Editing NAV 2018 report layouts with VS 2017

Report Design Gotcha
One of the things we sooner or later get into, is designing RDLC reports. The Development Client, opens Visual Studio 2017 on our machines, but it only showed the XML representation of the rdlc file.

Off course, the first results stated we need to install SQL Server Data Tools in Visual Studio, but after checking, this was already installed. I changed my search query to a more generic “Visual Studio 2017 rdlc design”, and found out there is a VSIX file from Microsoft here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ProBITools.MicrosoftRdlcReportDesignerforVisualStudio-18001

After installing this, our RDLC layout showed properly.
For the people who are interested, we are using Terminal Server internally, and we were able to install the VSIX for everyone on an admin session. You need to execute VSIXInstaller.exe with an admin command and the path to the VSIX. This will install the file in the admin profile, and make it available for everyone.

VSIXInstaller can be found here:


C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\<version>\Common7\IDE\VSIXInstaller.exe
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C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\<version>\Common7\IDE\VSIXInstaller.exe
making the command as follows:


vsixinstaller.exe /admin <path to vsix>
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vsixinstaller.exe /admin <path to vsix>