Spikeh'd

SQL Server Data Tools SSIS 2012 / SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) offers considerable benefits over SSIS 2008 / Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS). The UX is much quicker, smoother, feature rich (undo and redo, woohoo!), and one of the best new features is that we can finally attach the debugger to script components - which has been a bit of an issue in the past . It's not exactly perfect (opening the VSTA environment seems to take a lot longer than it used to, breakpoints are unpredictable, and there are a few little issues surrounding package encryption that I keep running in to), but the improvements are more than welcome, and certainly enhance development. If you're familiar with SSIS, but you've avoided script tasks / components before, I have to say you're missing out; they're very powerful tools in the right hands, and basically allow you to do anything you can do in a .Net app within the context of a control flow or data flow in a package. Do...

I've been doing a lot of work with SSIS recently, and learning a lot on the way. One of my tasks over the last week was to convert each row of a result set in to XML and post it to a web service. The web service only accepted one row at a time, and generating XML in SSIS is not the most intuitive of tasks, so I wrote a script component to do the conversion work. Anyone who's tried anything more advanced than a "Hello World" example in a script component will be able to tell you that you cannot use breakpoints in them - making it quite difficult to debug even the simplest of code. For a developer such as myself, it's like having an arm removed in a horrific train accident. I had a bit of a task ahead of me - I had to create an XML document with tags containing attributes and values, attributes and child elements, child elements and values, attributes, child elements and values, then self-closing tags with some of the above... whilst not exactly a daunting task, i...