Develop both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008R2 reports on same dev box

Question

We have a large real-estate of existing SSRS 2008 reports that we are still maintain in production.
However we are evaluating SSRS 2008r2 and would like to start developing reports that take advantage of the new features such as shared datasets etc.

The problem is that AFAIK installing the tools for 2008R2 upgrades the Visual Studio 2008 tools from 2008 to 2008R2. This means that when you open a 2008 report and make any changes that it thinks need a new feature it upgrades the schema to R2 making it incompatible with our production servers.

Has anyone else encountered this? Any tips? I don't want to RDP to a VM or anything nasty like that really.

Answer 1

Some things get upgraded, others remain specific to the instance. For example, Business Intelligence Design Studio gets upgraded, but Reporting Services remains independent. See this link for a complete discussion: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210714.aspx

Answer 2

I've just realised it's possible to install Report Builder 2.0 alongside Report Builder 3.0 and Visual Studio 2008 with SQL 2008r2 tools in it. Thus I can at least edit the old .RDLs using Report Builder 2.0.

From Technet - " Business Intelligence Development Studio supports working with both SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 reports, and with Report Server projects in the SQL Server 2008 R2 version of Business Intelligence Development Studio. You can open, save, preview, and deploy either version of reports or Report Server projects. You set Report Server project properties to specify the version of the report server to deploy reports to and how to handle warnings and errors which might occur when up either upgrade a report from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2008 R2, or revert a report from SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2008 "

The result is that with 2008r2 tools installed you have no choice but to upgrade the project file to 2008R2, however within the project you specify the target SQL Server version. This determines whether .RDLs get upgraded or not.