SharpShooter Reports in 2026: What Still Works

The confusion with SharpShooter Reports rarely starts with the reporting engine. It starts with the designer. A team inherits a WinForms application where someone embedded Perpetuum Software's report designer inside the host app so business users could build their own layouts without opening a ticket. Nobody currently on the team installed it, nobody kept the setup notes, and the .NET Framework project underneath it is the one nobody wants to move.

Full disclosure. We build IronPDF at Iron Software, and this read looks at where SharpShooter Reports's decade-stale release record and missing current-.NET path cost a team, and where IronPDF renders the same report to PDF on today's .NET from one package.

We checked this against Perpetuum Software's own changelog pages, published system requirements, its reseller listing on ComponentSource, and NVD's CVE records directly.

What does SharpShooter Reports still do well?

SharpShooter Reports' most durable capability, and the one thing IronPDF does not attempt, is a bundled, end-user-facing report designer with its own scripting support. A non-developer can build or adjust a report layout inside the application itself, without a code change or a redeploy, which is exactly why so many of these installs are still running. Its export matrix is wide for a single report definition, covering PDF, HTML, EMF, BMP, JPG, GIF, TIFF, PNG, XLS, Excel XML, CSV, TXT, and RTF from the same report, and .NET Framework support reaches back to version 2.0, the reason it still runs inside WinForms estates current libraries will not touch. Both capabilities sit inside a product whose own vendor stopped publishing anything past 2015, and that gap is what the rest of this piece works through.

That places it as a report designer and document-automation component rather than a PDF rendering library, with a visual layout surface, data binding to arbitrary sources, and scripting hooks IronPDF was never built to have. The surrounding platform, the .NET Framework runtime and its tooling, is aging out from underneath a product no longer being actively developed to follow it.

Rendering on current .NET

That aging platform is exactly where a current renderer takes over. Set the designer's own job aside, and what is left is one export step, and on current .NET it reads like this.

// Install-Package IronPdf
using IronPdf;

var renderer = new ChromePdfRenderer();
using var pdf = renderer.RenderHtmlAsPdf(reportHtml);
pdf.SaveAs("report.pdf");

That renders the report step's HTML into a PDF and writes it to disk, whether the source is a static template or generated from application data.

Where IronPDF is not the answer is the report designer itself. If end users or business analysts are still opening SharpShooter's designer and adjusting report layouts without a developer involved, that capability has no code-only replacement. Moving off it means finding a different designer-driven tool, or accepting that layout changes become a code change and a deploy, a tradeoff worth weighing as part of the migration plan.

Full API documentation covers every option on the renderer, and the NuGet installation path targets current .NET directly, no separate designer runtime required.

If the migration also needs to combine or split existing report output, or lock the result down with edit and print restrictions, both are one call on the same renderer.

Where does the vendor record go quiet?

The rendering path is settled. The product behind the designer is not, and its paper trail stops abruptly.

• No vendor-documented release in over a decade: Perpetuum Software's own changelog pages for both Reports.Win and Reports.Enterprise end at version 7.3.1, dated 8 September 2015. A 7.5.0 build circulates through reseller ComponentSource, but no release notes for it exist anywhere, so there is no way to confirm what changed or when it shipped.
• No .NET path exists beyond Framework: system requirements list .NET Framework 2.0 and higher, with IDE support ending at Visual Studio 2017, and no .NET Core, .NET 5 or later, or container deployment documented anywhere in the product's history.
• The distributor already marked it discontinued: ComponentSource states that SharpShooter Collection has been discontinued. New and additional licenses can still be purchased, but without further product updates or support, and the Lite and Express editions are no longer supported at all.

The same quiet extends to security tracking. NVD returns zero results for a SharpShooter keyword search, and a search for Perpetuum returns exactly one CVE, 2026-28100, belonging to LambertGroup's UberSlider PerpetuumMobile, an unrelated WordPress and jQuery slider plugin, not Perpetuum Software's reporting components. A decade without a documented release means there is no active patch pipeline behind the product, so the absence of CVEs reflects nobody publicly disclosing one against inactive software, not the confirmed record an actively maintained library earns.

That leaves one place the two products still meet on the same ground, the PDF each one produces.

Keep the designer, or move the render?

A decade past its last documented release, SharpShooter Reports has no path forward. No current .NET support, no cross-platform story, and a distributor that already called the product line discontinued.

When the report-authoring workflow still matters to the people using it, that capability needs a real replacement. If what is left is a data-bound template that needs to become a PDF, a currently maintained renderer picks that up directly.

Is the SharpShooter designer still something your end users actually open, or has your application quietly settled into generating fixed-layout PDFs from code? That answer changes what the right migration looks like, so tell us which one matches your situation in the comments.

If a data-bound HTML template is the last piece left in your pipeline, IronPDF's free trial lets you run the renderer above against your own report output before committing to anything.

SharpShooter Reports is a trademark of its owner, and this piece is not affiliated. The changelog, system requirements, distributor status, and CVE details above are drawn from Perpetuum Software's own documentation, ComponentSource, and NVD as they stood at the time of writing. If a detail has changed since, correct us in the comments.