To design the layout of a report in Visual Studio you can use the toolbox, in which you will find all the controls you can use on your report. It's with this toolbox, by clicking on a control and dropping (or by drag and drop or drag and draw), that you can add to the report. You can also right-click on the layout (the body, header, or footer) and insert a control.
Note
There are multiple ways of achieving the same goal. In this book, I will use and demonstrate the steps I apply on a daily basis in real life. Keep in mind that there might be different ways to do the same thing, but I will not document all of them.
The controls in the toolbox can be divided into report items and data regions. Report items represent information, which might come from the dataset. Examples of these types of report items are lines and rectangles. Images and textboxes are independent report items that can be connected to a field from the dataset, but it's not mandatory.