Free Visual Studio Designer for editing Reports in Dynamics NAV 2013 and other options
Today I learned that we will have a free Visual Studio Designer for editing reports in Dynamics NAV. If you have been in the TAP program for Dynamics NAV 2013, you know that it has been a big concerns, for all of us, that it would be required to buy a Visual Studio 2010 Professional license to design Reports in NAV 2013. Well now this issue has been resolved and here is what you do:
Install the free version of Visual Web Developer 2010 Express found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/visual-web-developer-express. Note: It will require several restarts of the computer, so if you are doing this on the customers setup, you might want to plan this.
Now you might think that you can designing reports in NAV 2013, but you see still see this messages if you try to select “View / Layout” on a report in Object Designer:
“An error occurred when opening Report Designer. A supported version of Visual Studio could not be found.”
But here is trick, after you have installed the free version of Visual Web Developer 2010 Express, install the free version of “Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package” found here:http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=115
Now you can select “View / Layout” and Visual Studio 2010 will open and you can design you report.
Other options to design reports in NAV 2013 are of course still Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher version. Note: if you choose to install a custom version of the Visual Studio Professional remember to check mark “Visual Web Developer”. If you do not install the “Visual Web Developer” component. Visual Studio will still open when you select “View / Layout”, but will open the XML editor of the report. If you are really smart you can of course design the report in this XML editor, but I have to admit that I prefer to have the Report Designer installed as well 
Designers not supported in NAV 2013:
Visual Studio 2008, all version as have described here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/2009/01/13/what-are-the-visual-studio-options-for-developing-rdlc-reports-for-dynamics-nav-2009.aspx
Visual Studio 2008 does not support RDLC 2008 which is the version of the layout supported in NAV 2013. In NAV 2009 we used the RDLC 2005 version.
Visual Studio 11. When Visual Studio 11 is released we will not be able to use this to design reports in NAV 2013, as a new version of RDLC is included in this version and will require an upgrade of the RDLC plus the new version of Report Viewer 2012 installed. As this will result in different version of the Report Objects in NAV 2013, Visual Studio 11 will be disabled for editing reports, and if only have this installed you will still get this message when you try to design a report:
“An error occurred when opening Report Designer. A supported version of Visual Studio could not be found.”
Good thing is that Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 11 can be installed side by side on your machine, and when Visual Studio 2010 is installed this will be detected by NAV 2013 and used for designing reports. So we pretty much have the same issue as we had with NAV 2009 and Visual Studio 2010 as I described here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/nav/archive/2010/04/29/visual-studio-2010-and-ssrs-rdlc-reports-in-nav-2009.aspx
Thanks, Claus Lundstrøm, Abakion.com
Marvellous post. Added to my IE fav
Great post. Send a tweet about this. Do you know if you can download a stand-alone installer. The online download is not smart when installing in multiple Virtual Machines on a regular basis. It just takes forever.
You can download all Visual Studio 2010 Express version in one ISO, which include the Visual Web Developer 2010 Express here:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express-iso
Clausl is back .. …
Claus Lundstrum has been working for Microsoft for quite a number of years .. and we all know him from…
[…] Claus started his blog with breaking news. For a long time, there seemed to be no “free” report designer anymore for NAV 2013 .. until now. Read his blog here. […]
Clausl is back .. …
Claus Lundstrum has been working for Microsoft for quite a number of years .. and we all know him from…
Thanks for the info!
Now if only Microsoft could make the report editor/format not suck
Easily the biggest problem my company will have with Nav 2013 is converting all our custom taxes reports to that limited format.
Welcome back!!!
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Claus, thanx for sharing this useful info.
Must say: they installation did take quite some on a machine that did not have any VS 2010 components on. VS 2010 SP1 needs to get installed also.
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Yes, it takes quite a while to install this, that is why I write: “Note: It will require several restarts of the computer, so if you are doing this on the customers setup, you might want to plan this.”
And yes SP1 for VS 2010 is required as well.
/Claus Lundstrøm
[…] at last, you will need Visual Studio 2010 Pro to be able to open the OfflineReport project. The free version, as I explained here, seems not to work, or I’m not smart enough to get it to work. So if anybody can get it working […]
Hi Claus
I am also have a blog on Mibuso for Microsoft Dynamics and soon Dynamics CRM. I am a Microsoft V-TSP for Dynamics NAV.
The reason for my email is to ask if I can link some of your blog news, articles and so on to my blog: http://mibuso.com/blogs/dynamicsqueen/index.php/category/dynamics-nav/?
I dont mind to share the info on my blog. I will be updating my blog regularly and hope that you will also find some points of interest on it.
Kindly let me know if it will be in order with you.
Baie Dankie
De Uwe
Stefnie
V-TSP Microsoft NZ
Hi claus, I just have a simple question: is it possible to have vwd 2008 and 2010 installed side by side on the same pc? because i need to develop nav2009 reports as well as nav2013 reports.
Thanks!
Yes you can have VWD 2008 and VS 2010 running side by side. When selecting “View / Layout” in Object Designer NAV 2009 and NAV 2013 will look for supported version of VS installed and then open the highest version supported. So NAV 2009 will open VWD 2008 even if VS 2010 is installed, but as VS 2010 is not supported in NAV 2009, NAV 2009 will not even detect that VS 2010 is installed. The same goes for NAV 2013. It will not see that VWD 2008 is installed.
/Claus Lundstrøm