I just read in my e-mail that Microsoft has announced a new product in the Visual Studio Team System product line for databases. I sat in on a design meeting for this product last year and saw it demonstrated in a webcast about 3 weeks ago. I can hardly wait to get my hands on this tool as I am sure it will make designing and modifying databases much easier.
Here is the relevant content from the e-mail.
This morning (09:00 PST, Wednesday May 31 st 2006) the Visual Studio Team System team announced the availability of a brand product in the Team System family.
Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals delivers a market-shifting database development product designed to manage database change, improve software quality through database testing and bring the benefits of Visual Studio Team System and life cycle development to the database professional. It delivers on Microsoft’s commitment to provide tools that reduce communication barriers and complexity across software development teams and fulfils increasing demand in the market for more advanced database change management tools. Database professionals such as database architects, database developers and database administrators, can now employ integrated change management functionality to streamline changes to their databases, ensure quality, and speed deployment.
Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals includes a number of great new features:
· A new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice.
· Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change
· A New T-SQL Editor allows you to be more productive when writingT-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel executionof queries and viewing of execution plans.
· SchemaCompare allows you to quicklycompare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and adatabase) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync
· DataCompare allows you to quicklycompare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databasesinto sync
· The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to createdatabase unit tests using T-SQL or managed code.
· DataGenerator lets you create datageneration plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based uponyour existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior torunning unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results
You can find out more about this great new release, see screenshots and find out how to get the early community technology preview which will be available on June 11th at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx
We are making Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals part of the Visual Studio Team Suite, so you’ll get this product for free when we RTM this edition if you are a VisualStudio Team Suite subscriber through MSDN. You can learn more about how to upgrade to Visual Studio Team Suite at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/renewal/#step
Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals will also be available as a stand alone Edition in the Visual Studio Team System family. You can learn more about how to buy Visual Studio TeamSystem at http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/default.aspx
The team has already started blogging.You can find out more information directly from the product team by visiting the following blogs:
http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/
http://blogs.msdn.com/camerons
http://blogs.msdn.com/rwaymi
http://blogs.msdn.com/mattnunn
http://blogs.msdn.com/thomas_murphys_agile_db_blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/tsdatabl
You can also see what others are saying by visiting the new Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals forum at http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowForum.aspx?ForumID=725&SiteID=1