How to put BIDS solutions under source control?

Question

I am starting to work with Microsoft BI suite: Analysis services 2005, Business Intelligence Development Studio 2005, stuff like that. Of course my first wish was to set up the same source control/automated testing environment I have for my .NET projects.

But xml files used by Analysiss services (dwproj, cube, dim, ds, dsv) and Integration services (dtsx) are rather source control-unfriendly. Not only they have actual data intermingled with presentation details of e.g. diagram coordinates, but they are also often reformatted on save by Visual Studio. This results in completely useless diffs in TortoiseSVN, where half of the file has changed but you cannot understand where and why.

How do you solve this problem? Are there any specilized systems/plugins suitable for the job?

Answer 1

We have a feature in BIDS Helper (a free open source add-in) that does a "smart diff". We can't stop all the reformatting that goes on, but the smart diff feature strips out as much of the presentation details as we can which usually lets you see the important details of any change. I know it works with Source Safe and TFS, I don't know if anyone has tried with SVN yet.