We’ve been getting more into SharePoint and Reporting Services lately. In their 3rd versions, these products have matured a good deal and are great solutions for many of our clients.
I recently ran across an odd issue with Reporting Services, though, where a site containing a .rdlc report would compile fine on my laptop, but on our build server, it failed with the error:
error MSB4062: The "Microsoft.Reporting.RdlCompile" task could not be loaded from the assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a. Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, and that the assembly and all its dependencies are available
At first I assumed the problem was that Reporting Services wasn’t installed, but even after installing that, the error persisted. Googling “Microsoft.Reporting.RdlCompile” came up empty. After a little digging, though, I came across Microsoft’s guidance on deploying reports and viewer controls, which reminded me that the report viewer has a separate installer. I ran the bootstrap package in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\BootStrapper\Packages\ReportViewer\ReportViewer.exe on our build server, and the build cleared up.