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

 

 

With Microsoft TechEd less than a month away I am getting a lot more mail and e-mail (mostly e-mail) from various vendors asking me to visit them. I have come to expect this and I know it will only get worse until about 2 weeks after the event when they will have figured out that if I wanted to talk to them I would have. Intermingled in the marketing e-mails are some that I acutally enjoy reading. So here are 2 of my favorites (so far):

Abstract: Credit Suisse Group is a leading global financial services company, providing clients with investment banking, private banking and asset management services worldwide. Like in most enterprises, Credit Suisse provided their developers with physical machines for development. Issues such as combination of authorization, physical delivery times and compliance-related workflows led to slow development timeframes. Their R&D group built an extremely extensible self-service virtual-machine provisioning system that enables software developers in a fraction of the time to easily, securely and rapidly provision on-demand disposable workstations, servers, and multi-tier environments. Credit Suisse will exponentially increase software developer productivity, drastically lower IT costs and ensure compliancy with continuously stringent regulatory requirements. The solution uses Windows Workflow Foundation , Windows Communication Foundation , and Virtual Server .

Speaker: Leslie Muller (Architect - Credit Suisse Global R&D)

Location: Thursday 6/15/2006 from 10:15-11:30 in Theatre 2

This one caught my eye because I have spent countless hours creating Virtual PC images to be ready for one demo or another. If I can use this same technique to cut that time down it might actually leave more time for things like blogging.

The other e-mail that I like is more along the lines of trivia:

In case anyone would like to throw an event the size of TechEd 2006, here is an idea of the quantity of food and drink that would be consumed.

 

-          1,250,000 pieces of "Mikes & Ikes " will be consumed over the course of a week at Tech Ed 2006

-           18,750 pounds of salad will be prepared and offered at meals

-          83,700 ice cream novelty/ fruit and yogurt bars have been ordered for this function

-          60,000 eggs will be eaten by attendees at breakfast (this is equal to 4,800 dozen cartons of eggs)

-          It will take 4 semis to transport the 150,000 bottles of water consumed on this show

-          The total amount of fruit ordered will fill 3/4 of full size tractor-trailer

-          1.6 million ounces of coffee will be poured and consumed (conservative estimate)

-          More than 50,000 pounds of carbohydrates will be consumed at Tech*Ed (Atkins who?)

-          1,500 table cloths will be used and re-set on a daily basis:   (7,500 for the week)

-          A minimum of 2,000 antacid tablets are likely to be consumed at this event

 

There is an article on eweek about Microsoft wanting to limit the rights that their employees have on their machines. I have been working day to day as a non-privileged user for over 2 years now. I know it definitely slows me down. I always seem to be shelling out to a command prompt that is logged in as an administrator but it has saved me from viruses.

I did have one issue with the article. It said that the machine would sometimes crash when you attempt to install something without administrator rights. I have never had a crash due to that. I have always gotten a prompt asking me to choose a login with rights or a simple messagebox telling me I didn't have the correct rights.

I am downloading the beta of Windows Vista now and I hope it is easier to run without administrator privileges. If nothing else I have read that Microsoft has implemented registry and file redirects to get around some of the problems that I see on XP.

Today marks the availability of beta versions of Office 2007 and Windows Vista. I plan on downloading them and starting to play with them in the next couple of days.

Today also marks the updates to several web sites. The asp.net site has a new look to it. I am also told that weblogs.asp.net was updated but I haven't visited the main site in a long time so I can't tell you if there is a new UI or just upgrades behind the scenes. There is a new web site at iis.net that will serve as a community center for development on IIS 7. It looks like you can download the beta and get more information there.

The Salt Lake City and Utah County SQL Server User groups are official PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) chapters and are hosting a SQL Camp on May 31. You can come to hear a lot of short presentations on SQL Server. It will be held in the Salt Lake City Microsoft offices so the number of participants will be limited. Also if you want to speak I am sure there will be plenty of opportunities. You can get more information at the official web site at http://utpasscodecamp.mollyguard.com.

[23-May-2006 Update]

I got an e-mail saying that this event has been postponed until September due to low enrollment. I guess with the Memorial Day weekend and the start of summer it is difficult for a lot of people to get away from work. When I have more information I will post it here.

I just watched a short video at http://www.rockyh.net/AssemblyHijacking/AssemblyHijacking.html that shows how someone can exploit some bad security (SQL Injection attack, accessing your database as a sys administrator, not applying a strong name to your assemblies, putting too much data into a log file) to get at information they shouldn't see. The best thing about this video is that I am sure that just about any developer would recognize some common mistakes that we all make when assuming how vulnerable our code is. It is also short enough to spend some time with a client or manager showing them this without loosing their interest and it shows just how easy it could be for a determined bad guy to get into your systems.

I just got a new tablet PC at work. It came pre-configured with Windows XP Tablet PC edition with service pack 2. The first time I connected to Windows Update there was only 1 patch. I was impressed at how up to date the image on the hard drive was. Then after a reboot I connected again. This time there was 1 patch (to install the Windows Genuine Advantage program). I realize I don't need WGA to download security patches but I know it is a valid copy so I installed that. After it installed I checked and there were now 38 patches to download and install. After a reboot I checked windows update and there were no more high priority updates. There were 7 optional updates left. So after only 47 patches I am now up to date on the software. I guess the image wasn't as recent as I thought. I am sure there will be other updates as I install Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server and all the other tools I need to work effectively.

There is an opinion piece at http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2987&tag=nl.e622 that suggests with the DRM and patents that Apple controls it may some day become a monoply that controls digital media and phones. I am not an expert in this area and since I have (thus far) resisted the urge to buy an iPod I am not sure how much this will affect me but it is an interesting scenario.

I can certainly see some competition for Apple. If another on-line music site (say MSN music or Wal-Mart or whomever) were to gain popularity it could certainly put a damper on the "planned" take over. Also if the RIAA decided that they would like to do the bullying rather than be bullied they could look for an alternative DRM provider. It would cut sales immediately but could force Apple to adopt that DRM technology for the iPod to continue selling.

In any case I think the competition leading up to whatever happens will be interesting and could be very good for us all.

I don't know how I missed this when it released on April 19 but I just ran across a download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E719ECF7-9F46-4312-AF89-6AD8702E4E6E&displaylang=en that has over 100 samples and 3 sample databases. That should be enough to take up any free time I might have thought about having.