BIDS Helper 1.5 Is Available!

The new version of BIDS Helper has now been released. If you haven’t used it before, now’s a great time to get started with it. BIDS Helper has been adding much needed functionality functionality to the BIDS environment for over 4 years, with the first release happening back in May, 2007.

I posted last month about the beta – thanks to everyone that downloaded it and provided feedback. The major new features are:

Duplicate Roles

This feature allows you to copy a role with all of the associated settings and permissions. This is implemented as a new menu item on the right click menu for a role.

Biml Package Generator

The Biml Package Generator provides the ability to create packages from Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml). You can find some tutorials on using this functionality here, and a short introduction video here.

There were also several issues resolved, and other improvements. The Enable/Disable features dialog has been improved to provide additional information and help links. The new version of the SSIS Expression Editor is also included, and there are improvements to the variable move feature, the Expression list, and the Printer Friendly Dimension Usage feature.

I’m pretty excited about this release, since I’ve been working on the Biml language and technology since joining Varigence. I think it’s great that we’re able to provide some of this functionality for free to the community through BIDS Helper. I’m particularly interested in seeing what interesting uses the community comes up with for it. As I mentioned here, I think it will provide a nice way to package up complete, working samples that someone can just copy and paste from a web page, and use locally. On top of that, it will help automate a lot of rote tasks in SSIS, as I’ll continue to highlight in my series on using Biml in BIDS Helper.

We’ve already gotten some great feedback on the new version, along with some suggestions for continued improvements. If there’s functionality you’d like to see added to BIDS Helper, please suggest it at the Issue Tracker page – you can also use that to track new feature suggestions.

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