Crystal Reports 2008 was released in October 2007 with lots of new features. But Visual Studio 2008 developers (including myself) were disappointed to discover that none of the new features had been included in the version of Crystal Reports that is bundled with VS2008 (called Crystal Reports 2008 Basic). TO make matters worse, if you upgraded to the full version of Crystal Reports 2008, it integrated into VS2003 and VS2005 but not VS2008.

I wrote about that and more in an article for ASPAlliance called "What Visual Studio Developers Should Know about Crystal Reports 2008".

In addition to that, during my experiments for the article I discovered a pretty bad bug that made broke one of my own very critical reports. This report was in a project that I still used VS2005 for so whether I tried to access the report through my project or directly in CR2008's standalone application, I hit this bug. I worked very closely with one of their engineers who was awesome because even though it took him a while to duplicate my problem, he was persistent, patient and did not discredit my finding. Finally he discovered the reason and it was passed on to the developers. The scenario that the bug occurred in was one that involved using strongly typed datasets to design a report - a pretty common scenario. While I've been waiting for this fix, I've continued to access the report by running an older executable of my app that I created last fall.

Today I found out that there was a Service Pack available. This blog post on the Crystal Reports Developer blog explains why it's called "Crystal Reports Service Pack 0". I had finally uninstalled the trial version so I didn't get automatically alerted. I just installed the service pack (which is really a full version) and immediately opened up my project. I let Crystal update the project to point to the new APIs and then pressed F5. I ran the report and rather than getting the error message I had gotten previously, I got my beautiful report. That made me happy enough, but there was more!

This report ranges from 100-200 pages. Normally when I view this report, as I move from page to page, there is a long delay while each page is rendered ...one at a time. I frequently print the report to a PDF file which takes anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes.

Now that I can view the report in Crystal Report 2008, I also get to see the benefit of some of the changes they have made to how CR utilizes memory. And I was astonished to flip from page to page with no delay, but even more exuberant when I printed to a PDF and it took under one minute!

Hallelujah!