I'm seeing a lot of activity on the forums about common problems when you're first getting started wth Visual Studio .NET 2010. In this blog I address the three most common ones. It may also be easier to see this use a screencast video, so I uploaded one to YouTube that you can watch. It is on the download link on this page, or you can go directly to YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wud4VtqpetU
First, Crystal Reports .NET is no longer included with Visual Studio .NET 2010. it is a separate download. Use this link to download it to your application and install it after you have installed Visual Studio .NET 2010.
http://downloads.businessobjects.com/akdlm/cr4vs2010/CRforVS_13_0.exe
Second, you will find that the Crystal Reports viewer is strangely missing from the Visual Studio toolbox. To fix this go to Project > Properties. Set the Target Framework to be .NET Framework 4 (this might be easier to see in the video). After doing so, you application will close and re-open and the viewer will now be in the toolbox.
Third, the Crystal Reports DLLs were written with .NET Framework 2 and they are compatible with Framework 4 as wel. But your application needs to have mixed-mode compatibility turned on for it to use the Crystal assemblies. You should add this property to the Startup tag in the app.config file
useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"
Again, this might be easier to see in the video's complete code walkthrough.
Once you've done those three steps, you should be able to get up and running with Crystal Reports in Visual Studio .Net 2010.
