This one isn't a rant... surprise! ... this one is to report how I resolved the latest problem I had and some of the web resources I used for it.
I've been working moving some web applications and associated Oracle databases from an old server to a new virtual one. I finally got the production applications running and had asked the IT folks to give me an alias through DNS to my test .NET 2.0 application that I want to run on the same server. First I had problems with getting 404 errors, and that'll be a different post, but once I started seeing Crystal Reports errors I knew I was getting there... sad how the error messages give you that warm and fuzzy :)
At first glance at the errors, I thought it was missing all the VS2005 assemblies. Not surprising, since I had just gone through this exercise for VS2003 and the legacy .NET 1.1 apps that I'm replacing. So I figured... what the heck, I know what I'm doing here, right?
Turns out, I had already run what I thought were the important parts of VS2005 in using a setup.msi that called out some merge modules, but I guess I needed more. Since the ones I was needing didn't involve license keys, I thought I could just copy them into the GAC.
I went on a search mission for them and dang... they don't live on my machine anywhere other than in the GAC... so I guess they were installed straight there by the VS2005 install. Hmmm...
That's when I came across this article by Richard Dudley. Richard has some good hacks in there, and one of them was to go to the reference (in your VS2005 project) for the ones that are missing, select one, go to properties, then set the "Copy Local" property to 'True'. I did that for the 2 that it was complaining about that were in my Reference list, and when I published the app, hey look! ... there they are in my bin folder... cool :)
I went one farther than that though, after I played with it... after I had a copy in my bin folder, I copied them to the GAC on the server, and then set the Reference properties back.
So far so good, but yikes ... it's still not running, and now it's complaining about some crap that not only is NOT in my Reference list, but also not anywhere on my machine... sigh... back to Google.
That's when I came across this page from Business Objects... I guess that's what CrystalReports now is? ... anyway, this page is for VS2005, back the link up or take a menu to find the one for your system. There's a doc and a merge module in that zip and tells you how to build the setup.msi to get everyone onboard.
I followed the instructions, built the setup.msi according to the doc, accessed it from the server, and w00t... it works!
Whew... This actually took less time than the freaking IIS issues, but am I glad it's done. I still have some CSS issues on the pages to get the look-and-feel to match what the users are used to, but it's very nice to see all this come up from the new server!
I have been archiving sites that have been useful to me for all the CrystalReports issues I've had and they can be found here: http://www.wynapse.com/TagContent.aspx?Tag=CrystalReports.
Of course this has nothing whatsoever to do with Silverlight, so be sure to check out some Slverlight goodness on one of the links below :)
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posted @ Thursday, May 08, 2008 8:58 AM