Microsoft has announced the upcoming availability of a new addition to the Visual Studio 2005 Team System family, Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals.
In the past, there has usually been a separation between the database professionals and the rest of the development team. Inevitably there are problems that arise due to this breakdown in communications. By bringing database professionals into the development life-cycle and integrating database activities with the rest of development we can alleviate or elliminate these types of problems.
In addition to communication and collaboration this new addition brings the following features:
Change Management
- off-line source controlled database schema
- cascading object changes - rename an object and the change is cascaded throughout the schema
- automated change management - compare the source controlled version to production or test and generate change scripts automatically
Database Testing
- create unit tests that can be run independently of VS2005
- unit tests can be authored in either T-SQL or managed code
- unit test functionality is extensible
- test data generator for pre-loading a database with realistic test data
The first CTP of Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals will be available at Tech Ed Boston on June 11.
You can read the full press release or go to the Team Edition for Database Professionals website for more detailed information.
If you can't make sense of all of these versions of Visual Studio, Micorosft's Mohammad Akif has a great product tree that maps out all of the different SKU's for Visual Studio. Mohammad is a member of the Microsoft Architecture Editorial Board.