Best way to add SSIS (Business Intelligence) projects to SourceSafe?

Question

I recently had the unfortunate experience of having the size of a field changed in a table that was being used in SSIS packages. The developer who wrote the packages had since retired, and had grouped them all in one VS BI project. She developed them solely on her local PC and moved them to a shared drive when she left.

Anyone with any knowledge of Protection Levels in SSIS knows what happened next. She saved them with the default EncryptSensitiveWithUserKey option, so as a result, I couldn't modify the package due to the fact that I wasn't her and I wasn't on her machine. Her AD account has long since been deactivated, and her machine may be checking people out at a grocery store now for all I know.

I had to recreate the packages from scratch. Fortunately, the protection level prevents you from saving or building, not from looking at things in Design, so I was able to replicate what she did, but it was a long, tedious process that took the better part of a full day to complete.

My question is: We use SourceSafe to maintain our projects, so that's where the new SSIS project will be going. Given the following:

• We each have our own PCs with working folders that sync to SourceSafe
• We do not have the option of saving the project on the database server itself; we can only deploy the pacakges.
• Software details: MS Visual Studio 2008, VSS 8.0, MS SQL Server 2008 R2

What would be the best security option to configure our project with? I immediately see that DontSaveSensitive would be the logical approach, but I don't know where the passwords would then be supplied from. I would think a config file, but I don't know how to set that up for an SSIS deployment.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Use VSS as the source control provider for Visual Studio and add the SSIS project just like any other source project. After installing VSS, go to Tools\Options\Source Control and set VSS as the provider.

I've been using this setup for several months. There's no difference, as far as I can tell, between any of my C# projects and my SSIS projects in relation to VSS.