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 VS 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 "VS 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 VS2008, 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 VS2008.
VS2008 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 VS2008 replacing VS2005
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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