The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR September CTP is now available for download. This is the last CTP, we started our final descend, we will publish a public RC (release candidate) when it is ready, followed by the RTM release. The upcoming RC (release candidate) will be a "go-live" release. The two remaining areas the team is currently working on is performance and bugs, we are done with all work items.

What is new in the September CTP (#17):

• The SQL Server 2008 support has been completed, all DDL 2008 statements are now supported.
• The SQL Server 2008 T-SQL parser now understands all new 2008 syntax and statements.
• Schema Compare and Import Schema supports translation between SQL Server versions. For example can now compare a SQL Server 2005 database project with a SQL 2008 database.
• The target version defines the object set used to compare. For example when comparing a 2005 source database against a 2000 target database, only the objects applicable to the SQL Server 2000 version are compared, SQL Server 2005 specific objects types like queues, message types etc are ignored as part of the comparison.
• The Schema Compare "Ignore" options are now also available in Deployment (part of the .sqldeploymemt file)
• Deployment and Schema Compare "Write Updates" now support wrapping the DDL statements in a transaction.
• Permissions are now supported and stored/modeled inside the .sqlpermissions file.
• The sequential data bound generator has been moved in to the product
• SQLCMD variables can be mapped to MSBuild properties inside the .dbproj file.
• Methods and properties (class and static) exposed by SQL-CLR user defined data types are now being resolved.
• The public API for feature extensions: database generators, data distributions, static code analysis rules, refactoring types, refactoring targets and test conditions have been finalized.

Pre-requisites:

This CTP requires that the following components are installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM
• Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP1

Download location:

You can download the September CTP (#17) from the following location:

• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/setup.exe
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/Readme.mht
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR Documentation.zip

If you have a previous version of the GDR installed, you will have to first uninstall these before installing the latest CTP bits.

Other notes:

• Make sure to uninstall previous CTP versions of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR.
• You can use the following command line command to uninstall previous versions of the GDR

msiexec /X {DDF197C6-4507-3A19-A4B5-0E17CC931370}

• CTP17 does upgrade projects from Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals and Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition (incl. SP1).
• CTP17 will not upgrade previous GDR CTP projects.
• The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power Tools do not work in combination with the GDR release.
• We will update the Power Tools to support the GDR after the GDR has been released.
• Feature extensions: database generators, data distributions, static code analysis rules, refactoring types, refactoring targets and test conditions that you developed for previous releases or versions of the GDR will need to be recompiled, to reflect API and namespace changes in the public API.

We are looking forward to your feedback which you can post to our MSDN forum and please file bugs and improvement requests using our Microsoft Connect site.

Thanks,
-GertD