Crystal Reports support/roadmap for Azure App Service?

[timmer3]

My question is about Crystal Reports for Visual Studio, and deployment in Azure App Service. i understand that the way the CR runtime has been built there are dependencies on registry settings and COM etc., and it's intertwined with the operating system rather than a contained / application deployment. Setting up an Azure virtual machine requires additional licensing, maintenance and security administration, which undermines the primary benefits of cloud hosting.

a stackoverflow article from 2012 has some steps and workarounds, referring to this blogpost but reading down the comments it is plagued with problems of crashing the web application and lack of scalability.

is this not a massive obstacle for people at the moment? i've been using Crystal Reports in .Net web applications since 2003 and i struggle to see why the product has not become truly "Azure-friendly" by 2020... is it on the roadmap to enable pure DLL only deployment of Crystal Reports? or should we be migrating to a reporting platform that fully supports the Azure infrastructure?

i'm hoping there may be an official & up-to-date user guide for deploying Crystal Reports in Azure without using a virtual machine, that is both reliable and scalable, and i've just been unable to find it.

[ido_millet · Accepted solution]

Please search this forum for '.net core'

The answers for that topic apply to your situation as well.

[former_member11696]

To answer why back when Microsoft announced they were dropping COM and wanted everyone to start using .NET framework CR did so and dropped the RDC COM engine and created a .NET Framework version. MS then announced they were not dropping COM due to public back lash, but CR was committed.

CR for VS was/is basically a wrapper around our COM components and therefore requires the full Framework version to work. In early days you could not use the "Client Framework", it was not complete enough for CR to work.

Same as Core, it's not complete enough either, it is getting closer but R&D has no plans to support it.

As Ido indicated, we can work in Azure but it still requires the full framework and CR's runtime to be installed using the MSI packages, it's the nature of the Framework not to be able to compile all into a single EXE.

Don