Waiting for Orcas to see what's new and hot with the database professional role of Team System?  Tired of not having static analysis for your T-SQL?  Want more refactoring options than just rename?  Need help nailing down those pesky regular expressions for generating data?  DONE! 

No, Orcas DID NOT release early so please don't start any rumors.  They just decided that Christmas would come early this year and a new Power Tool was released a couple of weeks ago that contained all kinds of neat toys and goodies for your database development needs. 

So for anyone who missed it...here's what's new:
  • Dependency Viewer
  • Refactoring
    • Move Schema
    • Expand Wildcard
    • Fully Quality Name
    • Refactor in to strongly typed DataSet definitions
    • Refactor Command Generator
  • Data Generation
    • Sequential Data Bound Generator
    • Editors for the Data Bound Generator, Sequential Data Bound Generator and RegEx String Generator to make configuration easier
    • The RegEx editor also tries to interpret your CHECK CONSTRAINTs and create a matching RegEx expression that you can use to generate data values that match the constraint definition
    • The RegEx editor can also be used for interactively defining and testing RegEx expressions and evaluate the output visually, which makes it a lot easier to create the right RegEx expression for your value domain.
  • MSBuild Tasks
    • SqlSchemaCompareTask; allows you to compare schemas between two database from the command line using MSBuild.
    • SqlDataCompareTask; allows you to compare the content of tables within two databases from the command line using MSBuild.
  • T-SQL Static Code Analysis
  •  Miscellaneous tools
    • SQL script pre-processor command-line utility, which will expand all SQLCMD includes and variable definitions (sqlspp.exe)
  • Schema Manager API

For more details and screenshots: http://blogs.msdn.com/gertd/archive/2007/08/07/it-is-august-6th.aspx

Check here for a great little video of all the new features included with the Power Tool: http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=334261

 

The Power Tools release can be downloaded from: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88852

The Power Tools require that you have Service Release 1 installed: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=88853