Crystal and #Develop

It's report time in my current .NET project at work. By that, I mean it's time to write the code to generate paper reports on the data. And yes, they will be paper. For some reason, nobody around here ever wants to read anything off their monitor.

Currently, my plan is to push the data into a Crystal Report. I prefer the push model because I think it cuts down slightly on the deployment headaches. I prefer Crystal because ... - OK, I don't actually like Crystal Reports that much, but it's basically all we've got. There are other options, but they all suck a lot worse than Crystal Reports.

Actually, I should correct that last statement. As a matter of fact, we don't have Crystal Reports - we have Visual Studio .NET 2002, which comes with a version of Crystal Reports. This means that I'm now back to using VS.NET to write my reports and SharpDevelop to write my code.

Probably as a result of this, I'm having some problems with adding a CrystalReportViewer to a form in the SharpDevelop forms designer. I'm able to customize the sidebar to add the Crystal controls, but when I drop a CrystalReportViewer on the form, it doesn't work properly. In particular, SharpDevelop isn't displaying it - it shows up at the bottom of the form designer, but not on the actual form.

The fix for this is to simply add the following to the form's designer file:
Me.Controls.Add(Me.myCRViewerName)
That at least shows the control on the form, but it still doesn't function properly. I can't resize the control or even select it on the form. However, I can still access all the properties by clicking the object's icon at the bottom of the designer (what the hell is that area called, anyway?).

I guess we'll see how this goes. Perhaps it's due to using the .NET 1.0 Crystal libraries with the .NET 2.0 application. Or maybe SharpDevelop just doesn't like the Crystal controls. Or maybe I just screwed something up. Hopefully I'll figure it out relatively soon.

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