Upgrade Issue to Visual Studio 2012 RC

  • Article

Since the release of Visual Studio 2012 RC, the SQL Server Data Tools team has become aware of several reports of SSDT no longer working when machines are upgraded from Visual Studio 2012 Beta to Visual Studio 2012 RC.   As a follow up to our investigation of the issue, we’ve captured the underlying cause, symptoms of the problem, and workaround below.  We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this behavior—please let us know if you run into problems after applying the workaround.

Primary scenario

1. Install Visual Studio 2012 Beta

2. Install SSDT for Visual Studio 2010 SP1

3. Install Visual Studio 2012 RC

Symptoms

Upon loading Visual Studio 2012 RC or Visual Studio 2010, several package load failure messages are shown for SSDT components.  An example error message is shown below:

The ‘SqlStudio Editor Package’ package did not load correctly. 

The problem may have been caused by a configuration change or by the installation of another extension.  You can get more information by examining the file ‘C:\Users\SQLCL01\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\ActivityLog.xml’.

Cause

Some Data-Tier App Framework (DacFx) assemblies are removed during the Visual Studio 2012 Beta to Visual Studio 2012 RC upgrade.  While SSDT has setup logic that reintroduces these assemblies in most scenarios, they get missed in this case because of the existing DACFx version on the machine from the SSDT installation.  The absence of these assemblies causes SSDT to load incorrectly

Workaround

To fix your installation, find Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Data-Tier App Framework in Programs and Features and Repair it.  You may have multiple versions of DacFx, so make sure to repair version 11.0.2100.60 (note that on x64 machines, there will be two entries for 11.0.21.00.60 and both should be repaired).  After this step, SSDT should load successfully in all Visual Studio shells.