I recently encountered a problem opening an existing SQL Server Integration Services project in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS aka Visual Studio 2008). When ever I tried to view the Data Flow task for an integration package, Visual Studio would crash. These are the details recorded in the event log:

Faulting application name: devenv.exe, version: 9.0.30729.1, time stamp: 0x488f2b50 Faulting module name: msdds.dll, version: 10.0.30319.1, time stamp: 0x4ba1fee8 Exception code: 0xc0000005 Fault offset: 0x000117f8 Faulting process id: 0x2678 Faulting application start time: 0x01cb9c2181b22022 Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe Faulting module path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSDesigners8\msdds.dll Report Id: cba37908-0814-11e0-9fdb-70f1a10159b9

One curious thing I noticed was that the version of the msdds.dll file above is 10.* not 9.*. The file properties also indicated that this was part of Visual Studio 2010.

Not being certain whether the issue was something SQL or VS related, I decided in the absence of more specific information, the most effective approach was most likely to uninstall all the installations of Visual Studio and SQL development components (I didn’t uninstall the SQL instances).

Uninstalling Visual Studio 2010 and 2008, then re-installing BIDS from the SQL 2008 R2 setup replaced the msdds.dll with the original 2008 version.

I was then able to open the SSIS project without any crashing!

Re-installing VS 2010 and the dll was updated back to 10.*, but this time BIDS continues to work properly.

One thing that may be relevant is that for a short time I did have SQL Server codenamed ‘Denali’ installed, so it is possible that something left behind from that might have been the culprit.

This is also a good way to confirm that the LED for your hard disk works properly (and to dream about getting an SSD!)