I’ve spent a good chunk of this week trying to revise some DTS packages to account for changes in how MapQuest provides access to data they’ve geocoded for us. Since I haven’t used it in years, I’d forgotten how much I dislike the user interface for it. It probably didn’t help that I was trying to edit this things with a plug-in you install for SQL Server 2005.
Trying to have separate development and test environments to avoid the horrors of doing development and testing in a production environment is quite a trial also. I think you can put settings in a configuration file, but it’s probably something like an INI file.
It’s probably just as well that DTS was replaced by SSIS. I did use that to do a bit of flat file validation for the same project and didn’t find it nearly as painful to use.