Yesterday one of my old colleague called me and we are discussing about framework and tools upgradation of an old project. We had a project developed with Visual Studio 2008. Now he wants to upgrade it with Visual Studio 2012 or higher. Most parts of the codebase are upgraded by Visual Studio conversion tool very easily. But only area where he finds many problems is, Crystal Reports.

Yes, the project had many reports developed with Crystal Report technology. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 has Crystal Report support in it. But in latest version of Visual Studio don’t have that. Microsoft pull out the support of Crystal Reports from latest Visual Studio because of their own reporting tool which is SSRS reporting tool.

Now the question is how he can upgrade the codebase with old Crystal Reports. I was searching the internet regarding this topic today morning. I found two options to upgrade.

1. He can convert them to SAP Crystal Report. SAP is currently having the ownership of Crystal Report.
2. He can convert it to SSRS report.

If required, I need to dig deeper about the process of the above options. But in theory as per my quick search I have found these two options. There may be some tools to convert old Crystal Reports to SAP Crystal Reports but I think those are not full proof. The best way is to build them manually. As per as I can remember those reports has ADO.NET DataSets to pull data from. If he can configure those DataSets with the new reports then I think the job will be done. Only part is he needs to build the UI part manually.

If you faced same problem at the time of upgrading your old codebase and found some more options, please tell me in comment section.

Arnab