Crystal Reports for VS2012 – free or not

crystal-reportsvisual studio 2012

Since Visual Studio 2010 Crystal Reports are no longer part of Visual Studio.
I'm using Visual Studio 2012 Professional and despite checking various sources I cannot reliably determine whether I can

  1. freely download and use Crystal Reports Developer version for development of commercial applications in Visual Studio 2012

  2. freely distribute and install Crystal Reports Runtime for running apps (developed above) at clients

In other words, do I need to purchase a license or not? Do clients need purchase their licenses, too?

(Besides your answer, providing link to sources of information will be appreciated.)

FYI – For obtaining Crystal Reports, there is a great resource containing all versions and package types, but still leaving me without the answer.

Best Answer

Yes, basic solutions, that allow a developer to generate and deploy reports, are free.
Advanced solutions, that allow end user to create, edit and share reports are not free.

  • It is free the IDE to be used with Visual Studio; stand alone full IDE is not free

  • Crystal Reports Runtime for running apps is free. SAP Crystal Server is not free.

EDIT

Look at this article: How do you spell confusion; CR for VS, Crystal 2011, BI 4.x and the .NET SDKs

And "Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010" (CRVS2010) is born. Note that this version, follows in the footsteps of CR 10.5; it only works in the VS 2010 IDE. E.g.; it is not a stand alone executable like CR XI R2 or CR 2008. CRVS 2010 has both 32 bit and 64 bit runtime. And it has the Crystal Reports SDK for .NET as well as the InProc RAS SDK. And it's FREE(!).

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