Upgrading Crystal Reports Files from VS2005 to VS2008

I just upgraded a fairly large project from Visual Studio 2005 to 2008. Everything went fairly smoothly but I did encounter hundreds of errors when I got around to upgrading the Crystal Reports data files.

In VS2005 I have a pair of files for each report:

• ReportName.rpt
• ReportName.xsd

where "ReportName" changes accordingly.

In VS2008, when you bring an XSD file into a project it creates 3 other files:

• ReportName.Designer.cs
• ReportName.xsc
• ReportName.xss

I didn't know the purpose of this trio but assumed they were necessary in VS2008.

In point of fact, all the conflicts occured within the ".Designer.cs" files. There are global variables in each one that cause repeat definitions of the same variables, which is not allowed.

So I did a little research and came across this blog entry. I ended up following just the first part, which was to delete the ".Designer.cs" and ".xss" files. Plus, because all the ".xsc" files were empty, I deleted them too.

Lo and behold, I rebuilt the solution but these excess files were never recreated. More importantly, the reports worked perfectly once again!

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Update: One problem I've discovered with the above procedure is that you still end up with one warning message per report like this:

The custom tool 'MSDataSetGenerator' failed while processing the file 'Reports\Templates\MTHOBRK3.xsd'.

The application still runs but I don't like any such warning messages to be present. After a little trial & error I found this to be the ultimate solution:

1. Delete the .xsc & .xss files only.
2. Replace the entire contents of each .Designer.cs file with the following:

#pragma warning disable 1591

namespace Website.Reports.Templates
{
public partial class NewDataSet
{
}
}

#pragma warning restore 1591