ℹ️ Note
This is an old post, only covers versions up to the year 2010
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:
| 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