What is the use of "Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll" in report viewer package?

Question

Project details: C# WinForms Project, Visual Studio 2019
We have installed the "Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportViewerControl.Winforms" packages from NuGet Solution for adding report viewing to the application

After installing the above packages, following files automatically gets added to the selected project references.

While building the code following warnings are reported:

WARNING: Unable to find dependency 'MICROSOFT.VISUALSTUDIO.SHELL.DESIGN' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0') of assembly 'Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll'
WARNING: Unable to find dependency 'MICROSOFT.VISUALSTUDIO.SHELL.14.0' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0') of assembly 'Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll'
WARNING: Unable to find dependency 'MICROSOFT.VSDESIGNER' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0') of assembly 'Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll'

Looks like 'Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll' has internal dependency on other .dll files. To resolve this issue, we end up adding many more .dll files which are not used by the project . If we remove the "Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design" from project references the warnings disappears, and the project works fine.

Wanted to understand the purpose of "Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll" in the package? Can we exclude it from project references if there is no dependency?

Answer 1

Hi @Ruta Abhyankar ,
According to your situation, I installed Package Microsoft.ReportingServices.ReportViewerControl.Winforms -Version 150.1484.0 locally, but your issue is not reproduced.

This is not an issue with this NuGet package. The assembly Microsoft.ReportViewer.Design.dll has a dependency on these three assemblies:

'MICROSOFT.VISUALSTUDIO.SHELL.14.0' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0')
'MICROSOFT.VISUALSTUDIO.SHELL.DESIGN' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0')
'MICROSOFT.VSDESIGNER' (Signature='B03F5F7F11D50A3A' Version='14.0.0.0')

But they’re not included in the package, resulting in the warning.

You could Ignore these since they’re warnings and not errors. This is assuming these files aren’t actually needed at runtime.

Best Regards,
Joy

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