Thanks for the new links. I"M sure the UK residents will be happy to know that they can get Crystal Reports Developer at the discounted price as well. 

Re whether the client's require new installations or your app, the answer is Yes. The DLLs that make VS 2005 compatible with Crystal REports XI are ONLY in the XI R2 release. This is a whole new build that was released after Visual Studio 2005 was released and fixes the compatibility problems. So you will have to do some more work to update all the machines after you recompile your app with the new libraries.

The problem with Crystal Reports is that it is not an XCopy compliant tool. You have to use the installation modules because it does tons of changes to the registry and whatnot. So you can't just copy the DLLs to the application folder like you would for pure .NET components. HOWEVER, I think that on their website they have a stand-alone installation executable that might work with .NET 2005. I haven't tried it yet, but I think that is the case. Of course, test thoroughly prior to a full roll-out (and report back to us if it works!)  

Update:

For those interested I had some trouble with the installation. I thought it had gone wrong on my laptop.

If you are using visual studio 2005 and upgrade to XI make sure you get Release 2. Don't bother downloading Release 1. The upgrade from R1 to R2 on my laptop took 3 hours and then was unusable for 2 hours lol.

Also, something I found out is that the Crystal Reports bootstrapper assumes that you have installed Visual Studio 2005 in the default place. ie. c:\program files\Microsoft visual studio 8\.. etc.

If, like me, you have not installed into this directory, to get your setup project to work you have to copy 'c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 8\sdk\v2.0\bootstrapper\packages\crystalreports\' to the equivalent place of your install. Make sure you delete the existing 'crystalreports' folder.

In the setup project you then have to right-click the setup project and choose properties. Click on 'prerequisites' and deselect 'Crystal Report for .NET 2.0' (which should show a warning) and instead tick 'Crystal Report XI Release 2'. All should then be well.

I can report back that the upgrade was positive for me. The ability to edit reports in the standalone editor is a big bonus for me. I haven't yet tackled the existing clients but there is a standalone installer as Brian suggested although it is not silent and requires my key. However, users I think can run the new install and then cancel installing my app. This will then install the new Crystal Reports engine without deleting the existing app. They can then upgrade using my own updater.

The Crystal Reports installer takes a lot longer but my report generation from data seems to be a lot quicker.

Another issue that came up immediately was the Business Objects logo that now appered on my report viewers. There is no property in VS to remove this so I use the following code in the form_load event....

Dim d As ToolStrip = CType(CRviewer.Controls(1), ToolStrip)    
d.items(d.items.count - 1).Visible = false

In the above 'CRviewer' is what ever you called you CrystalReportViewer component in your form and the '.Control(1)' number was discovered by trial and error. I have hidden various bits in my CrystalReportViewer. On the Business Objects site they suggest this should be '.Control(3)' but for me '.Control(1)' did the trick.

The only outstanding issue, which is not a major one, is that it always reinstalls the CR runtimes when you run the setup project msi. Before it would detect if the cr.net runtimes were installed (like .net does) and skip. Now it just seems to repeatedly install them. Minor gripe and unlikely to be a major problem.

Jon.

Edited by DreamState - 16 Mar 2007 at 4:37am