Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008 is an upgrade to Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005. Several new features have been added in this release.

Not that these aren't important thnigs - they certainly are. But this is "Crystal Reports 2008 Basic".

The regular (recently released) "Crystal Reports 2008" ($295 to upgrade if you have the version bundled in with VS2008) has new features such as lots of flash integration (hey where's the silverlight integration?), built in sorting & filtering that doesn't require additional hits to the db, built in easy access to the parameters (we don't have to code this), a data driver for accessing services on the web (hmmmm, Astoria (err ADO.NET Data Services)) has another way of removing a huge layer of pain around this. There are also some design time features that look nice - tools for searching for report metadata (eg. formulas, etc.), smaller footprint for deployment and ONE SKU, which makes life much less confusing.

There's a trial version. I haven't checked it out. I'm hoping someone will point out more new things in the "Basic" (bundled) version that are worth writing home about.

Here's the funny part. I poked around CR in VS2008 RTM and saw things I had never seen before. Why? Because I had never bothered poking around this way in the VS2005 version. I ported a ton of reports from VS2003 and created a few new ones, but never literally asked "what's new & improved? Let's see." So it only took me a few years to catch up.

I should probably do the same with some of the others out there (e.g. telerik's which I played with a while back, ActiveReports, Infragistics, etc. etc.), but I have to say, having it right there in the box of Visual Studio is (and has been for a long time) a huge benefit for Business Objects (company that makes Crystal) thanks to so many lazy developers.