Crystal Reports unbundled from VS2010 but free from SAP

Published: 01/05/2010 | Last Revision: 24/05/2010

SAP Crystal Solutions • www.greymatter.com/hc/SAP-VS2010

If you’ve checked your copy of Visual Studio 2010 and found Crystal Reports missing, don’t panic as Crystal’s owners, software giant SAP, have removed it from the VS bundle and are offering it as a free download instead. You may have to wait a while for the final version though, and if you develop server-side apps for resale, you may have to buy a new licence.

Crystal Reports is still free in Visual Studio 2010 – you just need to download it from SAP.

The removal of CR from VS2010 was a low-key affair, with little said by Microsoft or SAP until beta testers started posting messages. SAP product manager Blair Wheadon clarified the situation with a blog post (bit.ly/b7PI4B) explaining that Crystal Reports for VS2010 would be in beta by the launch of VS2010 (in fact they beat it) with production in “Q3 2010”. The product comes with a range of new features, and one omission – the MSM (merge module) runtime is no longer available (SAP says it’s adding new features to its MSI runtime to compensate for this). On the plus side are a new WPF viewer, XLSX export to exploit large Excel grids, hierarchical grouping, formula-driven margin settings, in-situ no-refresh sorting, the ability to protect RPT files from viewing by third parties, and more. Licensing is largely unchanged, with royalty free internal distribution of the runtime in all types of application, and free external distribution with client-side apps. The change comes if you embed the runtime in apps that execute it in multi-user mode (i.e. on the server) – to install them externally you’ll need SAP’s Crystal Reports Developer Advantage licence.