Distributing proper Crystal Reports dll's in VB.NET application

EliCat

Member
Joined
Aug 29, 2002
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17
Location
Netherlands
Ive already searched high and low on the www.crystaldecisions.com and wherever else I could think off, but havent found a satisfactory answer to an annoying problem.
Ive even unsuccessfully tried to get an answer from the C.D. staff and seeing as Ive had great help on this forum in the past I figured I might try it here as a last resort.




Is there a way to force merge modules to grab the proper/latest versions of the Crystal Decisions dlls from a developer system when an application is packaged for distribution?



I ask because my problem is this:

Visual Studio .NET installs version 9.1.9370.0 of CrystalDecisions.Windows.Forms.dll but this dll contains a known bug when it comes to printing in landscape format.

On my developer system (win2000 Pro with service pack 3) that runs VS.NET I can easily fix my problem by running the cr10netwin_en.exe patch which upgrades my dll to version 9.1.9466.8.
However when I package my application and use Managed.msm, regwiz.msm and DataAccess.msm to include the CR dlls the older 9.1.9370.0 version is packaged and not the newer version.

On a test system (also win2000 Pro with service pack 3) which runs only the .NET Framework I can then install my application and run the cr10netwin_en.exe patch to upgrade the dlls on the test system.
The upgrade of the dlls works fine (in the c:\program files\common files\crystal decisions\1.0 folder) EXCEPT that the entries in my Assembly Cache (located in c:\winnt\assembly) arent upgraded.
And because this entry isnt upgraded I am unable to automatically print my reports on the test system in landscape format.

With loads of trial and error Ive found a way to manually upgrade the assembly cache entries on the test system by copying gacutil.exe and gacutil.exe.config from my development system to the test system and force an upgrade of the cache entry CrystalDecisions.Windows.Forms.dll.
It seems that gacutil is able to force an upgrade of the assembly cache while (at least on the test system) the cr10netwin_en.exe patch is apparantly unable to do the same.


So now I can at least let our in-house testers test a proper version of the reports, but this application has to be sold commercially and I cant very well let our customers go through all those steps (not even the patching), especially not since the steps need to be repeated each time the application is (re-)installed (the installation resets all the dlls and also the entry in the assembly cache).


I am therefore looking for a more permanent solution, one that lets me automatically package the correct dlls from my developer system and that lets me install our application without needing to run any CR patch or using gacutil to upgrade the cache entry.


Does anyone have a clue how I can do this?
 
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