During my session at PDC I announce the immediate availability of the Release Candidate (RC) of Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR. We are going through the last stages of the development process and we are getting ready to release. This release candidate is the first step towards the final build!

Since the September CTP we did not add any new features, we only worked on bugs and performance. The project format is final, and we do not anticipate any more changes in this area, so if you want to start upgrading your existing VS 2005 and/or VS2008 Database Projects this is the time. The self extracting installer (setup.exe) did change so the experience is slightly different due to a change in the underlying technology.

Pre-requisites:

The release candidate requires that the following components are installed:

Download location:

You can download the Release Candidate from the following location:

NOTE: If you have a previous version of the GDR installed, you will have to first uninstall these before installing the RC 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}

  • Project upgrades
    • This RC upgrades existing projects from created with the released editions of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals and Visual Studio 2008 Team System Database Edition (incl. SP1).
    • This RC does not upgrade project files created with previous CTP versions of the GDR release.
  • PowerTools
    • 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.
  • Extensions
    • Feature extensions like database generators, data distributions, static code analysis rules, refactoring types, refactoring targets and test conditions that you developed for previous releases or CTP 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