Repairing SQL 2005 Business Intelligence Studio after uninstalling VS2005

I've lately crushed on SQL2005's business intelligence. See, it's nice to learn the greatest features of a product when new version is almost out there. :-)

Well, as probably many others, I almost instantly uninstalled VS2005 after VS2008 was in RTM and running on my machine. Of course, because I also had SQL2005 Developer Edition on here, this meant that SQL Server's BI Studio shortcut wasn't working anymore. Now, fixing that became a priority.

With quick Googling for step-by-step best practise instructions, how to repair the SQL2k5 BI installation, I found some information on Leon Zandman's blog. Unfortunately those steps didn't work for me, it did install VS2005 Premium Partner Edition, but the product itself didn't work. It complained about corrupted packages etc. So instead what I did was:

- I went to edit the SQL2005 installation (in XP: Add/Remove programs, picking SQL2005 and Change)
- I chose SQL Server 2005 Common Components->Workstation Components
- On to change the installed components, I picked first the Business Intelligence Development Studio to be removed and let the installer do the job
- Then same steps and switching the BI Development Studio back to be installed (Entire feature on the local hard drive)

E.g basically simple uninstall/install steps for the specific part of the product and voila, all was working fine. Yes, it means that SQL2k5 BI doesn't work within VS2008, but in VS2005 "shell". I suppose this is fine till SQL2008 comes out.

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