Hey Kevin,

I guess I wasn't looking for answers to any specific questions. Here are a couple of examples of problems I have had in the last 2 months...

First of all, I inherited responsibility for a rather large VB.NET project. The project was created in VS.NET 2002 and upgraded to 2003, reports created in CR9 Dev edition (only giving the specs because I am convinced they are part of the problem). Everything worked fine until one day I had to change something simple in a report. Well, that seemed to break every report in the project (approx. 25-30). I could not get the project to run on my dev machine due to some generic runtime error. After beating on it for a while, I decided to contact Business Objects Tech Support. After about a week and trying about 10 things, we found out that when I set the datasource for the project, I was setting the datasource for every table (rpt1.Database.Tables(rpttable1).SetDataSource(dt1) instead of rpt1.SetDataSource(DS1)). Well I fixed that and asked Bus Obj Tech Supp why it suddenly stopped working, and got a "that's just the way it is" answer.

Well, after I fixed that I tried running it on the user's machine, but it didn't like the Crystal Runtime version. Well, I found the CRNET_DEPLOYMENT.PDF document on Bus. Obj. site and followed the directions, and it still didn't work for the VS.NET 2003 using CR Dev 9 scenario. It seemed to work with the VS.NET 2002 scenario though.

Well, I got that to work, and then it seemed that all the margins in all the reports were off. I had to go in and twiddle around with all of them to get them to work again. I still can't figure out why I can't get the margins to be the same when I print it from a CrystalReportViewer and when I print it right through code. I am getting stuff cut off when they print from a CrystalReportViewer. I can live with that though, and just give them a print button on the form that prints through code.

Now, I know that a lot of these problems are caused by my own arrogance... and that's why I was looking for some sort of best practices somewhere. My organization is currently looking for alternatives to Crystal Reports because we are fed up with all of this stuff, but I really like the functionality and power that CR gives the developer. I have pulled off some pretty impressive stuff (by my own standards) using CR.

Anyway, this turned into me venting more than anything. If anybody actually got to the end of this before getting sick of hearing me complain I would be surprised.

Thanks,
MAC