I command thee...

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A, not uncommon request from SQL Server Reporting Services customers is the ability to use command line switches wtih Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) like you would with a standard\out of the box Visual Studio experience. Well, I am happy to say, we have done some work in this area for SQL Server Reporting Services 2008, and the RC0 release due very soon. I wanted to show a few samples so you can see whats coming and because its not a visual feature, your not likely to see it at the upcomming Tech Ed, for the many which will attend. Tech Ed North America 2008. Surprisingly, command line output does not draw the same crowd as cool new data visualization or richly formatted text features. Go figure.

As background, the samples I did here were with a fresh install of SQL Server 2008, so I had not installed Visual Studio 2008. Also, I should note there is lots of documentation on MSDN for using the Visual Studio command line but I found some of the samples differ in syntax. So, I based mine on what I read wih the command line help, or 'devenv /?'. A word of wisdom, when dealing with file paths which contain spaces. The double quotes are the standard, however be aware of the character difference when you are copyin/pasting between applications. Someone, could in theory, waste a lot of time trying to get command line operations to work, and swear they had the syntax proper, but there is difference between " and “

Also, I am generally lazy so to make make things easier I added the path to the folder containing DEVENV to my OS environment path, so
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE

Deploy: Well, the clear winner and main desire folks are after with the command line, is the ability to deploy to their servers....

devenv "C:\Documents and Settings\myuser\My Documents\Visual Studio 2008\projects\Aworks\Aworks.sln" /deploy myconfig

Which spits back the following, looking like what you see in Output window inside BIDs. Notice it includes the warning for the data source, and indeed in the Project Proeprties dialog in BIDs, I set 'OverwriteDataSources' to false.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Microsoft (R) Visual Studio Version 9.0.30428.1.
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.
------ Build started: Project: Aworks, Configuration: myconfig ------
Build complete -- 0 errors, 0 warnings
------ Deploy started: Project: Aworks, Configuration: myconfig ------
Deploying to http://theservername/reportserver
Deploying data source '/aworks/aworks_shared'.
Warning : Cannot deploy data source aworks_shared to the server because it already exists and OverwriteDataSources is not specified.
Deploying report '/aworks/aworks_salesorderdetail'.
Deploying report '/aworks/salesandterritory'.
Deploy complete -- 0 errors, 1 warnings
========== Build: 1 succeeded or up-to-date, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========
========== Deploy: 1 succeeded, 0 failed, 0 skipped ==========