Reporting Services 2005 Setup on Vista/Windows 2008

HAPPY 2009!!! 

Quick blurb on New Year's resolutions - More frequent blog posts that contain useful and helpful information as I have not posted for several weeks now.

I have been setting up a lab environment for my use over the past few days.  While setting up SQL 2005 SSRS on windows server 2008 I ran into a few snag that wanted to make sure that I put out there for people to be aware of.  Based on my searching a few people have been running into this as well.  If you want to skip the details the information to fix the issue , or issues, can be found at https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/sqlreportingservices/thread/48a1e733-1a47-4c79-b01e-d84fafa779b4/

After I installed SSRS (did not configure during install) and then configured it with the configuration tool I would get the following error when trying to connect "An error occurred while parsing the configuration file. The ReportServerVirtualDirectory element is missing."

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To fix this error I opened my RSWebApplication.config file and I noticed something interesting about 4th line down <ReportServerVirtualDirectory></ReportServerVirtualDirectory>

There was nothing between the tags.  Simple fix for me was to simply put in "ReportServer" between the tags (See below).   

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If you take time to read the entire set of posts on the link above you will see that this corrects only one potentially 3-4 issues with the setup. 

Be sure to take a look at https://support.microsoft.com/kb/938245/ (How to install and how to configure SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a computer that is running Windows Server 2008).

-k