Is Visual studio 2017 supported i Crystal Reports Developer Servicepack 20

[Former Member]

Hello

Is Visual studio 2017 supported i Crystal Reports Developer Servicepack 20 release today here:

https://wiki.scn.sap.com/wiki/display/BOBJ/Crystal+Reports,+Developer+for+Visual+Studio+Downloads

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Hi Ole,

Not officially but I tried it and opening existing projects works fine. VS will use the CR assemblies located in the GAC so there should not be any build issues.

Only part that will be missing is when creating new Projects you will not have CR Projects in the list and no Built in CR Basic Designer in the VS IDE.

SP21 should be fully supported and integrated into VS 2017 due out in August.

Don

[former_member314634 · Accepted solution]

Why does it take so long? It's not like Microsoft didn't issue release candidates months before the official release. It must not be a priority!

[former_member11696 · Accepted solution]

Because Release candidates are still considered Beta. At any time they could change or pull some feature/function before going GA which could potentially break something or everything we may had added in.

It's safer and more cost effective to wait for the final release and then integrate into the product.

Same thing if we did it with some beta patch for you. If QA finds some ship killer and they remove some functionality that you depended on it forces you to then rewrite your app and go through a full QA cycle etc...Not to mention the costs incurred by you re-developing your release.

CR for VS is not the same CR Basic we used to embed in VS. It's full featured including RAS so it's not a simple QA test/check to release, it can potentially affect a lot of the product.

And because CR for VS is free we only release patches four times a year, we actually wanted to release in SP 20 with VS 2017 supported but due some other legacy updates which is going to take longer to implement and resolve any issues Dev asked Me if they could delay SP 20 2 or 3 months or wait for SP 21 to support VS 2017. I opted for waiting due to some formatting issue we had with updated Framework versions. And some other parts need to be updated, USP10 is a formatting component we heavily rely on and we need to update it to version 1.6 from 1.4. Another huge upgrade is building the components in VS C++ compiler using VS 2015 and to get off of mscvp80, VS 2005 C++ Security dependency because MS no longer supports it, only in extended mode...

So lots of reasons why we postponed it, it's more than just a simple plug-in into VS 2017 and releasing....

Don

[former_member11696]

Remove all CR assemblies and add them back in, it is noted in the What's new....

[Former Member]

After I installed ServicePack 21.

VS2017 and VS2015 have the same error.

I got this error when I open the report in browser.

System.InvalidCastException: Can not convert COM object of type 'CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.Controllers.ReportSourceClass' to interface type 'CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.Controllers.ISCRReportSource'. The interface failed because the QueryInterface call on the COM component of the interface (IID '{98CDE168-C1BF-4179-BE4C-F2CFA7CB8398}) failed due to the following error: does not support this interface (exception occurred at HRESULT: 0x80004002 ( E_NOINTERFACE)).

[former_member1123427]

Warning 98 A custom tool 'CrystalDecisions.VSDesigner.CodeGen.ReportCodeGenerator' is associated with file 'Results\CrReports\Eingabe2Report.rpt', but the output of the custom tool was not found in the project. You may try re-running the custom tool by right-clicking on the file in the Solution Explorer and choosing Run Custom Tool.

This is what we get when we try to compile our project with Visual Studio 2010. What to do?

[Former Member]

Don,

Is there any news on the release of SP21?

(A beta version perhaps?)

Regards,

Theo

[Former Member]

I have a work-around for Visual Studio 2017:

If you don't have a supported version of visual studio installed:

1. Install a supported version of Visual Studio 2015 (you can do a absolute minimum install)
2. After this you can install Crystal Reports for VS SP20

Then load a project with a crystal report in it in VS2017

Right click the report and select Open With, select Devenv.exe from your VS2015 install, and set it default.

Now you can edit the reports from VS2015, while developing in VS2017

[former_member11696]

Ah, nice hack Theo.... Just a reminder the embedded CR Designer built into VS is CR BAsic, it does not have all features and functions and should not be used as the final format, it's only to show there is a report.... Preview in your app to validate the report works.

You can just install the 32 and 64 bit Redist packages so the CR assemblies get into the GAC and then you can open existing projects or create new ones. No template Projects so you have to add all of the CR assemblies to your project manually but is will work.

Once SP 21 ( or which ever one does support VS 2017 ) is released then just uninstall the redist package and use the install it get the update).