When Visual Studio 2010 was released about a year ago, I was very excited and wanted to quickly open up a SSAS project created in VS 2008 to see the new features that were available in VS 2010.  So I copied one of my projects to a test folder and proceeded to open that project in VS 2010.  I was greeted with a “Welcome to the Visual Studio Conversion Wizard”.  Ok, no problem.  I run the wizard, and it completes with an “All projects converted successfully”.  Great!  But looking at the Solution Explorer, I see that it shows the solution as “unavailable”, and for the project is shows “The project file was unloaded”.  Strange.  So I close the solution, then open it and see this:

Really strange.  Let me try a SSIS project.  Same error.  Let me try a SSRS project.  Same error.  I spent the next few hours trying to figure out what I was doing wrong to cause the conversion not to work.  Finally I turn to my friend Mr. Google, and find this interesting bit:  VS 2010 does not support SSAS, SSIS, or SSRS!  Not only that, but the conversion wizard converts the project into a format it can’t use in VS 2010 AND VS 2008!  That just does not make any sense.  Why didn’t VS 2010 just say “Sorry, SSAS, SSIS, and SSRS are not supported” when you try to open the VS 2008 solution in VS 2010?  Instead, it converts it into a format nothing can use.

Very frustrating.  But at least there is a pretty easy way, via the previous link, to perform a few steps so you can once again open the solution in VS 2008.  I just hope you don’t waste hours thinking you were doing something wrong with the conversion like I did.

In the next version of SQL Server, code named “Denali”, all the current “BIDS” components (SSIS, SSAS, SSRS) will be shipping on top of the Visual Studio 2010 shell.  With CTP1 of Denali, BIDS is still based on Visual Studio 2008.  In the next CTP, due this summer, it will use the 2010 shell (UPDATE: CTP3 made available here on July 12th, 2011).  This new environment is code-named “Juneau”.

Also, starting with Juneau, Microsoft re-architected the BIDS and Visual Studio integration so that they can almost sim-ship features in SQL Server Box and Visual Studio Box. For example, you can expect BI development Studio to be available in future versions of Visual Studio weeks after the availability of the release, instead of having to wait for the next release of SQL server to update it.