MSDN Magazine: Article on VSTS:DB

Visual Studio
Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill have published an article in MSDN Magazine outlining the new features in in VSTS:DB GDR. The description of the intent and use of the server project is extremely enlightening. I wasn't aware of the master.dbschema files available for use within a project. Luckily I haven't needed them yet. Another thing I wasn't aware of, if you use the refactoring tools, say rename a table, not only does it save you a lot of typing, but the project will remember that the table was renamed and instead of dropping and recreating it in the next deployment, it will issue SP_RENAME. I'm spreading that word to my team right now. Another good point is that you can make a configuration to work only on your local machine…
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VSTS:DB Composite Projects

Tools, Visual Studio
I've seen several searches go by from people who are looking for how to create composite projects. Here's a quick run-down. In the example, I'm going to create a main database project called BaseDB, a server project called MyServer, and a composite project that combines the two called Comp. This project is just another database project as you can see in Figure 1: [caption id="attachment_379" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="New Database Project"][/caption] Once the new project is created, you need to right click on the References object in the Solution Explorer. Figure 2: From the pop-up menu select Add Database Reference. The window in Figure 3 will pop up: [caption id="attachment_383" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Add Database Reference"][/caption] You can select the other projects for a dynamic view into their changes, or for a…
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