Lazycoder

SQL Reporting services is working on my dev machine

I finally got SQL Reporting services working. Yay! Turns out the culprit(s) were a BUNCH of artifacts in the Private Assemblies folder. Once I deleted them with reckless abandon (any other plugins I have installed can go fish if it means I get to use the Reporting Services) I was able to create a new Reporting Project. Here’s the newsgroup post I made in the “SQL Server Reporting Services” newsgroup

I had a couple of problems installing the SQL Reporting services tool. Mainly related to extra assemblies left behind in the Private Assemblies folder by plugins (a ReSharper Beta was the biggest culprit, it doesn’t uninstall cleanly).

My first problem was an error message when creating a new Report Project “The located assembly’s manifest definition with name “Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop” does not match the assembly reference.”. This was solved by deleting the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Shell.Interop.dll left behind by ReSharper in the Private Assemblies folder.

The second problem I had was an error message telling me “application for project type rptproj is not installed”. This was also caused by some dll in the Private Assemblies folder. This time I didn’t mess around, I just deleted all the dlls in that folder with reckless abandon. I’d love to know which specific assembly might cause that error though. There were 3 or 4 dlls that started with “Microsoft” in there. It could possibly have been one of those.

After I cleaned out the Private Assemblies folder, I was able to create a new Reporting Project. I may uninstall the Reporting Services tool and re-install it in case I deleted any assemblies required for it from the Private Assemblies folder.

You can read more about them here:

http://www.lazycoder.com/weblog/wp-trackback.php/45

and here:

http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2004/02/26/390.aspx?Pending=true

So, it’s not entirely Microsoft’s fault. The error messages could have been a little more clear. But could they? Can you really anticipate stuff like this?

I would advise anyone having problems installing a VSIP or the Reporting Services package to check out your Private Assemblies folder.

On another note: Does anyone know of a tool that will let you view the dependancies for a given assembly/executible and their physical location on the hard disk? I’ve seen lots that tell you the version # and the assembly name, but not where they are located.

Update: Albert Yen responded to my newsgroup posting telling me that the SQL Reporting Services tool does not install anything in the private assemblies folder.

We do not install any files in the Private Assemblies directory. There are
several versions of Microsoft.VisualStudio.*.Interop floating around and
they would cause conflicts if any of them were found in the Private
Assemblies directory. We specifically avoided this directory because of the
potential for such conflicts.

–
Albert Yen
SQL Server Reporting Services

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