Customer Driven

I am happy to announce that first Service Release of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals is in the works and will be available in the second quarter of CY 2007. In this service release we are addressing issues that were found by our customers as well as three bigger areas that we wanted to address based on the continuous feedback from users.

As our customer you have been great in providing detailed feedback and submitting issues via the Microsoft Connect website, which allowed us to identify and fix issues as: losing extended properties when writing to project from within Schema Compare; performance problems when the project is under source code control; parser gaps where we did not understand certain syntax constructs; interpretation problems that cause the generating of too many warnings and or errors.

All of these are a direct response on the issue to brought to our attention, we want thank you for that and please keep the feedback coming, so we can further improve our product!

What are the 3 areas?

1. Database References – allows you to resolve references to schema objects inside different databases; either by using database project references or referencing a database metafile(.dbmeta) in case you do not have the source code of a project. This functionality eliminates the cross database reference warnings and errors within your database project.
2. Better File support within Filegroups – allows you to define the files within file groups via a Database Project properties page as opposed to establishing the storage file within the pre-deployment storage script.
3. Better SQLCMD Variable Support – we have added a variables page to the Database Properties pages to allow you to define and edit SQLCMD setvar variables which can be used in your deployment scripts. The SQLCMD variables can optionally be mapped to MSBuild properties from complete integration in to the build system.

Expanded Platform Support

Besides fixing and adding functionality this service release also adds official support for the following two platforms that happen to release after us:

• Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP2
• Microsoft Windows Vista

Prerequisites

In order enable for full Windows Vista support and keep sanity in our installation and support matrix, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is a prerequisite for installing the service release. The service release will not install when you do not have the prerequisite software installed.

So when can I get it?

We will have a public CTP available shortly (as in weeks)! This will allow you to provide feedback on the functionality that we have enabled and issues we have addressed.

I will post more detailed blog postings on each of the major features as an introduction in the coming days.

-GertD
"DataDude" - Software Architect