Visual Studio Team System - DBPRO Power Tools

I have been very busy over the last few months in the Business Intelligence world, so I've been sort of neglecting the work that my friends over on the Visual Studio Team System team have been doing (Fortunately there's no good technical editors that read my blog or I'd probably get dinged for that last sentence!). Back in August, the DBPRo team released the Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Database Developers Power Tools, which includes some very nice functionality for the Database developer who wants to move into the Agile world.

Chief among the features that are added to DBPRO with the power tools is something I've been harping about for a LONG time, and that's the ability to build a dependency graph directly in the development environment. This is especially helpful when you're trying to track down the impact of any refactoring changes.

Other tools delivered with this add-on are:

Code Analysis

• Static Code Analysis - A precursor to the functionality that will be in future versions of VSTS that will allow you to perform Static Code Analysis on T-SQL code.

Refactoring

• “Move Schema” Refactoring - Allows a user to right click on an object and move it to a different but existing schema
• SP Rename Generation - Generate a new script that will contain sp_renames for all rename refactored objects that the user can then execute.
• Wildcard Expansion - Automatically expand the wildcard in a select to the appropriate columns.
• Fully-Qualified Name Support - Automatically inject fully-qualified names when absent in a script
• Refactoring extended to Dataset - Refactor into strongly typed dataset definitions

MSBuild Tasks

• Data / Schema Compare Build Tasks - MSBuild tasks that can generate scripts as if the user had run the Data / Schema compare UI

Schema View

• API Access to Schema View - Insert / Update / Delete to schema View and list schema objects and their associated files

Miscellaneous Tools

• Script Preprocessor - Expand SQLCMD variables and include files and command line version (sqlspp.exe) & an MSBuild version ( wraps the command line version )