The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Environment

Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 MOSS 2007 SP2 Web Front End
Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 SQL Server 2008  with all the services installed and SharePoint Integration Mode on.

Issue

Upon trying to launch Central Administration for the first time I was presented with the following error:

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms, Version=8.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Troubleshooting steps

First I tried to manually drag the following DLLs from the SQL Server to the SharePoint Server:

Microsoft.ReportViewer.Common.dll
Microsoft.ReportViewer.ProcessingObjectModel.dll
Microsoft.ReportViewer.WebForms.dll
Microsoft.ReportViewer.WinForms.dll

I soon found out that it’s not possible to drag DLLs the GAC if you have UAC turned on with Windows Server 2008. I really didn’t want to turn that off so I stumbled across some other suggestions on the web that didn’t really work either. These other suggestions were to use the run as command on various Explorer windows to copy the files to the GAC. Eventually I ended up logging on as the SharePoint server’s local administrator account and was able to successfully drag the DLLs into the GAC. Only problem was that the versions didn’t match up…

Solution

Enter the Report Viewer 2005 Redistributable. Installing that deployed the proper DLLs to the GAC and SharePoint Central Admin was able to load successfully. Woot.