MSDN Magazine: Article on VSTS:DB

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 by setting the “Configuration deployment settings for:” to “My isolated development environment.”

Great article guys. Thanks for putting it out there.

2 thoughts on “MSDN Magazine: Article on VSTS:DB

  • The Aha moment for me on isolated development environment settings was when I realized that these settings are kept in the .dbproj.user file with a section for each solution configuration. Aside: since the user file doesn’t belong in source control, I’m going to leave the sqlcmdvars and sqldeployment files out as well. Each developer will be responsible for setting up their own isolated development environment.

    Jim

  • scarydba

    That’s how it used to work for all configurations. It was the biggest possible win that you could share configurations, but I like that they kept that isolated environment thing and forced the invidual to deal with it. It makes a lot of sense. It’s a great piece of software.

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