Business Intelligence Development Studio Installation doesn't work

Hello,

I have just tried to install (among other things) BIDS, and have found it hasn't worked. I tried it once over an old SQL Server 2005 Express Edition installation, and that failed, so I followed the advice of others and removed it. In fact I removed everything I could find to do with SQL Server 2005, and started right from the beginning (restarted after removing everything). My steps were:

1) Install SQL Express with Advanced Services (SQLEXPR_ADV.EXE, 240 MB, downloaded today from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/). Choose to install all components, with default options. Restart when complete.

2) Install SQL Express Tools (SQLEXPR_TOOLKIT.EXE, 218 MB, dowloaded today from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/). Choose only to install BIDS (one of four components).

When it was all over, I tried to fire up BIDS via the start menu (All Programs / Microsoft SQL Server 2005 / SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio), and got an error to say the shortcut to "devenv.exe" couldn't be found. Sure enough, it isn't where it should be - in fact it is not there at all.

As a note, I observed that when I went to install BIDS as per step 2 above, the installer made some claims about it already being installed, and that it would perform an upgrade...?

Something is not right here... By the way, I have installed BIDS on another machine some months ago, with no problems. Probably an older version at the time...

Hope someone can help.

Nick

A couple of additional details:

*) I have the full set of Visual Studio Express tools installed (Visual C# Express etc).

*) I just tried to uninstall SSMSE, and then use Express Tools installer to reinstall everything - this didn't work.

The thick plottens...

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So it turns out I had to do like many others - extract the Express Toolkit and run the vs_setup.msi. Hardly a particularly intuitive solution.

Judging by the many similar issues raised in this forum, many spanning back a number of months, Microsoft could do worse than fix what is clearly a bug...