Visual Studio Team System Database Edition Best Practices

Barclay Hill, Program Manager for Visual Studio Team System Database Edition at Microsoft has just launched a new blog that I’m excited about. He’s going to be blogging on best practices for VSTS:DB. His initial post outlines the topics he hopes to address and it’s an impressive list. I responded immediately with an offer to help because I’m using the tool and struggling a bit to get it to do everything we need and because I really like all that VSTS:DB has done for me and my team already. Any one else interested in pitching in should go over there and get involved.

Here’s what I sent as an initial message:

I saw your blog post and request for interest and participation and decided to pitch in. The company where I work has been using VSTS:DB through several iterations for about two years now. We have several automated mechanisms for deployments and some standards in place for how best to use & configure the tool. But we need more, so I’m pretty excited about your project. The three most interesting topics are the three that we’ve wrestled with the most, Build Automation and Build Management, Deployment Automation and Continuous Integration and Targeting Multiple Database Environmments. The biggest problem we face today is with incremental deployments where we want to retain the data. Clearly builds of this type require a manual intervention, but unfortunately, at this point, with VSTS:DB, we can’t then automate the deployment but must deploy manually.

Anyway, I look forward to your future posts and please feel free to bounce things off of me. I can’t guarantee I can help, but I’ll sure try.