not possible to use SQL Server 2000?

[Tim R]

I installed the Reporting for .NET  trial on a WinXP machine running VS2010.  Then I tried to create a class library and use a SQL Server data connection to a SQL Server 2000 server, and an error message appeared saying earliest version supported was SQL Server 2005.   Is it not possible to use Telerik Reporting for .NET against a SQL Server 2000 database?

[Massimiliano Bassili]

According to the system requirements (http://www.telerik.com/products/reporting/getting-started/system-requirements.aspx): "Creating the AdventureWorks database used by the Reporting Examples requires SQLExpress/SQL Server 2005 or above to be installed on local machine."

Cheers!

[Tim R]

Thanks for the reply but I am still somewhat in the dark.

I assume "local" machine means "the development PC", that is, the programmer's computer, not the end-user's computer?  I do indeed have SQL Server 2005 or later on my own development machine, but the database the deployed report must use is SQL Server 2000.

Does Telerik Reporting use the local copy of SQL Server 2005+ for the report metadata while the report is being programmed, and permit the report to be deployed to another machine where it will use a connection to a SQL Server 2000 database?

[Massimiliano Bassili]

If the error message says it is not supported, then the chances are it is not supported ... after all this is 11 years old software ...

[Tim R]

Thank you Massimiliano, for your intelligent guesses ("Chances are")  but I need a definitive answer because I must give the people I'm working for a definitive answer--and, hopefully, an explanation of the answer.  I will open a support ticket.

I can read an error message as well as the next guy but I don't always believe what they say because they can be spurious. The reporting tool is GUI presentation layer and it should not care where the data are coming from, as long as it finds them in an intelligible ADO.NET structure such as a DataSet or DataTable.  That's why I find it hard to believe that SQL Server 2000 is not supported.

[Steve]

Hi Tim,

You are absolutely correct that Telerik Reporting does not care where the data is coming from. The error you have received is coming from Visual Studio 2010 and not from Telerik Reporting. After a quick google search we found the following articles that confirm this:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdevtools/archive/2010/05/03/visual-studio-2010-support-with-sql-server.aspx
• http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vstsdb/thread/37d137be-f119-4d49-bddf-99f398328096/

Reading carefully, the first article says: "What this means is that you will not be able to connect through the Server/Database Explorer to any older versions of SQL Server or use any of the data design tools that require Visual Studio to connect to the database (LINQ designer, datasource wizard, table editing, etc.)  This does not mean that your ASP.NET pages will stop working; the .NET framework still supports older versions of SQL, so the runtime experience should not be affected."

In other words, if you generate your SQL query on supported SQL Server or in management studio and you manually create the connectionString to the database, you would be good to go.
All the best,
Steve
the Telerik team