Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Development Studio
As soon as Visual Studio 2008 went RTM I installed it and removed Visual Studio 2005 from my system. As you might know VS2008’s new multi-targeting feature can target .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 and should be fully backwards compatible with VS2005, so in theory there shouldn’t be any need for keeping VS2005 around*.
However, today I encountered an unexpected situation where I did need VS2005. I tried to launch the SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Studio, which failed miserably… As you may know Business Intelligence Studio makes use of the VS2005 IDE (it uses either an existing “normal” Visual Studio installation or it installs the Visual Studio Premier Partner Edition). I knew this, but I had expected it to somehow automatically (or magically :-)) switch to the VS2008 IDE, which ofcourse it did not.
Unwilling to re-install SQL Server 2005 I searched the internet for a solution to this problem and stumbled on a thread on the MSDN forums discussing this exact same issue. It contains an interesting reply by Microsoft employee Dan Jones. There he explains a way to install the VS2005 files need without the need for re-installing SQL Server 2005. Here’s the trick:
- Go to the location for SQL Server setup and run .\Tools\Setup\vs_setup.exe. This will install the VS Shell.
- Repair the Business Intelligence Studio installation by running the following command from the command line from the .\Tools directory (note: this should be typed on one line):
start /wait setup.exe /qb REINSTALL=SQL_WarehouseDevWorkbench
REINSTALLMODE=OMUS