Our world would be way too easy if we could just download Visual Studio, open an RDLC file with it and just start developing. But like with many things in life, the same is true for developing RDLC Reports with Visual Studio: The more burdens you overcome, the more fun you will have afterwards.

Basically we need to do two things:

1. Install Visual Studio Community Edition
2. Install Microsoft Rdlc Report Designer for Visual Studio

Let’s do it!

1. Download and Install Visual Studio Community Edition

You can go to this site and download the Free Community Edition for Visual Studio 2017.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6278-visual-studio.html

Choose “Free Community Edition”, press “Download Now” and wait until your browser has sucessfully downloaded Visual Studio.

If you do not want to use techspot to download Visual Studio, you can use the official website https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/de/downloads/ to download the latest version of Visual Studio there.

When clicking on the installation file, you will see something like this:

Yes, it was done soon…Now we can select our Workloads.

Click “Install” and watch the magic happen.

After installing Visual Studio, we are ready for the next step.

2. Install Microsoft Rdlc Report Designer for Visual Studio

There are two ways to download and install this extension.

In Visual Studio through “Extensions and Updates”

If you do not want to install the extension in Visual Studio, you can also use your browser. Search for “Microsoft RDLC Report Designer Market”. Download the extension and install it.

Download link for the lazy ones:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ProBITools.MicrosoftReportProjectsforVisualStudio

After the installation is done, close all windows of Visual Studio. Reopen Visual Studio. Smile. Your changes have been applied and you can start developing your first RDLC report with Visual Studio.