ReportViewer only pulls back 100 Work Items by default

Our release manager comes to me today and says he really likes the Report Viewer option in Team System Web Access, but hates the fact that he's limited to only viewing a 100 work items. At first I thought he was crazy - I have similar thoughts about most manager types - but after peering over his shoulder, he was right, only 100 work items showed up.

I started by digging on the forums and didn't find much. Turns out Google didn't know either so I started to track it down in our DEV environment.

If you open the Web.config under \Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System Web Access\Web, you'll find a setting for "maxWorkitemsInReportList" which defaults to 100. Push the value up a bit (we set ours to 200) and you get the requested results.

Why didn't I set it to 2000? Here is my logic; I figure Microsoft put a limit on the number of work items for a reason. I'm guessing performance, though I don't have any proof. The release manager said he would not expect anything near 200 at this point, but did have queries that pulled back more than 100. So we agreed on 200 for now and shook hands. We can gradually push the value up as we go.

I'd be interested to hear from someone with far more Report Viewer knowledge that I to comment on why there is a default max limit set.