Will the real Crystal Reports 2008 stand up?
After looking at Business Objects' Webpage about Crystal Reports 2008 for Visual Studio, you may conclude that the version included in Visual Studio 2008 is a "light" version of CR 2008.
http://www.businessobjects.com/product/catalog/crystalreports_visualstudio/
Well, not exactly. Here are the CR 2008 Basic DLLs. Note the version? Yep, that's 10.x
Here are the CR 2008 Full version DLLs. Note the version? Yep, that's 12!
So CR 2008 Basic, the version bundled with Visual Studio 2008, is not a scaled down or a light version of CR 2008. A quick call to Business Objects confirmed this. They said that it was version 10 along with some version 11 enhancements. IMHO, this will create a lot of confusion. They should have used a different name.
Now that Crystal Reports 2008 SP0 provide support for Visual Studio 2008, I installed it. Here's a screenshot of the setup process. Note that they kept the same product name as the one used in Visual Studio.
I was told (but did not test) that if you already installed CR 2008 Basic as part of the Visual Studio 2008 installation and you install Crystal Reports 2008, the Setup will upgrade your files from 10.x to version 12. There's no side by side installation possible.
Since it was impossible to move reports files from CR 2008 Basic to pre CR 2008 SP0, I wanted to test if they fixed that with SP0. Yep, it now works.