How to get BIDS for Visual Studio 2008 SP1?

Question

I currently use Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and have been migrating older projects into VS2008 but existing SSIS and SSRS (2005) projects have not been compatible with VS2008. It has been a pain to maintain those BIDS projects as a separate solution.

I have been considering upgrading to SQL2008 but because our dev, test and production platforms are all SQL2005 Enterprise Edition I do not like the idea of deviating my local environment from the current standard. Despite wanting BIDS for VS2008.

I just installed Sql Express 2008 with all the bits and something occurred to me... Did Sql Express 2008 just install all the BIDS bits I need without requiring me to upgrade my local version of Sql Server?

Is this a viable methods of installing BIDS for VS2008 or am I missing something?

UPDATE

I just had a thought... Why don't I just install the tools from the full SQL Server 2008 since I have access to that.

There is still the question of what differences there are between the tools from Express 2008 and the full Sql Server 2008.

Answer 1

BIDS for SQL Server 2005 is based on Visual Studio 2005. AFAIK it won't install directly into VS2008.

Answer 2

In my experience you can install BIDS 2008 side-by side with BIDS 2005 on your machine, just select it from Client tools section in SQL Server 2008 installation wizard. You do not need to install a new SQL Server instance (as you did with Express) or upgrade existing one.

AFAIK you cannot target SS 2005 with BIDS 2008.

Answer 3

This seemed to work fine but I did run into a slight snag, at least with SSRS. I don't seem to be able to deploy to SSRS 2005 from BIDS 2008. Seems to be some significant changes in the RDL between 2005 and 2008.

So until we get SS2008 onto our servers it seems we're stuck maintaining two solutions - one for the application and one for any BIDS development for the application.

Note, the same goes for SSIS projects. BIDS in VS2008 doesn't work with SQL2005 :(