CrystalDecisions.Shared Version=12.0.2000.0 not found!

Question

Hi experts,
I have developed a .NET desktop applicarion in Visual Studio 2005 which uses CR 11 assemblies. I built the application on my dev PC and it runs fine and showing Crytal reports properly. But when I installed the same application on my user's machine it throws an error "Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.Shared Version=12.0.2000.0'" or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified."
The interesting fact is that, I never used/referenced any of the Crystal 12.0.2000.0 assemblies in my application! all what I'm using is CR 11 assemblies. Still the runtime is complaining about the 12 version. Also, the CR pre-requisites I installed on the user's machine was "Business Objects Crystal Reports XI R2 SP3 Runtimefiles". No idea where the Crystal 12 reference kicks in!
I would appreciate your thoughts on this issue.
Thanks in advance!
KB Hunter

Answer 1

Hi Don,
Thanks for your response! My team and I were debugging for a couple of hours now and looks like we got some clue on what's going on. Your point about the 'runtime confusion' is very valid. The runtime I had on my dev machine was "Business Objects Crystal Reports XI R2 SP3 Runtime Files"(which is the one on my user's PC too). When the application was built on my machine it was referencing the 11.5.x assemblies. If I had deployed this exe to my user's machine that would have worked fine.
However, we have an automated build process here where I have to promote the code to the build server and get it built there and then moved to users' machines. We noticed that the build server has another runtime version("SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports Runtime 2008" which utilizes 12.x assemblies) which forces my exe to internally point to the 12.x assemblies(reflection proved this). It's indeed confusing that the 12.x assemblies are force referenced this way though the application explicitly references 11.5.x assemblies only.
As a work-around we advised the user to install the second runtime and when she did that the application started working fine! We are going to enforce "SAP Business Objects Crystal Reports Runtime 2008" as a pre-requisite for our application. Hope this will resolve this issue - at least for now.
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts on the issue. Hope somebody else will find this post useful later!
Cheers!
KB Hunter
Edited by: kbhunter on Oct 9, 2010 8:38 PM