Deploying CR on Server

Dear Brian,

I bought your book "Crystal Reports Encyclopedia .NET 2005/2008" and have found it very useful in trying to figure out CR on the .Net application.  I am having a problem with deployment, however, and don't quite understand the description in the book(pg 416). 

I have CR running in my ASP.Net application (C#) just fine on my development machine but apparently CR is not installed on the deployment server.  I built a deployment project like you described (although at the end of the section, you said something about using the setup files to "install the application on the client computer"), copied it to the server, ran the setup.exe file that was auto generated and I get some error about things being precompiled.  My typical way to get my project to the server is use the Publish Website link in VS2008.  When I do that, I get the error:  Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.Web, Version=10.5.3700.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. I'm not being too lucky finding help on the web so I thought I'd go the master.  Thanks in advance if you can shed any light on this.

Bob

Hi Bob,

Man, deploying apps can be a pain when it doesn't work right. Re your errors, I never heard of the 'precompiled' one and I honestly have no idea what it means.

But for your second error, this is most likely a versioning problem or you don't have the DLLs installed on the server. From your description, it sounds like you're installing your custom app on the server and not the CR install files. In the book it talks about running the MSI on the server. Have you tried that? If you run the MSI first and then run your app's Setup.exe file, that should work.