In the first part of the series I mentioned two methods of upgrading SSIS projects (well - packages, for now) - Application.Upgrade() and  Application.SaveAndUpdateVersionToXml(). This post is about the latter.

Starting to learn something new - first step. Let’s analyse the code of SSIS package. How does it store the information about the element connections? How can I get that data as graph’s edges and nodes? Step by step - building the packages from empty one to more complex I will find how they are stored.

SSIS has a neat feature - it encodes all the sensitive data when you set it as - well - sensitive. It’s a great thing for environment variables - you write once, use it to configure the project and then you can forget the password. Or write it down for later use. In the future. Some day. Maybe.

When you deploy SSIS project basically you have two options - right click on project name and standalone tool (let’s skip SMO and stuff). Both mean the same: IsDeploymentWizard.exe. I was curious what happens during deployment and why mode/Silent finishes deployment very quickly, so I started digging.