A while back I wrote a post about the “Unable to load client print control” error that Report Manager (and RSinteract) was throwing after Microsoft’s auto update KB956391.

I also asked a question over at StackOverflow which I ended up answering myself. Yesterday follow up information was added, which may be of use if you have trouble with the fix.

EY Kalman says:

I have had the same problem (on several different servers). Applying SP3 and Report Viewer SP1 has helped on some of the servers, allowing the client machines to connect and download the control with no problem. However, I have had one server that, even after applying the updates, when accessing the report viewer using a client machine, it was still giving me the error. On looking into the exact URL GET request that is being sent, I discovered that it is possible to force the client machine to connect directly to the Report Server to download the control.

The user would need to enter the following url:

http://reportservername/Reports/Reserved.ReportViewerWebControl.axd?ReportSession=51bjqv45xydgos2wghu5ceza&ControlID=7617dedbf0234f89b80cad8e64431014&
Culture=2057&UICulture=9&ReportStack=1&OpType=PrintHtml

This should then pop up the required download/install prompt.

dotnettrio added (which is probably more relevant to RSinteract):

Hi,

I got this working with out removing any patches. The above patch was not working too. Finally what I did was on the IIS server install the following patch and reset / restart the IIS server. This is not for report manager application. This is for any ASP.NET Web application developed in .net3.5 using VS2008 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6AE0AA19-3E6C-474C-9D57-05B2347456B1&displaylang=en

I hope this helps anyone else with this problem.

After 8 long years the browser that everybody loves to hate is being automatically retired by Microsoft. Although there is a way to avoid the upgrade if your business has the problems later in this post.

To be fair to it, IE6 helped make the web what it is today. Its quirks mode rendering enabled anybody to code a web page with little regard to well-formed HTML or standards. This caused many a developer to hate it because it renders things differently to other browsers and often caused a lot of extra work because it takes so long to get it working in both.

Most of the anger directed at IE6 has to do with the differences with the W3 Consortium’s standards. However, when it was released these standards were not concrete and it was unclear if they would even be adopted ubiquitously.

Many companies have ignored Firefox and stuck with IE6 because of the huge costs involved in deploying and testing all their internal applications on their networks.

RSinteract is Internet Explorer only and will continue to support IE6 and IE7 for the foreseeable future because of this very reason. The web is changing and more and more people are becoming aware of other browsers such as Google Chrome. Perhaps in future we will move towards cross browser support but for now we are very much tied to Internet Explorer.

The new version 3.6 release is live and ready for download!

New Features:

• New formatting options including: Font, Font Size, Font Style
• Instant formatting options from the field selection screen
• New conditional formatting options
• Indicator images in the report for creating simple instant dashboards.
• Add tables and fields to existing SQL data sets
• Selectable Join types for joining tables from the front end
• Support for SQL Server 2008
• Improved field selection in the new report wizard
• New tree structure for creating SQL reports making it even faster and easier to find the data you want.
• New tree structure in the SQL filter screen drop downs to allow quicker selection of filter field
• Updated Look and Feel
• Improved Custom Fields Editor
• Report Branding support
• SSL compatibility
• 64 bit compatibility

There are also improvements to the admin tool, and a ton of bug fixes.

You can download the free and fully functional 30 day trial at http://www.rsinteract.com/download/eval.html

On any software project it’s important for managers to have some sort of system in place to keep track of how long tasks are taking and how much time has been spent collectively on a project. Gathering this data is fairly easy (with the right tool), for RSinteract we have a TimeBooking application written internally that collects the data. It’s fairly simple: client, task, comments, lots of drop downs for each half hour slot in the day. It works.

The problem is getting this data in a useable form to make decision on… but wait! We’re making a reporting tool. What better way to look at our time booking data than in a nicely formatted report!

Here’s an example of my time as booked back in the second week of December. I’ve quickly made a weekly time sheet using our _Reporting view in the time booking database with filters for employee and week commencing. I can now save this and look at anyone’s time for any given week! Clever eh?

Using products internally like this is known in the industry as “dogfooding” as in “eats its own dog food”. This gives us a good idea of how our clients may use the software and also highlights problems that we might not otherwise pick up in our usual testing.

Here’s a quick demo of the new indicators feature. It’s a pretty trivial one but shows the potential.

Server Error in ‘/RSinteract’ Application.

Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.BadImageFormatException: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.ReportingServices.Interfaces’ or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format.

Here’s a sneak preview of the new look and feel and some of the new features included in the upcoming major release of RSinteract.

• New formatting options including: Font, Font Size, Font Style
• Instant formatting options from the field selection screen
• New conditional formatting options as above and more!
• Indicator images in the report for creating simple instant dashboards.
• Selectable Join types for joining tables from the front end
• Join tables direct from the edit section screen, allowing the addition of data to existing SQL reports.
• Support for SQL Server 2008
• Improved field selection in the new report wizard
• New tree structure for creating SQL reports making it even faster and easier to find the data you want.
• New tree structure in the SQL filter screen drop downs to allow quicker selection of filter field
• Updated Look and Feel
• Beta of Windows SharePoint Services support
• Improved Custom Fields Editor
• Report Branding support
• The much missed previous button is back (excuse the pun)!
• Plus lots and lots of bug fixes!

Let us know if you like it or not by commenting!

UPDATE: Further information on alternative fixes has come to my attention via StackOverflow.

This new error has popped up since Microsoft released the update KB956391.

The update is for a vulnerability in the GDI+ DLL which allowed a malicious user to execute code on the client machine (good old! – ed). The fix uses ActiveX Killbits which is a setting that Internet Explorer checks for each ActiveX control. If the Killbits are set, IE refuses to load the control.

The update set the Killbits for the version of the RS Client Print ActiveX control which is used by the version 8.0.0.0 of the ReportViewer which is referenced by RSinteract (and Report Manager). Thus the printing will not work in either.

To fix Report Manager you need to apply the ReportViewer SP1 patch and the Security Update for SQL Server SP2 (KB954606). Once this is working again you can fix RSinteract.

To fix RSinteract you need to apply another Security Update for SQL Server SP2 (KB954607).

Let us know if this fix doesn’t work for you.