Biml - Adding external assemblies

This blog post is coming live to you from SQL Saturday Dallas BI Edition. We were discussing horrible things you can do in SSIS and I mentioned how you can do anything that the .NET library supports. That got me wondering about whether I could do the same awful things within Biml. The answer is yes, assuming you supply sufficient force.

As a simple demonstration, I wanted to pop up a message box whenever I generated or checked my biml for errors. However, the MessageBox method lives in an assembly that isn't loaded by default. And to get that assembly to import, I needed to add it as a reference for the biml compiler. The last two lines of this show me adding the assembly and then importing the namespace.

<Biml xmlns="http://schemas.varigence.com/biml.xsd">
    <#
    MessageBox.Show("This works");
    #>
</Biml>
<#@ import namespace="System.Windows.Forms" #>
<#@ assembly name= "C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\System.Windows.Forms.dll" #>