Adding BI4 designer.exe as a reference in Visual Studio on Windows 7

Recently I had been having massive problems trying to get designer.exe added as a reference in Visual Studio. I had installed the BI4 client tools, I could see it as an option to add as a reference but whenever I added it I got the following error...

A reference to 'BusinessObjects Designer 14.0 Object Library' could not be added. Could not register the ActiveX type library 'C:\..\win32_x86\designer.exe'.

I tried registering designer.exe via regsrv32.exe, I also tried registering designer.tlb, but nothing seemed to work.

After searching far and wide, I came across this stackoverflow post.

And after registering designer.tlb using regtlibv12.exe, I saw a new entry in the available references for BusinessObjects Designer 14.0 Object Library. The notable difference here is that the version number was listed as 14, whereas the original entry was listed as version 20. I added this and everything was good to go.

Specifically, what I did was

• opened a cmd prompt (as administrator, but I'm not sure if this was necessary. 
• cd to the business objects installation folder (C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win32_x86)
• run the command
• C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\regtlibv12.exe designer.tlb
• You should then see "Registration of designer.tlb successful." returned.
• Add the reference in VS.