Recently I tried to open a script component in SSDT-BI 2013. I was developing for SSIS 2014, so this means using Visual Studio 2013 (I explain in this blog post how I set this up using Visual Studio online). However, I got a message saying there was a compatibility issue with Visual Studio 2012.

(this isn’t the actual screenshot, because I forgot to take one, but it looks a lot like the one I got)

After clicking Run program, nothing happened, except for the very annoying message that Visual Studio is busy (one of the most annoying messages you can get).

After a quick online search, I found a forum topic where it was suggested to install a patch for Visual Studio 2012, since the .NET 4.5 framework could cause instability issues (of course it does). Unfortunately, it did not work.

Then I downloaded and installed SQL Server 2014 service pack 1 (you never know), but it didn’t help as well. My mental state become something like this:

Then I realized something: SSDT-BI 2013 (aka Visual Studio 2013) tries to open the VSTA editor of Visual Studio 2012. Is it installed? It turns out VS 2012 was installed, but as an empty shell (probably by the set-up of VS 2013, because I didn’t install it myself). So I downloaded SSDT-BI 2012, installed it and lo and behold, I could open a script task/component in VS 2013!

Moral of the story:

you have to install SSDT-BI 2012 if you want to edit scripts in SSDT-BI 2013. Quite retarded if you ask me, but that’s how it is…