After over 6 months of silence, it is time again for another Stupid me™®©! For those unfamiliar with the concept:

Every time I do something “stupid”, which happens from time to time, I’ll do a little blog post on what happened and how I solved it. The reason for this is twofold: I’ll have a solution online I can consult if it happens again and other people can benefit from my mistakes as well. Because remember the ancient Chinese proverb: “It’s only stupid if you don’t turn it into a learning experience”. Okay, I might have made that last one up…

The problem

From time to time I have to script out some logic using a Script Component in a SSIS package. Business as usual for most developers, but since I hardly have a .NET background, it’s always a very stressful experience (I may be over exaggerating a bit). Sometimes it happens I write a little piece of code with a small bug, it happens to the best of us.

For those who haven’t noticed: you cannot store -1 in a byte. Anyway, the wonderful designer that is the Visual Studio shell fails to warn me of my little indiscretion. Leaving me with a script component that won’t compile.

The matching errors aren’t helpful either.

The solution

The solution is elegant yet simple: we force the designer to tell us what’s wrong by building the code inside the script component.

This results in a blue squiggly being added to the code, together with a decent explanation.

The moral of this story: if the script component is giving you a hard time, hit that build button!