Error in Visual Studio 2008 with SSRS 2005 report projects

Question

Has anyone found a good workaound for opening or editing an SSRS 2005 report project with Visual Studio 2008 yet?

Will the SQL server 2008 tools be the migration path for these report projects in the future? I really dont want to have to keep VS2005 installed forever just to update SSRS reports.

After an upgrade to VS2008 an existing solution that contains a VS2005 SSRS reports project will not open. From what I understand the SQL Server 2005 tools dont know about VS2008 so they will not integrate into the IDE. So currently I switch back to VS2005 for any updates to this project, and get an error loading project message everytime I open the solution in 2008.

EDIT on solution: I was able to install the shared component for BDIS from the SQL2008 disc and am now able to open and update my SSRS 2005 .rdl project items within VS2008.

Note to others: If you edit your SSRS 2005 reports in VS2008 and re-save you will not be able to edit them in VS2005 anymore, or deploy them to a 2005 server. They are up-converted to 2008 report files.

Answer 1

I don't fully understand what kind of "workaround" you want.....

In order to create and edit SSRS report projects in Visual Studio, you basically have two options:

• install the "Business Intelligence Development Studio" components from your SQL Server 2008 DVD - this gives you the full suite of visual designers and everything to create and edit RDL files in Visual Studio

• learn the RDL spec by heart and open the RDL files as XML and just manually edit those - joking, of course - this is not really an option, is it?

So - what exactly do you want to "work around" then??