Addition to BIDS: BIDS Helper

The Business Intelligence Development Studio (or BIDS) is typically used for developing Microsoft BI software. Now there is room for improvement everywhere and the BIDS Helper offers this improvements.

BIDS Helper is a Visual Studio add-in which will add a number of additional features and options to Visual Studio. Most additions are in the Analysis Services and Integration Services projects and range from comfortable to extremely useful. A lot of these additions are really things that make you wonder why Microsoft didn't include it themselves...

A few examples:
- Integration Services packages can sort by name within a project
- Variables in packages for Scope another move / copy
- Within Analysis Services option to create your attribute relations graphically
- A Smart Diff option packages or differences between two cubes to detect

And there are many more.

The add-in comes from an open source project on Codeplex (from Microsoft) and is free to use. It is available for Visual Studio 2005 as well as 2008, so be sure to choose the right one.

Download BIDS Helper, install and try it yourself!