Problem 1
Our SQL integration developers were facing challenges developing SSIS packages for a particular system.
These SSIS packages were originally developed for SQL Server 2014 using Visual Studio 2013 and contemporary tooling. VS2022 lacked compatibility, whilst VS2019 caused issues post-deployment, despite being compatible on paper, likely due to version-specific features.
Our intention is to eventually re-architect this workload completley, but in the meantime it was necessary to provision a development environment capable of working with SSIS packages and tools/plugins built with and on top of legacy software.
My first thought was to grab Visual Studio 2013, but VS2013 builds are no longer publicly available from Microsoft in 2024. Installers can be found in online archives, but I usually don’t trust those.
During my search I discovered Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools - Business Intelligence for Visual Studio 2013 - a collection of tools for working with legacy solutions built for equally legacy platforms. It includes a VS2013 “shell” - which is a stripped down version of VS2013, incorporating all the plugins and tools you might need to work with old SSIS solution files targeting older platforms. This was exactly what we needed. It can be installed alongside newer releases of Visual Studio.
Problem 2
Secondary challenge was in obtaining the right version of Microsoft SQL Server Native Client.
Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Native Client - QFE can be obtained here on its own. At the time of writing, the published version is 11.0.7001.0, which may/not suit your needs.
In our case, the version used in our production environment differed from the standalone installer published online or the ones that came pre-packaged with newer tools. It was important that the driver version matched exactly. After checking the sqlncli11.dll used in production (search C:/Windows), I started figuring out what patch level it belongs to. These resources were helpful in identifying all the numerous releases, service packs, and patch levels for MS SQL:
Latest updates and version history for SQL Server
I ended up downloading the KB corresponding to the version I needed, I unpacked the installer, searched for sqlncli.msi and installed it on the dev enviornment.