How to get Visual Studio 2008 to edit SSRS 2005 Report Projects w/o Installing SQL Business Intelligence Development Studio 2005?

You cannot. Check this forum posting which has a reponse from Microsoft.

Yes, it was an active decision that the 2008 design evironments would not support continuous backwards compatability but would rather be a one way upgrade. This was not a casual decision and it is understood how it can be an impact.

You can read the entire posting for more details on why you are unable to use VS2008 for SSRS 2005 projects. Very annoying, but I guess I can understand why they had to make that decision. Just about the only reason I have VS2005 on my dev machine now is for Reporting Services projects since our company is not going to be upgrading to SQL Server 2008 anytime soon.

That is just ridiculous.

We are still running SQL2005 here, with no plans to upgrade soon. Given the state of the economy we don't have a lot of cash flow for server upgrades without a really good reason.

The developers have been able to upgrade to Visual Studio 2008, but we have to still keep VS2005 on our machines so we can edit old SSRS and SSIS packages.

At one time we had some developers with THREE versions of Visual Studio on their machines. Can't wait for Visual Studio 2010 to see what they left out in that version, maybe we'll be able to have FOUR versions on our machines. That's not stupid at all!

I'm not sure about editing SSRS projects with VS2008, but I know you can use SQL Server 2008 Report Designer. You can create new reports and edit old reports as well. It will be automatically upgraded once you open them in the designer.

http://windowsitpro.com/article/articleid/98925/sql-server-2008s-report-designer-preview.html