New GDR Announced for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition

Posted By: Brian Keller | Jun 3rd @ 5:52 AM

We caught up with Gert Drapers to get the inside scoop on the new General Distribution Release (GDR) for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition. The GDR was announced this week at TechEd Developers and provides the following added capabilities:
- Support for SQL Server 2008
- Partial / Composite project types
- New Build & Deploy model
- All prior Power Tools releases
- Dependency Viewer
- and more...

A Community Technology Preview for this GDR may be downloaded from here.

For the highest quality viewing experience of this video+screencast we recommend viewing the high-quality WMV.

Tags: Visual Studio, VSTS

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PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

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?

gertd

In reply to PerfectPhase

#Jun 3rd @ 8:50 AM

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

PerfectPhase
"This is not war, this is pest control!" - Dalek to Cyberman

In reply to gertd

#Jun 3rd @ 12:33 PM

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.

JoshRoss
JoshRoss

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?

gertd

In reply to PerfectPhase

#Jun 3rd @ 4:32 PM

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

scot

Pingback from:Handan

sokhaty

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

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).

MotoWilliams

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)

gertd

In reply to sokhaty

#Jun 5th @ 9:37 AM

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