Installing Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005
If you are upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 then be careful with SQL Server.
You may or may not know that the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) is a visual studio shell. If you don't have Visual Studio installed when you install SQL Server then it installs a version of Visual Studio for you.
So how does this impact Visual Studio 2008 . Well you may think that when you upgrade you can uninstall Visual Studio 2005.
STOP
You can uninstall VS 2005, but make sure you don't uninstall the shell used by SQL for BIDS. How do you know what that is? I'll tell you its "Visual Studio 2005 Premier Partner Edition".
If you uninstall this you will not be able to use BIDS, so you won't be able to develop Integration services packages, Reporting Services reports, or Analysis Services Database. Whats more based on my experience you have to jump through a few hoops to get BIDS installed again.
You might think why can't I use Visual Studio 2008 , well the simple answer is that Microsoft haven't developed the project types ( the designers etc that work in VS for SSIS, SSRS and SSAS) for Visual Studio 2008 .
Visual Studio 2008 will be used for the Katmai version of BIDS so if you have to support a SQL2005 and a SQL 2008 instance you will need to make sure you keep your SQL2005 BIDS lying around. Unfortunately the benefit of Visual Studio 2008 replacing Visual Studio 2005 by supporting all .Net versions ( 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5) is not the same for us SQL guys we have to stick with both versions.
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