Can't generate licenses

Can't generate licenses

Posted by: law on 24 March 2025, 12:38 pm EST

• 

  law

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  Posted 24 March 2025, 12:38 pm EST - Updated 24 March 2025, 12:43 pm EST

  TL;DR: Whenever I try to generate the license file for AR in a website, I get the message below.

  My environment is Windows 11 and VS2022. The machine is newly-built and last the “latest and greatest” of pretty much everything. I’m trying to migrate some old AR13 reports on a web server and encountered a ton of issues so I decided to try installing IIS on my local machine and copying one of the folders from the web server to my C drive and fooling around with them.

  But no matter how I try to generate the license file - by right-clicking licenses.licx and choosing “Build runtime licenses”, by building the website, or by running the AR19 converter, I get the same message.

  Things I’ve tried:

  • Originally there was an “app_licenses.dll” (I think that’s the right name) in the bin folder - I’ve deleted both it and the licenses.licx file (and had the AR19 converter recreate it).
  • Removed any blank lines in licenses.licx (I seem to remember those causing problems in the past).
  • Tried running VS as both a regular user and administrator.
  • In the VS2022 installer, made sure Windows 10 and Windows 11 SDKs are installed.
  • Did a “repair” installation of AR19.
  • Verified that AR19 is activated (even tried deactivating and reactivating).
  • Rebooted.
    
    Plus some combinations of the above, all without success.

  Just to be clear, this is on my local machine that has AR19 and IIS on it - not the server.

  Does anyone have any ideas for other things to try?

  Thanks!

  Eric Law

  

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  akshay.rajput

  

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  Posted 26 March 2025, 8:06 am EST

  Hi Eric,

  Please try the following:

  • Uninstall ActiveReports 13 and restart the machine.
  • Then, Install ActiveReports 19 again.
    
    Now try to use the convert tool or add the licenses.licx file.

  Let us know if this fixes the issue.

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  law

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  Posted 26 March 2025, 1:38 pm EST - Updated 26 March 2025, 1:40 pm EST

  Sigh… thanks but no luck!

  Specifically, I:

  • Uninstalled AR19 (AR13 all all other versions were already uninstalled).
  • Rebooted the computer.
  • Reinstalled AR19. It was already activated, verified in the license manager.
  • Rebooted again for good measure.

  But the behavior is the same.

  Edited to add: at one point before I realized they can’t be run side-by-side, I had a number of different versions of AR installed on the machine. Is there some tool or technique I can use to verify they’re all completely gone (other than looking under installed apps which I’ve already done)?

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  akshay.rajput

  

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  Posted 27 March 2025, 7:55 am EST

  Hi Eric,
  
  This seems to be an issue with Visual Studio handling legacy Website Project licensing. As a workaround please use the following commads to generate and use the License dll:

  lc.exe /target:App_licenses.dll /complist:.\licenses.licx /i:bin\GrapeCity.ActiveReports.dll /i:bin\GrapeCity.ActiveReports.Web.dll /outdir:.
  
  csc.exe /t:library /res:app_licenses.dll.licenses /out:bin\app_licenses.dll
  

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  law

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  Posted 27 March 2025, 8:22 am EST

  Well I feel like we’re making progress but I’m still having problems.

  When I first ran the “lc” command I got these errors:

  Warning LC0000: 'Unable to find assembly 'bin\GrapeCity.ActiveReports.dll'
  Warning LC0000: 'Unable to find assembly 'bin\GrapeCity.ActiveReports.Web.dll'
  Error LC0000: 'Could not load file or assembly 'MESCIUS.ActiveReports, Version=19.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc4967777c49a3ff' or one of its dependencies. Invalid pointer (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80004003 (E_POINTER))'

  I tried replacing “GrapeCity” in the command with “MESCIUS” but then get this error:

  Processing complist '.\licenses.licx'...
  .\licenses.licx (3) : error LC0003 : Unable to resolve type 'GrapeCity.ActiveReports.Export.Pdf.Section.PdfExport, MESCIUS.ActiveReports.Export.Pdf, Version=19.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=cc4967777c49a3ff'

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  akshay.rajput

  

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  Posted 31 March 2025, 7:21 am EST

  Hi Eric,

  Please try to remove the culture, version and public token info and use the following line to add the entry:

  GrapeCity.ActiveReports.Export.Pdf.Section.PdfExport, MESCIUS.ActiveReports.Export.Pdf
  

  If the issue persists then please try to remove this entry entirely and see if it works.

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  law

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  Posted 31 March 2025, 12:22 pm EST

  Sadly neither of those ideas worked.

  Though it would be nice to get it working, I don’t necessarily need all the newest features of ActiveReports… my main goal is to get to at least version 16 so we don’t have to use old versions of Visual Studio to maintain our stuff. Do you think we’d have better luck going to an older version like 16, 17, or 18?

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  akshay.rajput

  

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  Posted 1 April 2025, 8:16 am EST

  Hi Eric,

  You can try with ActiveReports 16.
  
  If your use case only involves maintanance of your old code base then I would suggest you to stick to ActiveReports 16 itself and old update the old code to consume the latest bug fixes and features(if required).

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  law

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  Posted 1 April 2025, 10:38 am EST - Updated 1 April 2025, 10:54 am EST

  So with a lot of experimentation I’ve found one process that seems to work. Here it is:

  • Uninstall AR19 from my machine, install (and of course activate) AR16
  • Remove the folder with the reports in it from my local machine (which I’m using as a test server)
  • Recopy the folder with (AR13) reports from our production server to my local machine
  • Delete the licenses.licx and app_licenses.dll files
  • Open VS2017, File → Open → Web site, and open the (local) folder with the reports
  • Run the converter to convert to the new version of AR

  So far I’ve done the above successfully with AR16 and AR17. The process does NOT work if I use Visual Studio 2022… only 2017 works (I don’t have 2019 installed but may give it a try).

  So I really haven’t met my goal of being able to use only VS2022 but this is at least an improvement.

  Edited to add: I tried the above with AR18 but no luck. The converter doesn’t complete in VS2017 (it silently fails before installing the NuGet packages), and same issue as before in VS2022.

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  akshay.rajput

  

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  Posted 2 April 2025, 2:36 pm EST

  Hi Eric,

  This is a known issue. According to our development team, the root cause lies with Visual Studio’s support for Web Site Applications (Legacy). Given this, I recommend reaching out to the Microsoft Support Team, as they will be best equipped to assist you with this matter.

  Let me know if there’s anything else I can help with.