Unable to make Business Intelligence Projects. How do I resolve a "Configuration system failed to initialize" error message?

Question

My problem is that I am receiving a "Configuration system failed to initialize." error every time I try to open or create a Business Intelligence Project in Business Intelligence Development Studio.

I am on a fairly new install of Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise in which I first installed SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise (with the Business Intelligence Development Studio) and then Visual Studio 2010 Professional in that order. I have tried fully installing Visual Studio 2008, but that seemed to not make a difference.

The message appears to be from a System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException. A lot of the Googling that I've done points to config files, but I don't know what config would be related to this. I haven't created a project with a related config file, because I can't create a project at all. Attempting to do so will make a folder for the project and then fail before creating anything else.

Answer 1

you are creating the projects in BIDS right, not VS2010? It won't work in VS2010

Answer 2

The solution to this was to copy the machine.config from C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\CONFIG\ into C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\CONFIG which is for the 32 bit framework. I'm on a 64-bit machine, so as far as I can tell it just never really configured the 32-bit machine.config.

I don't know if this is the ideal solution to my problem, but it got me up and running. Hopefully this will help others with this situation.

Summary: If you are on Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit then make sure that your .NET 2.0 32-bit machine.config is configured for Business Intelligence Development Studio from SQL Server 2008 R2 to work correctly.