Handling a deployment error in Reporting Services

You created a great looking report in Visual Studio 2008 using a Report Server Project template and now you try deploying it by hitting the deploy menu item in the report's drop-down contextual menu. You get an error that it cannot be deployed. Specifically you get the following Microsoft Report Designer error:


Could not connect to the report server . Verify that the TargetServerURL is valid and that you have the correct permissions to connect to the report server.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

Unable to connect to the remote server (System)

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No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it IPAddress:Port(System)

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BUTTONS:

OK
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The first thing to know is that the Report Server you are deploying your report to is not the web server. Used to be Web Server in Visual Studio 2005 but not in Visual Studio 2008.

Although your TargetServerURL is set correctly to the ReportServer's URL it is possible that the server has not started.

Now use the Reporting Services Configuration Manager, or otherwise, connect to the Server and start it.

You can now deploy the report (the deployment success/failure will be displayed in the output window).

Get a jump start with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services with the Hands-on loaded book from yours truly,

http://hodentek.blogspot.com/2009/01/it-was-very-good-year.html