Devs and Data Dudes Oh My!

Microsoft has made a big announcement regarding the next version of Visual Studio, Visual Studio 2010. Among other welcome news is that the Developer Edition and Database Editions of Team System will be merging into a single product. This is great news for folks like me (and I suspect many developers) who do a lot of work on both the database side as well as the application side.

The really great news though is that we don’t have to wait for 2010 to take advantage of this. As part of the announcement Microsoft said that effective October 1^st, 2008 people who are MSDN Licensed for the 2008 (or 2005) version of Visual Studio Team System Developer will now have access to the Database version, and vice versa.

Database Edition has some great features. One of the ones I use the most is the database comparison tool. It lets me compare data in one database with another and get them into sync. This is great for keeping my local development database that sits on my computer identical with our production system.

I’m sure Database Edition will be new to many developers, so I’d like to mention to books that will help you get up and running with “Data Dude” (as Database Edition is often called).

The first I have mentioned before, it is SQL MVP Andy Leonard’s Mastering Visual Studio Team System Database Edition Volume 1. This is a great book that focuses exclusively on the database edition. It’s a great resource and one of my favorite books on the subject, I can’t wait for the next volume to come out.

The other book is from APress, Pro Visual Studio Team System with Team Edition for Database Professionals. This book covers all aspects of VSTS, including the database tools. I think too often we make life harder on ourselves than we have to, if we took some time to learn the tools available to us, we could be much more productive. I’ve found this book to be a good aid to help me do just that.