To solve my eariler problems with Crystal Reports, I upgraded to CR 9. This solved the deployment issue I was having, but caused a new problem on my system.
When using a Crystal Report inside Visual Studio, it automatically created a strong named class to go along with the report. A custom tool is executed that generates this code for each report. However, after the upgrade, any new reports I added to any project failed to generate the class files. I would get an error that said:
"The custom tool 'CrystalDecisions.VSDesigner.CodeGen.ReportCodeGenerator' failed."
I figured that the name of the custom tool had probably changed in the new version, but I wasn't able to figure out the new name. I was however curious as to why my old reports were able to continue to build properly, when new ones wouldn't.
Upon closer examination, I noticed that the existing reports in my project had a different custom tool attribute value than the new ones. Changing the custom tool attribute of the new report to match the old reports fixed the problem.
If you are getting this error, but don't have any old reports to look at, try changing the Custom Tool attribute to: 'CrystalDecisions.VSShell.CodeGen.ReportCodeGenerator'. This fixed the problem for me and hopefully will for you too.