Deploy VS2013 SSIS packages to SQL Server 2012 & edit in VS2012

Question

I'm afraid I know the answer to this already, but I'm hoping someone can point me in a better direction. I just finished developing a large ETL project using VS2013. My dev machine has SQL Server 2012 installed, and everything works perfectly executing from within VS. However, I just went to deploy the project to another device running SQL Server 2012, and got a version error.

I thought if I could open the solution in VS2012, the packages might recompile correctly. However, I can't open them in VS2012 due to version errors again ("version can't be lower than current version" error). I'm pissed because everything worked fine in development with the VS2013/SQL2012 combo, but now suddenly it's no good?!?

Can someone please help me figure out how to get these packages downgraded to work with VS2012/SQL2012? There are only a few script tasks involved if that makes a difference. Mostly it's just basic SSIS tasks and data flows.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I found a workaround how you can "downgrade" your SSIS 2014 packages to SSIS 2012. I wrote it on my blog here:

http://vaniecastro.com/2015/02/26/how-to-downgrade-sql-server-integration-services-2014-packages-to-2012/

The idea is that you need to manually modify the XML file, change the PackageFormatVersion and replace ExecutableType property and componentClassID attribute values to use the DTSX2 Version 2012/01 values instead of the DTSX2 Version 2014/01 ones.