Currently SQL Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and all the project types (AS, IS and RS) live in Visual Studio 2005. So don't try to open a solution that contains IS project in VS 2008 yet. What about final SQL 2008 - now that Visual Studio 2008 is released - what are the plans for BIDS and support of BI projects VS 2008?

Note that I have to comment on unreleased software, so the plans may change, and this information is provided as-is (as everything else in this blog, but even more so :)). Still, we got a lot of questions, I'll try to summarize this discussion.

The SQL 2005 is not going to change, SSIS 2005 is hosted in VS 2005, and you can't open SSIS projects in VS 2008 until you install SSIS 2008.

 

For SQL 2008 the plans are different:

  1. SSIS 2008 RTM will work with VS 2008 (and only with VS 2008 - there will be no option to use SSIS 2008 project in VS 2005 IDE).
  2. It is not final yet when this will be implemented, maybe next CTP or a CTP refresh soon after it. Update: starting with CTP6, SSIS 2008 lives in VS 2008.
  3. SSIS 2008 designer (hosted in VS 2008) will convert the packages to SSIS 2008 format. SSIS 2005 runtime will not be able to execute new packages after this conversion.

Now regarding setup: how do I remove VS 2005 without impacting BIDS installation? If you have both VS 2005 and BIDS, there should be at least two entries for Visual Studio SKUs in Add/Remove Programs:

  1. VS 2005 Premier Partner Edition - this is the one installed by SQL 2005 (and current SQL 2008 CTP). Do not remove it if you want to keep SQL 2005 BIDS
  2. The actual VS, e.g. VS 2005 Team System, or VS 2005 Pro - this is the one you want to remove if you want to uninstall Visual Studio 2005.

 

That was about designing SSIS packages. If you want to write SSIS custom components (tasks, transforms, etc), you can use either VS 2005 or VS 2008 to develop either SSIS 2005 or SSIS 2008 components - there is a lot more flexibility here. If you use VS 2008 and want to target SSIS 2005, open project properties and make the project target .NET 2.0 runtime.