How to hack Telerik Reporting Q3 to be supported under Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

Several weeks after Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 has become public Telerik released their Q3 release. And despite the fact that their Silverlight Controls setup fully supports VS 2010 B2, their reporting setup has no support at all! On community questions whether they will support VS 2010, their answer is that their Reporting will not support Beta IDEs and they will announce their support once VS 2010 goes official (Link). This means that there will be no support for VS 2010 for another 3 months in the best case (rumors say that VS 2010 will be released at the end or March 2010).

And seeing more people (including myself) move on VS 2010 B2 for their main environment for development (especially for Silverlight) having at least some support of Telerik Reporting for VS 2010 is a must. Here are some steps that can almost fully integrate Telerik Reporting in VS 2010 (NOTE: All the steps bellow are valid if you have VS 2008 installed and you have already installed the Telerik Reporting setup):

Registering Telerik Reporting Report File Template
  1. Copy "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VisualBasic\Telerik_Reporting_Q3.zip" to the following locations

    "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VisualBasic\Reporting"

    "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\VisualBasic"

  2. Copy "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Telerik_Reporting_Q3.zip" to the following locations

    "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\Reporting"

    "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp"

  3. Run the following from an administrative command prompt: "%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /installvstemplates and wait for the command to complete

Adding Telerik Reporting controls to VS Toolbox
  1. While viewing a report in design mode, open the toolbox and add a new tab naming it Telerik Reporting.
  2. Right click the newly created tab and select "Choose Items..."
  3. Wait for the window to show up (it takes some time) and then click "Browse..."
  4. Navigate to "%ProgramFiles\Telerik\Reporting Q3 2009\Bin", select Telerik.Reporting.dll and press "Open"
  5. On the "Choose Toolbox Items" window press OK

Following the above two procedures will enable you to add new reports and drag items from the toolbox to a report in VS 2010.

The things that I have not managed to enable (YET! :)) under VS 2010 B2 is the Data Explorer window. So you will not be able to directly Drag'n'Drop fields from your data source to the report. Instead of that just add a TextBox control and use the Expression function.

Other than that Telerik Reporting works fine under Visual Studio 2010.
Enjoy!

UPDATE (12/08/2009): In order to have the Table and Crosstab Wizards you have to add also the following assembly from GAC to the Toolbox Items:
%SystemDirve%\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\Telerik.Reporting.Design.Components\<ReportingVersion>_a9d7983dfcc261be\Telerik.Reporting.Design.Components.dll

Labels: , ,