Is there a way to make VS2008 work with the old (vs2005 crystal reports) assemblies and not require any updates to be installed in the client machines?
We have upgraded a Visual Studio 2005 .net 2.0 solution to Visual Studio 2008. The purpose is to take advantage of the IDE improvements and because it supports multi targeting. The solution still has to be built against .net 2.0.
It all works as advertised, we rebuild and run it in a machine with only .net 2.0 installed. But during testing we get an exception when we try to show a Crystal Report that is included with the application.
Then upon review we find out that without telling us, Visual Studio changed the references to the crystal assemblies and pointed our solution to the updated versions that come with vs2008, which requires crystal runtime be updated on client machines.
We did try removing the references and adding the old ones but it won't compile.
Best Answer
don't use Crystal reports
You could try to put all reports in a separate project. Then create a second visual studio solution in VS2005 which uses the same project (add existing project). Then use VS2005 for editing your reports. Create a library directory for your references in vs2008 and reference the vs2005 dll's.
Don't know for sure if it works, but it could be worth a try.