I’m running Visual Studio 2010 SP1 Premium on Windows 7, and am trying to create SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) Reports. I’ve downloaded the new SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/hh297027 and installed/restarted. If I go into VS Help->About, I can see “Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools 10.3.20225.0” in the list of installed products. However, SSDT doesn’t seem to be showing up in the “New Project” window, and if I try to open existing SSRS 2005 reports projects (created in BIDS/VS 2005) it says “‘Reports.rptproj’ cannot be opened because its project type (.rptproj) is not supported by this version of the application. To open it, please use a version that supports this type of project”.
Am I incorrect in my impression that VS/SSDT does not require SQL Server being installed? Is there some other software, package, or step that I’m missing in installing SSDT?
For SQL Server 2012 SSRS, the functionality of BIDS is REPLACED by SSDT. If you are working with SQL Server 2008 R2 (or earlier) SSRS, then you’ll want to use BIDS from that version of SQL Server.
When you install SSDT, it includes templates for BI projects (i.e. SSAS, SSIS, SSRS). SSDT can be installed as a stand-alone application, or, if you have VS2010 SP1 on your machine, then SSDT will install inside of VS2010.
For the OLTP (including offline) database projects, there is NO template. Rather there is a new View named ‘SQL Server Object Explorer’. For more about the latter, see my blog post.