Running ReportViewer Control on Windows 2000

I’ve been working on an interesting project where we had reporting considerations. I hadn’t been very involved with it. There were some folks creating the reports, some others telling those folks what to do, and still others trying to figure out how to deploy the thing. Needless to say, there were issues with it. So I was asked to come in and see what I could do.

Microsoft has a handy ReportViewer control that really is quite cool. I came from a background where we used Actuate and the report delivery mechanism was a little clunky (probably mostly due to our implementation) and not really integrated at all. So to have this control that basically puts the reports in an IFRAME is kind of cool. It looks integrated at least.

Our environment is a little messed up. I develop on my own W2K3 server workstation and deploy to another W2K3 server. I knew that I had to impersonate a domain user in order to access the required reports. So I followed the instructions I learned here. It all worked fine, until I deployed the solution to an old W2K server, which is our public test machine (don’t ask). I could not for the life of me get it to work.

After many hours trying this that and the other, I finally figured that I *must* be doing something wrong in the impersonation. That’s the only thing that makes sense. So then I came across this. And the solution was so obvious that I felt a little sheepish in announcing my find to others. I don’t know enough about the internals to figure out why it’s happening, but I do know that I’ll consider that I need to grant the “Act as part of the operating system” privilege for the ASPNET user when running on Windows 2000. Hopefully that scenario won’t present itself again.