Today I was deploying a solution to a production environment and ran into a quite difficult problem; the custom report we had made could not be uploaded to CRM and the error description was rather cryptic. This error description was independent on if we tried to import the entire solution or just added the report directly. The error we received was the following:

Unhandled Exception: System.ServiceModel.FaultException`1[[Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk.OrganizationServiceFault, Microsoft.Xrm.Sdk, Version=5.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35]]:

An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.Detail:

http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/xrm/2011/Contracts">
  -2147188072
  http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/System.Collections.Generic" />
  An error occurred while trying to add the report to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Try adding the report again. If this problem persists, contact your system administrator.
  2011-06-16T07:43:12.1856313Z
 
 


I Binged/Googled the webb some and found that this article probably describes this error as it fits our environmen setup:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2491352

The error was due to the fact that reports written for SQL 2008 R2 are not compatible with SQL 2008. This has some very important effects as many customers might be running SQL 2008 for the production environments and many developers work with SQL 2008 R2 when developing. This difference might not be noticeable in general but this fact will cause these reports  to not be importable into the production environment.
So, a general suggestion is to have all environments, development, development test, acceptance test, training and production on exactly the same version of both Windows server and SQL-server to avoid any errors showing up in one of the environments but not the other, something that can be very problematic to solve due to the difficulty of finding the error since it by definition cannot be replicated on some of the environments.
Gustaf Westerlund
CEO, Chief Architect and co-Founder at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se