New GDR Announced for Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition

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