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A brief history of BI Developer Extensions |
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If you've been working in Microsoft BI for a while you may know that back when SQL Server 2005 was release the BI Development environment was called BI Development Studio (BIDS).
The 2005 release was a massive release that was 5 years in the making and introduced a raft of new and improved BI services however it was not long before the community noticed that there were a few "rough edges" on some of the BI design tools. Fortunately however these tools had been built in the Visual Studio shell which allowed for 3rd party extensions and out of that this project was born.
The initial release was first announced back in May 15, 2007. At this time the project was called "BIDS Helper" and was hosted on the now defunct Codeplex site
The Microsoft BI development environment continued to be called BIDS through the SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 releases, but with SQL Server 2012 Microsoft decided to rename all of their developer focused tools under the SQL Server Developer Tools (SSDT) moniker.
"BIDS Helper" continued using it's familiar name until 2017 when Microsoft announced that it was shutting down the Codeplex site. It was at this time that the decision was made to choose a more generic name and to shift the project to Github where it resides today.