ReportViewer control: Look out for appropriate version when using in Server mode (Remote Processing)

The report viewer control (available for Windows Forms as well as ASP.NET applications) is used to display reports in our applications. However, it was an interesting observation for me that the ReportViewer control can connect to specific SQL server versions when used in Server Mode(or Remote Mode). The related MSDN docs for report viewer control that verify this behavior can be viewed at here(version 9.0.0.0, with VS2008, for SQL server 2005+) and here(version 10.0.0.0 with VS2010, for SQL server version 2008+). My dev machine has Visual Studio 2010 equipped with SQL Server 2008 R2 and the default report viewer control came out to be version 10.0.0.0. When I tried to connect to an existing SQL 2005 report server on my network, it errored out saying:

Remote report processing requires Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Reporting Services or later.

Strange!! Typically software are backward compatible and new versions support all previous versions but Report Viewer wont. So be careful when choosing your version of Report Viewer. Finally, if you need directions on how to use Report Viewer version 9 with VS2010, here’s an stack overflow question that may be helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3013135/using-reportviewer-9-control-in-vs-2010.