Visual Studio 2019 BI Design Tool Extensions

As you may know, Microsoft recently released Visual Studio 2019. Today I want to talk about how to install the Business Intelligence Designer which used to be part of SQL Server data tools. The way that we install these has changed in Visual Studio 2019, so I wanted to share this information.

I thought this may be helpful since although this topic is not exclusive to Azure, but with Azure SQL Databases, SSIS and Azure Analysis Services we still do our development of those products in Visual Studio.

• When you’re installing Visual Studio, the database tools or the SQL Server Database Designer is still an option when you’re doing the Visual Studio installation. (see my screenshot below) This is available similar to how it was in previous versions of Visual Studio. Again, this is just the database design tools, not integration, analysis or reporting services. 
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• The database designer ONLY is still available through the regular Visual Studio installation. You can just search for that option and select it.
• Once you have Visual Studio installed, the way we enable development for integration, analysis and reporting services now is through Visual Studio extensions. In previous releases there used to be a separate installation or an add-on to Visual Studio that we had to download and install.
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• In 2019 this is much different. In this screenshot I’m showing that we can enable these extensions by going up to Manage Extensions, then you can search for those and download and install them.

I just wanted to share this change with you in the newest version of Visual Studio; I hope you found it helpful. If you have any questions about developing solutions for Azure with Visual Studio or otherwise, we’d be glad to help with this or any questions you have about Azure. Click the link below or contact us – we’re here to help you take your business from good to great!