VS 2008 / SSIS packages

I recently received a question about opening SQL 2005 SSIS packages in VS 2008. So the situation is that for SSIS you use BIDS (Business Intelligence Dev Studio) which is based on Visual Studio - what it provides is a subset of the VS functionality. If you install VS 2005 before installing SQL Server 2005 the environments are one and the same, but it’s with BIDS that you get the project types that are specific to SQL Server 2005 Business intelligence. The situation is that to open SSIS projects in VS 2008 you need SSIS 2008. According to the below blog post, since VS 2008 can target .NET 2.0 you can then use it to develop for SSIS 2005.

Here is a link from the Microsoft BI team which I think explains things in more detail:

https://blogs.msdn.com/michen/archive/2007/12/04/SQL-2008-and-VS-2008.aspx

Update:

There are two distinct projects involved –

1) VS C# or VB project one would use to develop custom components written in .NET. You can use either VS 2005 or 2008 to develop custom components.

2) SSIS project used to develop packages. You have to use matching version.