File or assembly name CrystalDecisions.Shared, or one of its dependencies, was not found.


This error is telling you that you don’t have the Crystal Reports runtime installed on the computer you’re trying to run a Crystal Reports .Net application on. You will see this error message with the Crystal Reports that comes with Visual Studio 2003 (.Net Framework 1.1), Visual Studio 2005 (.Net Framework 2.0), Visual Studio 2008 (.Net Framework 3.5) and Visual Studio 2010 (.Net Framework 4.0). The version of Crystal that it’s trying to reference will change. It should be noted that Visual Studio 2010 no longer ships with Crystal Reports and it has to be obtained separately.

You will want to location the “CRRedist*.msi” file for the version of Crystal that you are wanting to use. For example, using Crystal Reports 2008 (that comes with Visual Studio 2008) you would want to locate the “CRRedist2008_x86.msi” for a 32-bit application or “CRRedist2008_x64.msi” for a 64-bit version.

Be careful though if you search for these packages over the web. There are a lot of web-sites offering these files. You will want to obtain them either from local media you have, Microsoft or SAP (which is the likely place you’ll go).

Additional Error Messages you might see:

  1. Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.Shared, Version=10.5.3700.0, Culture=neutral, publicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the require assembly.
  2. Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.Shared, Version=10.2.3600.0 Culture=neutral, publicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the require assembly.
  3. Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.Shared, Version=11.5.3300 Culture=neutral, publicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the require assembly.

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