My next book titled Building Custom Tasks for SQL Server Integration Services is available for pre-order! The current release date is scheduled for late July 2017.
The Cost of Custom SSIS Tasks
There is overhead associated with using custom tasks in SSIS. When I started writing, I believed there were three costs associated with custom SSIS task development:
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Developers need to use Visual Studio Professional
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The code must be deployed to every server running SSIS (at least every server with SSIS packages that use the custom SSIS task)
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The code must be maintained (updated and supported as new versions of SSIS are released)
While items 2 and 3 in the list above remain true and are not trivial, I built a sample custom SSIS task (Execute Catalog Package Task) using Visual Studio Community Edition – which is free.
What I Cover (and Don’t Cover)
This book isn’t about the “innards” of building a custom SSIS task. I wrote this book to help people who have an idea for a custom SSIS task but aren’t experienced Visual Studio component developers. There are a handful of “gotchas” less-experienced developers will encounter… well, I encountered them. You don’t need to buy this book to discover the source of and correction for the errors you may encounter, you can cast about the internet using your favorite search engine and learn, like I did, the answers to most of the problems you are trying to solve.
One reason I decided to write this book, though, is those answers are not as easy to find as one would think. The answers are, I believe, basic and trivial to developers with experience building Visual Studio components. They are so basic and trivial, I believe they fall into the category of tribal knowledge for developers experienced in building VS controls. When experienced developers see a question on Stack Overflow, some assume you’ve already tried the basic and trivial. Hence, the difficulty in locating a helpful response. This is not intended as a dig at Stack Overflow or the wonderful people who donate their time, knowledge, and expertise to helping the community. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me for not knowing enough about the problem I was trying to solve to search for the most helpful answers.
I found all but one answer at Stack Overflow. I had to weed through more replies than usual, though.
The one thing I couldn’t find dealt with getting the icon to show up on the custom SSIS task. I figured that one out by opening a sample from Microsoft and performing a manual compare until I found the property that they had changed and I had not.
Conclusion
Building Custom Tasks for SQL Server Integration Services is a short book focused on solving the stuff around coding an SSIS custom task. We don’t build a production-ready custom task in the example. I didn’t include that material because I find plenty of material online that discusses and demonstrates the “innards” of designing a production-ready custom SSIS task. If there’s enough interest I’ll write another book that builds out the example in this book (the Execute Catalog Package Task) and includes making it production-ready.
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You might like working with Enterprise Data & Analytics because we grok building SSIS Custom Tasks.
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Learn More:
From Zero to Biml – 19-22 Jun 2017, London
Designing an SSIS Framework (recording)
Biml in the Enterprise Data Integration Lifecycle (recording)
IESSIS1: Immersion Event on Learning SQL Server Integration Services – Oct 2017, Chicago
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