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Once again, no support for new visual studio versions :-(

Posted by: kev16967 on 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

  • kev16967

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    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]I’m running the release candidate of VS2015, but active reports isn’t showing in the list of items to add to a project. I remember we had the same problem with other active reports versions when new versions of visual studio were released. Why do you limit your installations to specific visual studio versions? I can’t help but be cynical and suspect that it has everything to do with forcing people to upgrade to the latest active reports, something I’d normally do anyway, but was put off by this behaviour the last time I encountered it. AR7 works perfectly under VS2015, except for the missing new item templates and the missing Report menu. There is no technical reason it shouldn’t be able to register with VS2015. Please do something about this, as my current feeling is to (very reluctantly) ditch the product altogether in favour of one which plays nicely with visual studio updates!![/activereports_archive]

  • kev16967

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]sigh, perhaps that was a bit strong, but it’s a bit disappointing to be in this situation again. My apologies for the outburst - is there any chance we can get things working with VS2015?[/activereports_archive]

  • mohita

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello,

    We understand your concern and hence the inconvenience caused.

    However, since, AR7 was never tested with VS 2015, hence you might/might not face issues when using the same with it. You may still use AR7 with VS 2015 at runtime without facing any issues.

    Hope it clarifies.

    Regards,

    Mohita[/activereports_archive]

  • kev16967

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hi Mohita,

    I would quite like to take the chance and use AR7 at design time in VS2015, and have no problem with it being unsupported in doing so. We use a number of other third party components, all of which are still available in VS2015. I can appreciate you may not want to do another release of AR7, but I wonder if it is possible to manually register the components with VS2015. I have been an ardent proponent of active reports since the original version. Technically I have no issues with it, and believe it to be unsurpassed, but we’ve encountered this issue with every new release of visual studio, and it genuinely is making me consider recommending we use a different product. We’ve been looking at AR9 with a view to upgrading, but I see that has the same issue as, for the moment at least it does not register with VS2015. Doubtless you’ll address that very soon, but it shows we will encounter the same issue with the next release of visual studio. VS2015 now has a go live licence, and we are keen to start using it within our organisation, but even if we were using AR9 we would be held back by our dependence on active reports :frowning:

    Kevin[/activereports_archive]

  • mohita

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello Kevin,

    I understand your requirement and concern and hence I have escalated the issue to the respective team (tracking id :179847).

    I will get back to you as soon I hear anything from them.

    Regards,

    Mohita[/activereports_archive]

  • mohita

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello,

    We have heard back from the respective team and as per since every VS require it’s own settings and files from setup, it is impossible not to limit the installer to specific Visual Studio version.

    Next, in order to manually register the AR7/AR8/AR9 components with VS 2015, you will have to :

    1. Write a lot of registry keys.
    2. Copy/paste all templates to VS 2015 installation.
    3. Don’t forget to cleanup if uninstall.
    4. Call ‘devenv /setup’.
    5. Manually switch default designer in future (because report designer switcher tool cannot process all versions).

    Hence, this is too is very cumbersome and almost impossible.

    However, please note that the support for VS 2015 would be available in AR9 Sp4 release that is due in Sept 2015.

    Regards,

    Mohita

    [/activereports_archive]

  • sinha345

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]here is the build with vs 2015 support.

    http://publicfiles.componentone.com/ActiveReports/ar/ActiveReports-v9.3.4300.0.msi

    [/activereports_archive]

  • mirekvanicky

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hi Kevin,

    I have exactly the same problem - http://arhelp.grapecity.com/groups/topic/ar8-in-visual-studio-2015/

    Have you found any solution to this? I is very unfair to force us to buy new AR only because of we want to use new VS.

    Mirek Vanicky

    miroslav.vanicky@fsd.cz[/activereports_archive]

  • reema-pruthi

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello Mirek,

    As is already mentioned here, AR7/8 was never tested on VS2015 as the IDE was not available at that time.

    AR7/8 installer has no idea about integrating ActiveReports7/8 in VS2015 IDE. The basic requirement of integrating AR(templates, report designer tools) with this IDE could not be achieved with ActiveReports7/8. Therefore, we would suggest you to kindly upgrade to AR9/AR10 that support this IDE completely.

    We regret for all the inconvenience caused.

    Regards,

    Reema[/activereports_archive]

  • mirekvanicky

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hi,

    In VS2015 report designer and toolbox of AR8 seem to work correctly. What is missing in VS is Report menu and AR-items in Add new Item dialog.

    I understand that AR7/8 knows nothing about new VS2015. But what about to create some patch to enable AR 8 in VS2015? I have asked our company manager and we will not buy new AR with every new VS. Now we will edit existing AR8 reports in VS2015 (it works), when we will need new report we will hack it somehow for sime time.

    Together with this we have to look for another reporting components to avoid such a situations in the future. And we are sorry for this, because we used AR from version 3.

