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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T03:25:56+00:00

I’ve been assigned to a new project. I have to maintain an application which

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I’ve been assigned to a new project. I have to maintain an application which was made in Visual Studio 2003 (VB.NET, Framework 1.1) and Crystal Reports which came included with the IDE. The application is absolutely what we call "legacy code".

Just to make the test, today I’ve tried to convert the application in Visual Studio 2010. The converter is offering me download SAP Crystal Reports, with no cost and no registration.

The question is: Does anybody has experience with this components? Is feasible to migrate an application as described to VS 2010?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The quick answer is yes, it is feasible. I’ve used Crystal Reports from VS2003 to VS2010 upgrading my code at each point along the way. The actual Crystal Report files tend to port very well between versions.

    A few notes:

    • When you upgrade, you will need to install the new Crystal Reports runtime for the version of the framework you’re using on whatever machine needs to run these (whether it’s the runtime or the merge modules).
    • I went from 2003->2005->2008->2010. I haven’t gone straight from 2003->2010 but I don’t think that will be a problem with the actual report. The viewer controls may have changed. When you upgrade your project it may try to use the older viewers which may or may not fit your need. If you’re just using a Viewer control on a form you can probably rebuild it quickly. If not you can try removing the old components and then places new ones onto the form and see what works/breaks (I typically deal with the backend code and the coding objects they provide, and those haven’t changed much, or at least not enough to substantially break anything I’ve written).
    • Easily enough, you should be able to make a copy of your project and go through the upgrade process to see what problems you run into. What I would look for is to make sure the components upgraded to their newer counterparts and they’re not just referencing the old ones (i.e. you’re running a .Net 4.0 application wanting the Crystal 2010 viewer but referencing the old viewer instead).
    • The free version of Crystal works fine, though it’s a little convoluted. I did have some issues with it crashing inside of VS2010 when I did use it. As an organization, we decided that we use it enough that the full version made sense for us so I’ve since moved to the full Crystal Reports 2011 (version 14, which is supposed to match up to the VS2010 components according to an SAP sales rep I talked to).

    Some of my answer depends on how much code is custom built in this legacy app.

    Reference Links:

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