Preparing a demo of VSTS DB Edition for a customer the other day I ran in to some problems with creating a isolated sandbox environment.

The scenario I wanted to solve was to have a separate deployment configuration for my sandbox where I re-created the database every time I deployed. In my project settings I just wanted to do incremental deployments.

I started with opening the properties for my database project and changed the value of “Configure deployment settings for:” to “My Isolated development environment”.

 Project Properties

I then add a new “Deployment configuration file” accepting the default name of “Username.user.sqldeployment”.

In that file I check the checkbox for “Always re-create database” and save the deployment config as well as the project config files.

Deployment properties

I then test to deploy my database and nothing happens, I still just get an incremental deployment.

As I’m somewhat of a newbie on DB Edition I assume I did something wrong and start to look for the problem. After doing that for a while I gave up and posted a message to one of our internal mail aliases. This is one of the great things with working at Microsoft, whenever you need assistance you have a ton of fantastic colleagues that help out. I got a reply from Gert “Data Dude” Drapers where he pointed out that I had hit one of the issues in the DB Edition GDR that is fixed in the upcoming QFE of the Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition GDR.

After installing the RC of the QFE the behavior is as expected.