RDLC Without BC: When the Feedback Loop Is Longer Than the Workday

Developing RDLC reports for Business Central requires a full build-and-deploy cycle to view changes, which can take about five minutes per iteration.

Visual Studio Report Designer does not accept BC XML as a data source and RDLC files have a DataProvider set to SQL that the UI cannot change.

The author built a WPF tool that renders .rdlc and BC XML locally using ReportViewerCore.NETCore and WebView2, but had to implement column type inference and explicit date parsing for dd/MM/yyyy.

Packaging and deployment raised installer issues: Inno Setup preprocessor encoding, DownloadTemporaryFile error handling, PublishSingleFile native DLL extraction, and WebView2 user-data folder permissions.

Solutions included parsing dates with TryParseExact, disabling PublishSingleFile so native DLLs remain alongside the exe, and setting WebView2 user data to AppData.