I recently installed Visual Studio 2008 on my main development computer and have been very happy with it overall.  However, before starting the installation, I decided to remove all of the Visual Studio 2005 components from my computer.  Overall, this was a good idea (VS 2008 is backwards-compatible), but I found out that it broke my ability to launch the Business Intelligence Development Studio (the primary tool for creating, among other things, SQL Server Reporting Services projects).  One solution would be to re-run the SQL Server 2005 setup, but I didn’t want to go through the time and trouble.

Fortunately, it looks like there’s a better way…  This MSDN Thread outlines a great response from Dan Jones:

You should make sure that Visual Studio is still installed. If you didn’t previously have VS installed, the BI Dev Studio installation will install a VS shell called Visual Studio Premier Partner Edition. Look in Add or Remove Programs for an entry like this. If you don’t find any entry for Visual Studio go to the location for SQL Server setup and run .\Tools\Setup\vs_setup.exe. This will install the VS Shell. After this is installed repair the BI Studio installation by running the following from the command line from the .\Tools directory: start /wait setup.exe /qb REINSTALL=SQL_WarehouseDevWorkbench REINSTALLMODE=OMUS

After running both commands, I’m back up and running properly.  Hopefully, this “gotcha” will be better documented at some point (perhaps in an official Knowledge Base article?).  For now, though it should get you back up and running within about 10 minutes.  Note that you’ll want to run Microsoft Update to install the Visual Studio SP1 updates on your computer.

Update: If you’re looking for information on SQL Server 2008 R2 and Report Builder 3.0, please see my newer post SQL Server 2008 R2 Report Builder 3.0 (RTM).