As mentioned in the previous recipe, SSDT is actually a set of templates that exist within the Visual Studio shell. Because of this, Visual Studio is able to support SSDT in a variety of ways. The powerful IDE was explored in the previous section; another key though is keeping up with updates to the SSDT templates.
Prior to checking for updates, you must have an Internet connection. For most users working on development computers or their home workstations, this won't be an issue. If you are updating SSDT on a Windows server, the administrators may have firewall rules in place, which may interfere with the update process. Be sure to check with your system administrators should you have any issues.