    Regards,

    Mirek Vanicky

    Financial Systems Development

    Czech Republic

    [/activereports_archive]

  • reema-pruthi

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello Mirek,

    We have forwarded this issue to the concerned team and will get back to you as soon as we get any update from their side on this.

    Regards,

    Reema[/activereports_archive]

  • sinha345

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Mirek

    ActiveReports 7/8 has been out of active development for quite some time, way before vs 2015 was released.

    It does not make sense from support and also from a business point of view to go back and support previous versions of AR in later releases of Visual Studio.

    It takes a toll to maintain codebase that is pretty much dead. Our current focus is v9 and v10 and then upcoming v11 scheduled for around novemeber release. That by itself needs lot of resources, time and all the other stuff. if we go back and start supporting all the previus versions of ActiveReports with all the new releases of VS, it will be a nightmare!!!

    We do our best to keep current versions inline with vs support and for that reason we did add vs 2015 support for v9 in one of the service pack releases. That process will be followed for future releases too. so, if vs2016 is released sometimes this year, we will add support for it in v10 of AR.

    At the same time, if you have one of 2008, 2010, 2012 or 2013 you can still go about creating and editing reports there. vs 2013 was one before vs 2015.

    It is great to know that you have been using ar since v3 release, so it does seem like the product does what you want it to do butI am sorry to hear that you will be moving away from AR.

    I hope you are willing to understand our side of the picture here.

    thanks

    raj

    [/activereports_archive]

  • luciocamacho

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Dear friends, I read your comments with some sadness and in turn giving every reason to Mirek, I am a

    AR user since version 1.08 ActiveX, at that time I change this powerful tool because

    equel what was offered in the market now (CR) did not meet my expectations.

    At present there are many very good reports regarding applications are concerned, but only AR and that

    it is reality, I say this because I am a developer and you really are, know what I mean.

    Now, I know the story of the creator of AR (SPW also, working with both since 1998) and this

    it has grown and adapted to the time, that’s why I wish wholeheartedly that both parties understand each other,

    AR because we are all !!! and not just marketing that we are not at par with the growth … I love the

    DataDynamics products ActiveReports and Farpoint SpreadSheed … AR10…SPW8 must continue together, the road is still long!

    [/activereports_archive]

  • craig.smith

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]We’re not big fans of this limitation either. We’ve already started porting our reports over to SQL Server Reporting Services. All new report go there as well as any existing report that requires modification.[/activereports_archive]

  • ruchir-agarwalgrapecity-com

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello,

    Supporting older AR version in new VS versions requires maintaining their huge codebase and that requires a lot resources, hence we tend to utilize these resources in adding new features in ActiveReports that can only be incorporated with latest AR versions.

    Therefore, working on these old versions and supporting them with latest VS version instead of working on the latest ActiveReports version does not seem to be a very good option.

    Also, as an alternative you may create reports in ActiveReports designer and add them as ‘Existing items’ in your Visual Studio project. This way you would be able to use latest Visual Studio version along with old ActiveReports version.

    I am really sorry but there is really nothing more that can we can do in this.

    Regards,

    Ruchir [/activereports_archive]

  • kev1609

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hi Ruchir. I don’t think anyone would realistically expect you to make changes to a previous version of ActiveReports to enable it to work with a new visual studio release. However it would be great if the active reports installer was modified to allow you to install it to any version of visual studio, emitting a warning if the version in question was later than the last tested version. Then we as developers can decide if we want to take the risk of proceeding or not.

    That said, the comment about ActiveReports designer (which I hadn’t realised existed as a separate app) goes a long way to dealing with the problem. Thanks for the tip

    Kevin[/activereports_archive]

  • ruchir-agarwalgrapecity-com

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello Kevin,

    Thank you for the suggestion regarding making changes in the ActiveReports installer.

    We have forwarded your suggestion to the concerned team for consideration whether ActiveReports should support new Visual Studio versions in future.

    Also, we will keep you updated .

    Thanks,[/activereports_archive]

  • craig.smith

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]I think perhaps its the high cost of upgrading that becomes the sticking point. US$599 per developer every couple of years is a bit steep for our purposes, especially when we already have SSRS available to us. Anyone with VS can develop an SSRS report without spending an extra cent. It’s just the SQL Server license for production that hurts. We’re still using 2008 R2, but we can move up Visual Studio versions whenever they become available.

    Cheers

    Craig[/activereports_archive]

  • ruchir-agarwalgrapecity-com

    Posted 14 September 2017, 6:57 pm EST

    [activereports_archive]Hello,

    Thank you for sharing your concerns Craig.

    I would like to inform you that, this issue has already been escalated and the Product Managers are discussing on it.

    We will update this thread as soon as there is an update.

    Regards,

    Ruchir Agarwal[/activereports_archive]

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