SSIS Packages Loading Woes

I'm doing some work on an SSIS package, and I'm also updating the database schema it uses. The package isn't loading and VS appears to be hung. It says in the status bar that is validating the package. Is this what offline mode is for?

It's been like this for 45 minutes. Software today should detect it's in this state and then give the user to skip the validation. How long does it take to drop a column on a table with 150,208,363. I guess when you have 8 indexes where the column is included as part of a covering index it can take a while.

Especially when running on virtualized machines....darn you EC2!

Adding a new GUID column in SSIS

I just discovered there is no way in SSIS (at least in SQL2005), to add a new column of type guid. I have found some different work arounds one of which I will share quickly.

1. Add a new Script Component, to your data flow and set the type to transformation. 
2. Edit the component and go to the Inputs/Outputs tab. Under the output add a new column. Make sure it has a data type of Guid (FYI, I have seen references the type is called DT_GUID; however, my version of VS is not functioning properly. My data type field is all black and when I click in it, the edit dialog closes. I set the data type by finding the output column in the xml and setting the dataType attribute to "guid".
3. Go to the script tab and in the method add  Row.<YourColumnName>=Guid.NewGuid()

A very easy work around.