Release Candidate of Database Projects availble and GDR Power Tools update

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2010 Database Projects in RC

The RC version of Database Projects is available in the RC release of Visual Studio (10.0.30128.1).  We invite you to evaluate the RC and send you feedback through this blog or MSConnect.

For Database Projects there are no major changes since the Beta 2 release other than numerous bug fixes and other incremental improvements.

Here are a couple of notes for known issues in the RC release.

1.) There are 6 deprecated deployment options. These options are no longer supported. These options did not provide true benefits to deployment automation so they have been removed. If you have previously checked these in your deployment options you will have to manually remove these options from Database.sqldeployment file by hand editing the file. These options include: IgnoreAutoGeneratedNames; IgnoreBodyDependencies; IgnoreCollations; IgnoreFileAndLogFilePath; IgnoreFileSize; IgnoreFullTextCatalogFilePath; IgnorePasswords; IgnoreQueueEventNotifications.

The error you will get will be similar to:

*** SQL00256 <ProjectPath>\sql\debug\<Project>_Database.sqldeployment (0,0) The deployment property IgnoreQueueEventNotifications could not be used to configure deployment. *** The deployment configuration file could not be loaded. Deployment cannot continue

2.) You experience issues building SQL database project on 64-bit installation of TFS 2010 RC Build Controller. Receive an error indicating that the .targets file cannot be found. You must copy the targets to the correct directory and register them. The steps to accomplish that is documented here on the forums.

Both of these issues will be resolved in the RTM release.

The new features in 2010 are listed here on the Beta 2 Release announcement.

GDR Power Tools will not be released

Given that the 2010 release candidate is available and contains all the power tools previously identified for the GDR Release we have decided to not release the Power Tools for the GDR version of the product.  In 2010 you can find the Power Tools that were previously release, but not in the GDR release. These Power Tools include:

  • Data Generation Wizard - This is in the 2010 RC release, but is now called Data Transform Plan. This feature creates a Databound Generation Plan for a whole database for you instead of having to manually create it.
  • Expected Schema Unit Test Condition - Determines if the columns and data types of the result match those specified for the test condition.
  • Data Checksum Unit Test Condition - Determines if the checksum of the result set returned from the Transact-SQL script matches the expected checksum specified in the test condition.

Thanks and have fun evaluating Visual Studio 2010.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 01, 2010
    Hi Barclay, in 2010 RC I cannot find the SqlDataCompareTask and SqlSchemaCompareTask build tasks, that were introduced in a previous VSTSDB power tool for VS 2008. Can you please help me?

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2010
    Hi Katsudone , The MSBuild targets for Schema Compare and Data Compare have not been refreshed. We now have vsdbcmd.exe that should fill the need for the Schema Compare automation.  It is possible to automate comparisons between dbschema files and databases. See: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd193283(VS.100).aspx Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    March 02, 2010
    Thanks for your answer, Barclay, but actually I'm interested in automating the data comparison. Let me explain my scenario: we are rewriting a .Net application that basically moves data from a source db to a target db with some logic in the middle. We'd like to test the correctness of our application, setting up a test environment in which we can run the legacy application on dbs, say,source1 and target1, and then our procedure on source1 and target2. Then we want to compare the data in the target databases to see that they are the same. We would like to automate the whole process with team build, that's why I was looking at the SqlDataCompareTask. We are using VS2010RC for development and TFS2008 on the server side. The build process is set up to run on 2010 enviroment, because we need to compile with .net 4. Do you have any hints? Thanks a lot.

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2010
    Katsudone, Thanks for the additional context.  There are numerous ways to go about this, but largely the approach should be driven by the complexity of the logic in between you mention, the data size you are working with, and any latency between the source and target.  You may want to check out SSIS packages or automating Database Compare through DTE. See this post: http://blogs.msdn.com/psirr/archive/2008/11/22/data-compare-dte-commands.aspx

  • Anonymous
    March 03, 2010
    Barclay, thank you very much for your answer. I'll check DTE commands for data comparison, as you suggested. Just to know, are there any plans about when the MSBuild targets for Data Compare and Schema Compare will be back in VS?