Multiple tasks in the same assembly

Hello,
All the SSIS tasks (and components come to mention it) exist in their own assembly file.

Is there anything that stops us from putting multiple tasks into one assembly?
Assuming you can do that, is there a reason why this perhaps should not be done?

Thanks
JamieActually, the percent sampling and row sampling transforms are in the same DLL.

There is nothing to stop you from having multiple tasks or multiple components in the same DLL. I can't even think of a reason why you couldn't have both a task and a component in the same DLL. In general, the reason why you wouldn't do that is ease of fix and/or upgrade. If you put 10 transforms in one DLL then if you only changed one you still have to "update" all the others because the DLL has changed. If they are all in separate DLLs then you only update the one that changed (i.e. instead of having to update a 5MB DLL you only have to update a 20KB DLL).

HTH,
Matt|||

Matt David wrote:

Actually, the percent sampling and row sampling transforms are in the same DLL.

There is nothing to stop you from having multiple tasks or multiple components in the same DLL. I can't even think of a reason why you couldn't have both a task and a component in the same DLL. In general, the reason why you wouldn't do that is ease of fix and/or upgrade. If you put 10 transforms in one DLL then if you only changed one you still have to "update" all the others because the DLL has changed. If they are all in separate DLLs then you only update the one that changed (i.e. instead of having to update a 5MB DLL you only have to update a 20KB DLL).

HTH,
Matt

Thanks Matt,

I thought it was a requirement that the DLLs for Tasks went in the ..\Tasks folder and the DLLs for components went in the ..\PipelineComponents folder. How could you do that if they were in the same DLL?

-Jamie|||

Jamie Thomson wrote:

Thanks Matt,

I thought it was a requirement that the DLLs for Tasks went in the ..\Tasks folder and the DLLs for components went in the ..\PipelineComponents folder. How could you do that if they were in the same DLL?

-Jamie

Yes, the same DLL would need to go to both of these places (plus Global Assembly Cache). Still, you build just one DLL.

Michael.|||I was working through this and have decided to go for the multiple assembly approach, because of the deployment and install ease.|||

You may want to consider going one step further and separating Task/Component and User Interface into 2 distinct assemblies as well. This allows you to modify one without modifying the other, although the deployment benefit is a bit less obvious in this case.

In the main Task/Component class, the UITypeName property in the Attribute links your main assembly to the UI assembly.

-Doug

|||

One benefit of separating the UI from the task is that you don't have UI code on the server for security reasons. (Easier to lock down).
The reason we did this in the beginning was to make the task dlls smaller so that if we ever shipped something like MSDE (which has no UI), we could ship the tasks without the UI to make the distribution smaller (for web release etc.)
This might be useful for those writing custom tasks as well, though I can't think of when you might wish to ship a task without the UI.
K