VSTSDB 2008 GDR CTP16

Gert just posted about the release of CTP16 of the Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR release.

From Gert’s post:

This release adds the following features:

• VSDBCMD.EXE
  • We added independent commandline deployment and reverse engineer, which can be used on machines that do not have Visual Studio installed, in order to deploy the results of a database project build (.dbschema file), or if you need to generate a .dbschema file so you can for example compare it, this commandline tool will let you do that as well.
• Database Project (.dbproj) Upgrades
  • CTP15 enabled upgrade of project files, but did not included updating Data Generation Plans (.DGEN files), which now be upgraded when they are opened the first time inside the DGEN designer.
• Schema Compare
  • You can now choose the SQL Command Variables (SQLCMD) to use during a Schema Compare session by clicking the “Specify SQLCMD variables” button on the Schema Compare toolbar. This will allow you to compare projects that are using SQLCMD variables and provide the contextual information via the variable values.
  • You can now set the Schema Compare options at the session level, in addition to Tools->Options, by clicking the Settings button on the Schema Compare toolbar.
  • And you can now save your Schema Compare session and reopen it again. We also added an item template for this, name "Schema Comparison"
    
• Extensibility
  • We finished the namespace and assembly naming cleanup. As a result all assembly names and namespaces have been changed. This means if you have code leveraging our extensibility mechanisms you need to update the assembly references and namespaces in your code.
  • We added the ability to add your own refactoring types! So now you can create your own refactoring command and have it change all the required references inside the schema. This is above and beyond the ability to create your own refactoring targets (the sources your want to change by an refactoring type), static code analysis rules, data generators, data distributions and test conditions.
  • We now also offer public access to our TSQL parsers for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, including the script generator functionality.
• And then there are many more enhancements in the parser, interpreter, validation, build and deploy.

Pre-requisites:

CTP16 requires the following components to be installed:

• Visual Studio 2008 SP1 RTM
• Microsoft SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 SP1

Download location:

You can download CTP16 from the following location:

• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/setup.exe
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/Readme.mht
• http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/a/e/0ae1153a-8798-474a-93e6-d19299f37c8b/VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR Documentation.zip

NOTE: If you have a previous version of the GDR installed, you will have to first uninstall this and then install the latest CTP16 bits.