BIDS Templates Come to Visual Studio 2012 in SSDT Update

"Does SSDT for Visual Studio 2012 support BI project templates?" asked James V. Serra in a TechNet forum last September.

Some six months later, the answer was yes: "Hi James, the download to add the BI Project Templates to the VS2012 shell is now available."

The release includes templates for Visual Studio 2012 BI projects, including Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services. These templates were part of the old Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS).

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) encompasses a bunch of integrated services and enhancements to improve database development entirely from within the Visual Studio IDE, such as incorporating functionality found in BIDS and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), among a host of other features.

Prior to this, the BI templates were available only in Visual Studio 2010, SSDT 2010 or SQL Server 2012. The new release will be installed through the SQL Server 2012 setup tool as a shared service and will install a Visual Studio 2012 integrated shell if you don't already have VS 2012.

This will hopefully relieve a lot of the frustration of data developers confused by different versions of SSDT, which was introduced with SQL Server 2012 but hosted in the VS 2010 shell, and inconsistencies in functionality as data development tools have evolved.

Apparently, though, there are still some frustrated users and more integration to be done. SQL DBA John Pertell welcomed the announcement. "That’s great news as a lot of developers, myself included, have been waiting for this functionality," he said. However, he added, "the bad news is that it doesn’t include the Database Projects templates released last year. You’ll still need to install them separately. But they will work together."

He explained further:

So if you want just the BI templates for Visual Studio 2012 you only have to install the BI version of SSDT. If you also want the database projects you will need to install both the BI templates and the database templates. And if you want to use the test plans for your new database projects and create SSRS reports or SSIS packages you’ll need a full edition of VS 2012, either Premium or Ultimate, plus the database templates plus the BI templates.

There were also some users frustrated by the install experience, especially on 64-bit machines running SQL Server 2012 (see comments on this blog post). Visual Studio and the SSDT integrated shell are 32-bit apps, and users reported errors, some of which were apparently caused by the installation tool trying to install the 32-bit version of SQL Server 2012, Service Pack 1. The solution seems to be to choose the "perform new install" option during installation and not the "add features to existing" option.

Still, many data devs are happy with the new capabilities. Those include Serra, who said on his blog, "It took 8 months, but at least it was quicker than being able to use BI in VS 2010, which took about two years."

Other enhancements to Visual Studio 2012 added last week include Office Developer Tools and a SQL Server Data-Tier Application Framework update.

What do you think of the new BI functionality in SSDT? Are we headed toward one big, comprehensive IDE that will include everything you need for SQL Server development in one place? Comment here or by e-mail.

Posted by David Ramel on 03/14/2013