Recently while giving some CRM 4.0 training, one of our Business Intelligence developers ask me “Since the SRS Report Viewer Control portion of SRS is installed on the CRM server, how is this control updated when SRS updates are released?”.  While, I have given this training many times, nobody to date had asked this question and didn't have a very good answer to give.  So I did some research and here is the answer.

First off, the Report Viewer Control does not actually ship with Microsoft CRM 4.0 and instead it is separate prerequisite that the CRM setup will download as needed.

The controls redistributable package can actually be downloaded directly from Microsoft here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=E7D661BA-DC95-4EB3-8916-3E31340DDC2C&displaylang=en

Second, the control is not actually a part of SQL Reporting Services and it is actually updated based on the Visual Studio codebase instead of the SQL Reporting Services codebase.  So while SQL Server 2005 / SQL Reporting Services 2005 is on Service Pack 2 (Soon to be SP3), Visual Studio 2005 is only on SP1 and as such, this control is also on SP1.  Since SP1 of this control is the version that Microsoft CRM 4.0 requires to being with, there are not really any major updates available yet that would affect any CRM 4.0 installations.

In the future if Microsoft does release a Visual Studio 2005 SP2, they will probably release a separate update that can be applied to your CRM server to get the updated rendering control.  This will of course be completely separate from any Microsoft Dynamics CRM updates and hot fixes.

Enjoy,

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.