Visual Studio 2010 Connect to SQL Server 2000?

Question

We recently upgraded a major application to Visual Studio 2010.

Unfortunately, we are still using several database servers that are still running SQL Server 2000 (8.0.2055 to be precise).

According to this article (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/habibh/archive/2009/07/27/visual-studio-2010-rip-list-partial.aspx), "Since mainstream support for SQL Server 2000 ended on 04/08/2008, Visual Studio 2010 will only support debugging SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008.

We have a lot of stored procedures that we keep in Source Control and execute them from within Visual Studio whenever we need to update them.

Is there any way around this restriction? 3rd-party tool, anything.

While researching this, I saw a few sites that indicate an ODBC connection could be used to get to the SQL2000 box. I was able to create a System DSN and then a Data Connection within VS2010, but am unable to connect to it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Chris

Answer 1

The only way I've found so far is to extract our data library out of the project and keep it in VS 2008 targeted at 3.5 while we're building it. Once it's complete and ready, we open up the primary project in VS 2010, check out the changed files and then use the file system to copy the changed files over.

We then keep the supplementary 3.5 project in source control parallel to the primary project.

They will still build and function in .Net 4.0, but we have found that the IDE will not accept any connections or commands to them.