IMPORTANT: BIML users - please read the "BIML Detail" section below

The exe downloads are a self extracting installer, the zip downloads allow for an xcopy deploy which does not require administrator permissions. Make sure to note the updated xcopy deploy instructions for SQL Server 2012 and 2014.

• BIDS Helper 2014 is for SQL 2014 and Visual Studio 2013.
• BIDS Helper 2012 is for SQL 2012, Visual Studio 2010, and Visual Studio 2012.
• BIDS Helper 2008 is for SQL 2008, SQL 2008 R2, and Visual Studio 2008.
• BIDS Helper 2005 is for SQL 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

• BIDS Helper for SQL 2016 and Visual Studio 2015 can be found in the Visual Studio Gallery.

This BIDS Helper release is marked as a beta release due to major Biml improvements and updates. The new Biml functionality has gone through a rigorous private beta and we are ready for everyone to begin using it. Special thanks go to Stefan Gustafsson and others for an excellent job beta testing. Biml is now up-to-date with Mist 4.0 and now properly supports emitting SSIS 2014 packages in SSDTBI for Visual Studio 2013. There is also a new Biml FAQ.

Fixed Issues:

• Fixes to all features so they work when the project is inside a solution folder.
• Fixed Biml project connections in Visual Studio 2013.
• Reports launch in the proper version of the Report Viewer control in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

Improvements

• Biml updates to bring it up-to-date with Mist 4.0
• Biml updates to support emitting SSIS 2014 packages from Visual Studio 2013.
• Biml brings the Output window to the front, displays a progress bar, and displays a more useful errors dialog
• Enabling the ability to add a translation for the default language in Tabular Translations Editor to make frictionless renaming easier.
• Improvements to Tabular Actions Editor:
  • Adding button to test all MDX expressions
  • ensuring the drillthrough column dropdowns only show columns from related tables
  • Adding a button to let you copy an existing action
  • Adding a button to populate the drillthrough action columns with all columns in related tables (since it's quicker to manually delete than manually add columns from this list)
  • Allowing MeasureGroupMeasures to apply to any action type
• Printer Friendly Dimension Usage for Tabular

Biml Details

There are a huge number of changes to Biml in this release. Below are highlights of some of the more notable changes and those changes that were most requested by users.

BREAKING CHANGES

• RootNode.PackageProjects has now moved entirely into RootNode.Projects, including all namespaces. This is done to better support other project types such as analysis services projects. The mitigation is to change all instances of the <PackageProjects> tag to the <Projects> tag.
  • MITIGATION: If backwards compatibility with older versions of Mist is required, the PackageProjects/Projects element name can be conditionalized based on the tools version.
• Removed QuerySource and Destination. These were abstractions that wrapped OleDbSource/AdoNetSource and OleDbDestination/AdoNetDestination in a single interface that offered the intersection of their features and automatically chose the correct component type to emit based on the referenced connection type. These language elements were not particularly useful, were very narrowly used, and their removal will prevent unintentional use by new customers.
  • MITIGATION: Change any instances of QuerySource or Destination to the appropriate OleDbSource/AdoNetSource and OleDbDestination/AdoNetDestination
• All instances of the word Hadron have been removed from the project. Most notably, namespaces that included “Hadron” have 1:1 replacements with “Biml”
  • MITIGATION: Empty classes were added in the removed namespaces to prevent code with legacy namespace imports from breaking scripts
• AstDimensionNode and AstFactNode have been removed. SSAS metadata is now added underneath the AnalysisMetadata element of table objects.
  • This is unlikely to affect most BIDSHelper users, since SSAS emission is only supported in Mist.
• AnalysisServices connection property OverriddenConnectionString is renamed to ConnectionString. The Provider property is removed as it is no longer needed
  • This is unlikely to affect most BIDSHelper users, since SSAS emission is only supported in Mist.

Biml Language Changes

• Directives
  • Added code directive to reference C# or VB files with code directly from Biml files. This enables a variety of scenarios around creating more complex and reusable .NET code for use within BimlScripts
  • Nested include files now work
• Other
  • Added ObjectTag property to all Biml API classes. This is essentially a .NET Dictionary object that enables storage of .NET objects in a similar way to annotations in Biml.
  • Added support for external script project files in the language
  • Added GetPropertyValue method to all Biml API objects. This provides another option to get object property values when doing dynamic code generation.
  • Added Parse methods to all Biml API objects. This enables easy parsing of Biml code snippets to create Biml API objects. It is the inverse of the GetBiml functionality.
  • ConstraintMode has been set to default to Parallel, so that it no longer needs to be specified for most package objects
  • Added BuildSettings object to AstRootNode to access build settings in a central location
  • Added FriendlyName convenience property to columns
  • Fixed Biml reference resolution code so that references are updated even when DisableAllChangedEventInfrastructure is set to true. This is essential to enable the use of utility methods like IsUsedInPrimaryKey within live scripts on tables also imported within the live scripts
  • Added an IsDatabaseCharSetUnicode override property to Oracle connections

Biml API Changes

• Added timeout support to all of the database providers and external data access methods
• Fixed issue where properties changed via API were not being reflected in GetBiml output
• Added GetDataTable support for most major DbConnection types
• Added AstRootNode convenience collections for FlatFileFormats, RawFileFormats, PackageProjects, and CubeProjects
• Fixed issue where AstRootNode convenience collections did not support name-based indexing in Live mode
• Fixed an issue where StructureEquals was producing incorrect results due to a missing negation operator in autogenerated code

Biml SSIS Emission Changes

• SSIS 2014 Support
• New Tasks and Components
  • CDC Control Task
  • CDC Source
  • CDC Splitter
  • DQS Cleansing
• Added SSIS Path Annotations to dataflow and control flow paths
• Added support to SSIS emitter for emitting external columns without the corresponding output columns. This is primarily used for database datatypes that are unsupported by SSIS.
• Changed DbType to DataType in column specifications
• Fixed issue where a variable defined in an event handler could not be referenced from a descendent of that event handler.
• Fixed build crash when cache connections are used on lookups
• Improved emission of connection managers so that the individual connection properties are supplied, rather than just the connection string property
• Fixed code generation issue reported to support with the Fuzzy Lookup component
• Added support for the new AutoPassThroughInputColumns property on Fuzzy Lookup to give it a bit more flexibility
• Added ServerExecutionID to pre-defined variables list for packages
• Added support for expressions on project connections
• Added PackagePassword property to AstPackageNode for encryption support

Biml Errors/Warnings

• Fixed an issue with ValidationReporter where it would occasionally report line numbers into our temp files. This usually happened with mismatched end braces
• Improved validator for SSIS data flow columns to show the duplicate column name when the same column is mapped multiple times
• Fixed an issue where transformer generated errors were not being reported correctly. They previously appeared as Null Reference Exceptions because of an issue in the reporting mechanism.
• Fixed issue where wrong column name was being shown in Script Component column type mismatch errors
• Clarified error message when “Build and Run” or “Build and Execute” was performed without the correct version of SSIS installed
• Added an error for duplicate dataflow column nodes. This usually arises with "reserved" column names "ErrorCode" and "ErrorText"
• Added a warning and an automatic patch of import statements that use the old Hadron namespaces