Crystal Reports has been around for a long time. Some might say too long. Over its 19 year history its certainly become very widespread, and I have nothing bad to say about its presentation. But 19 years of evolution and attempts at backwards compatibility can play havoc with an object model. A case in point: If you want to attach a reports to a different database at run time - a pretty common occurrence - you have to write surprisingly unlikely code. Its easy enough once you know how to do it, but why isn't there any centralised connection information?
Crystal Reports has also changed hands a lot over the years, from being owned by Crystal Services, then Seagate, then Crystal Decisions, then Symantec, then Business Objects and finally SAP. This led to a plethora of different version names, and to make things more complicated, the versions that were bundled with Visual Studio were separate releases in themselves.
I haven't found any good summaries of the versions and their compatibility with Visual Studio, so here's an attempt to do that:
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Official Name
Version No
Notes
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2010
13 ?
Not bundled with VS 2010, has to be downloaded separately
Crystal Reports 2008 Service Pack 0
12.0.0.683
SP0 made Crystal Reports 2008 compatible with VS2008
Crystal Reports 2008
12.0.0.549
This was not compatible with VS2008 initially. Service Pack 0 fixed that.
Crystal Reports XI Release 2
11.5
Crystal Reports XI
11.0
Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008
10.5.3700.0
This came bundled with VS2008. Not to be confused with 'Crystal Reports 2008' which is V12, above
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2005
10.2.3600.0
This came bundled with VS2005
Crystal Reports 10
10.0.3300.0
Crystal Reports 9
9.2.3300
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET 2003
9.1.5000
This came bundled with VS2003
Crystal Reports for Visual Studio .NET 2002
9.1.3300
This came bundled with VS2002
Crystal Reports 8.5
Seagate Crystal Reports 8
Crystal Reports 7
Crystal Reports 6
Crystal Reports 5
Crystal Reports 4
4.6.1.0
This came bundled with Visual Studio 6
Sources:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms225607(v=VS.90).aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms225607(v=vs.80).aspx
http://blog.crystalreportsbook.com/crystal-reports-version-numbers-by-product-and-service-pack
http://resources.businessobjects.com/support/additional_downloads/runtime.asp#03