Next version SSIS

Details of the next version of SSIS have been leaking onto the internets. Some highlights; undo in the designer - which will be a big time-saver, data-flow sequence containers - allowing developers to group and hide transformations, and last but not least - rounded corners!

This is great, and no doubt other improvements will be announced over the next few weeks (presumably Visual Studio 2010 integration is a cast-iron certainty). However other gripes on connect remain open, or have already been closed as 'won't fix', such as case sensitivity on the Lookup transform (forcing additional 'uppercase' columns, or passing the whole lookup to the SQL database), and some of Jamie Thomsons debugging suggestions.

Nit-picking aside its interesting to note that less than 6 months after the release of R2 MS is starting to talk about CTP's of the next version.

Data dude build without a Visual Studio installation

The simple answer is that you can't.

I've just run into this issue myself. It strikes me that requiring an additional client license, and a full VS install simply to_build_a project is way over-the-top. The TFS alternative is obviously better (it being a server product) - but potentially still requires additional licensing. Anyway with increasing numbers of shops running continuous integration I think it removes a significant amount of desirable functionality from the Visual Studion database project story.

If you want to try and get database projects built only using MSbuild vote here.

Data dude erroring on deployment - Connect request

I've created a connect request for the problem described below. Fingers crossed it gets accepted - if you want it added go and vote now!