New GDR Announced for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition

Intreasting stuff.   A quick question, I use this for developing the database for one of our more shrink wrap type of applications, will I be able to use the deployment engine in a WiX based installer? 

The deployment engine is two .NET assemblies, one core and one provider assembly.

However there is no direct way to run managed custom actions from an installer, which is what you would have to write to make this work. The reason why the installer folks do not like this is the unexpected behavior if you load mixed version assemblies from the same host.

The supported way will be to run a command line version from a custom action in WiX. We will provide a command line shell, vsdbcmd.exe, which will be able to deploy a .DBSCHEMA file. I will be demonstrate this on Friday at TechEd in my session TLA320.

-GertD

Hopefully your talk will find it's way online at somepoint, sounds just what I need.  I have found the DBPro very useful but using the output to deploy to an end clients system in a nice wrap up installer has always been a stumbling block unlike our connected internal systems which are a breeze.

The quality of the video is wonderful!  I'm looking forward to using this product.  As a side note, I had a hell of a time trying to get this comment in.  Can we go back to the old site?

I will record a Camtasia once I am back in Redmond.
-GertD

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Partial/Composite projects sound very promising. Are you guys planning to add "SQL Server Schema parts" to Windows marketplace any time soon?

Also, any plans to add Oracle support? I've heard about forthcoming DB2 support, but supporting Oracle would be really big.

On a site note, does renaming a column really requires dropping indexes built on it? (At least it looked like column rename in the demo generated drop/create index statements).

In watching the keynote at TechEd, the "GDR release will support DB2".  Since DB2 isn't just DB2, can anyone tell us if it will support DB2 on iSeries? (yes there are differences, EF doesn't support DB2 on iSeries)

I am not sure what you mean with "SQL Server Schema parts" that is a term that I am not familiar with. Please educate me on what this is or means.

With regards to plans to add Oracle support, we cannot make announcements on behalf of other companies. Microsoft will not develop providers for other data stores, but we are working with all major vendors and 3rd parties to make sure all major data stores are covered.

The index that gets dropped in the demo is a bug in the system right now, we only need to update text based objects like functions, default constraints, check constraints etc when renaming a column.

-GertD

Q: In watching the keynote at TechEd, the "GDR release will support DB2".  Since DB2 isn't just DB2, can anyone tell us if it will support DB2 on iSeries? (yes there are differences, EF doesn't support DB2 on iSeries)

A: IBM is the only authoritative source to answer, but the way I understand it is that the current implementation targets their DB2 implementations on Windows, Linux and AIX, since it is a shared implementation. They are actively evaluation the need to support the other versions.

-GertD 

Me too, I made a comment before on this thread and it is no longer there.  I did mention IBM so I guess maybe they are deleting on mention of other products.

Me too, I made a comment before on this thread and it is no longer there.  I did mention IBM so I guess maybe they are deleting on mention of other products.


EDIT:  2 seconds later, I guess they didn't remove it, I just couldn't see where it was.  Very confusing Channel9'ers.

GertD,

I am looking at the CTP of the GDR right now, but before I dive into, I wanted to specifically ask about better support for CI and not just using Team Build.

I had a day of issues with the OTB VS2008 Database Edition project type on a build machine that had TeamCity running. Most disturbing was the requirement of the registry key for the user that was running MSBuild for the design DB. I have found forum threads discussing this and workarounds that can work but it was still a hassle and without innate knowledge of MSBuild (and sometimes even Reflector ), this would be really hard.

I'm now considering moving up to SP1 Beta1 and your June CTP and hope for the best, willing to spend another half day being bleeding edge but I still wanted to get the half-technical/half-marketing answer from you on what can we expect in the future.

Here are my current pain points:

 - No simple deployment of MSBuild targets, GAC assemblies (Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data[.Tasks].dll), etc. on build agents. Had to install VS2008 on my build box, even though I wanted to avoid that.
 - No way to configure the DB server instance name for the DesignDB through MSBuild properties, registry keys are super ugly under HKCU when my build agent is running under some obscure non-interactive user account. I know this is going away, but is the end-to-end story going to be better.
 - MSBuild error messages shouldn't point me to the build properties tab in VS and I wouldn't want to rely on generated .dbproj.user files just to be able to figure out what am I missing.

oh and most importantly, what is the timeframe for the RTM GDR? Can I expect it to be released 1-2 weeks max after SP1 RTM or maybe even earlier?

Thanks,
Gabor