Report Viewer Enhancements in VS.NET 2005 SP1

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As you probably know by now, Microsoft has recently released Service Pack 1 of Visual Studio.NET 2005. Since the Report Viewer controls are owned by the VS.NET team, it turned out that they have been updated also. Many bug fixes have been implemented. The new features include:

Report Viewer ASP.NET Control Enhancements

  • Reset method to reset the control to its default values.

Both ASP.NET and Windows Forms versions

  • ServerReport.Cookies property to pass cookies to the server (useful if the Report Server is configured for custom security).
  • ServerReport.Headers property to pass custom HTTP headers to the server (useful if the Report Server is configured for custom security).  
  • New (currently undocumented) IReportViewerMessages2 interface for localizing additional menu strings that were not covered by the original IReportViewerMessages interface.

Strangely, VS.NET 2005 SP1 doesn't update the product documentation (perhaps, the next edition of MSDN library will) so you need to rely on the online documentation.

How can you tell if you have the SP1 version of the controls? Once you install SP1 (don't interrupt the second part!!!), open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\ReportViewer. Right-click on one of the assemblies there (e.g. Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms.dll), choose Properties and flip to the Version tab. The file version should be 8.0.50727.762 and it should match the GAC version of the same assembly.

CTP3 Build of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 Released

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In the spirit of the season, the SQL Server team give us the third (and probably last before the final release) CTP3 build (version 9.00.3033.0000) for the forthcoming SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2.

Losing Identity

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After installing CTP2 of SQL Server 2005 SP2, I started getting a rather annoying exception when attempting to launch the Report Builder.

An application for this deployment is already installed with a different application identity.

I’ve noticed that this happens when I run the Report Builder form a server that has CTP2 installed and then I run it from my local machine that doesn’t have CTP2 installed. While I wasn’t able to find what’s causing ClickOnce to lose identity, the workaround I found was to nuke the Report Builder download folders as follows:

  1. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Documents and Settings\<your user name>\Local Settings\Apps\2.0
  2. Delete all folders below the folder except the Data folder.