Keyvan Nayyeri

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio Team System Database Edition and use its integrated features in my projects frequently. In my opinion it’s really good to encapsulate your databases into a Visual Studio project and keep it along your development projects in one place. This also makes it easier to distribute the code withe solution over a source control among team members and manage all applied changes easier and faster.

Recently Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1 just a few days after the official release of SQL Server 2008. Like many other members of the community, my expectation was to see an upgrade in database features for SQL Server 2008 as a part of service pack 1 for Visual Studio 2008 but this wasn’t a correct expectation since the team behind VSTS Database Edition is working on this stuff on their own product line and you need to grab your own update to bring these features to your IDE.

After installing VS 2008 SP1 and SQL Server 2008, if you open the New Project or Add New Item dialogs in your Visual Studio IDE then there is no appropriate item to work with SQL Server 2008.

To have new project and project item templates for SQL Server 2008 along the new features provided to work with databases through your database projects, you need to install the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR CTP16. This preview is available for download on Microsoft downloads and adds some new features such as database project upgrades and schema comparisons that are very handy.

After installing this CTP which requires VS 2008 SP1 and SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP1 as its prerequisites, you can see new templates in the IDE.

There are significant changes to refine working with database projects. The final version of this GDR (Global Distribution Release) is supposed to be released in October in PDC 2008 in Los Angeles.