I get the following 6 warnings when I try to publish my application with
ClickOnce Deployment:

Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.reportsource".
Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.shared".
Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.windows.forms".
Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.reportsource".
Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.shared".
Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.windows.forms".

The three Crystal Report DLL files mentioned are not published.
Consequently, an error is thrown when my application attempts to open a
Crystal Report on a machine without the DLL files already installed.

Does anyone know why ClickOnce Deployment would fail to publish particular
DLL files? Strangely enough, CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.dll

I figured out how to get rid of the warnings, though that doesn't mean the
DLL files will actually get published. If you set your references to Copy
Local, then their publish status will/can be set to Include (auto). For some
reason, when the publish status is set to Include (auto) instead of Include,
the warnings go away.

In order to actually install the DLLs to the user machines, the only way I
can figure is to publish with the additional prerequisites setup program
created to include Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 2.0.

It seems to me like Microsoft is purposely not allowing us to publish the
Crystal Report DLL files directly because they want to avoid having a new set
of these DLL files installed on the user machine for each .NET 2.0
application that uses Crystal Reports. Since use of Crystal Reports is
pretty widespread, I guess it is preferred to install once to the GAC per
machine, even though the extra step in the installation process is a bit
cumbersome. Either that, or maybe there is a licensing issue that forces
Microsoft to go this route so that the user can agree to the licensing
agreement for Crystal Reports.



Does a representative of Microsoft care to shed light on my speculation? I
would prefer to publish the Crystal Report DLL files directly instead of
installing to the GAC, but maybe that is not possible for a good reason.


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