SQL Server BI Tooling now in Visual Studio 2012 Shell

This is really exciting. One of the complaints from those using the BI tools (SQL Server Data Tools) has been that they were tied to the Visual Studio 2010 shell, when the rest of their development work had moved to Visual Studio 2012.

The SQL Server BI team has now released the VS2012 versions of these project templates. You’ll find details the download here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36843

The Reporting Services team blog about it is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2013/03/06/sql-server-data-tools-business-intelligence-for-visual-studio-2012-released-online.aspx  

And the Analysis Services team blog about it is here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/analysisservices/archive/2013/03/06/sql-server-data-tools-business-intelligence-for-visual-studio-2012-released-online.aspx  

One nice aspect that I’ve found is that I have been able to open BI projects in VS2010 again, even after editing them in VS2012. I wasn’t expecting that to be possible so it must mean that the project format hasn’t changed.

One hint on installation though:

Make sure you choose the “New Instance” option (strange as that might seem). Otherwise, you’ll get an error that says the following:

Rule “Same architecture installation” failed.

Enjoy!

2013-03-07