From Wikipedia..."Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) is the former IDE from Microsoft, and was used to develop data analysis and Business Intelligence solutions utilizing the Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, Reporting Services and Integration Services. It is based on the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment, but customized with the SQL Server services-specific extensions and project types, including tools, controls and projects for reports, ETL dataflows, OLAP cubes and data mining structure. BIDS functionality can be augmented with BIDS Helper, a Visual Studio add-in with features that extended and enhance business intelligence development functionality in SQL Server 2005, 2008, and 2008 R2 BI Development Studio (BIDS) and SQL Server 2012 SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT). BIDS Helper is hosted on Microsoft's open source project hosting website CodePlex. Business Intelligence Markup Language (Biml) can be used in BIDS to create end-to-end BI solutions by translating Biml metadata into SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) assets for the Microsoft SQL Server platform. BIDS is not supported with Visual Studio 2010 and later, and has been replaced by SQL Server Data Tools - Business Intelligence."

From Ross...BIDS is an excellent tool for developing SSIS and SSAS applications. It has been replaced post SQL Server 2008 by SQL Server Data Tools and the pluggins in Visual Studio for SSIS, SSAS and Reporting Services development. This is the normal development of Microsofts effort to house all of their development tools in one IDE. BIDs is still in common use in MS SQL Server 2008 environments.