Power Tools for DataDude

The Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals team (Hiya Gert!) has announced the arrival of the VS 2008 Power Tools. The Tools provide a host of new features above and beyond what was delivered in VS2005.

Here's a list of features (shamelessly stolen from Gerts blog):

• Command line SQL Static Code Analysis execution through MSBuild, this was the biggest customer request, which is why I was holding the release. This enables SQL Static Code Analysis to be an integrated part of Team Build!
• Data Generation Wizard; this is another customer request where we allow users to create a new data generation plan by pointing at an existing database, the plan will be fully configured by the wizard to pull all data from the database using the Sequential Databound Generator. This way users can use an existing data set and only override columns which impose risks because of for example privacy concerns and save about half a day or more of configuring a data generation plan from scratch, one column at the time.
  File based data generator; this allows you to insert the content of files in to the database (works for string and binary, not for XML yet).
• XML based data generator; this allows you to generate XML based on an XSD (the XSD has to be provided as file right now, and cannot be selected from database or inherited from the data type).
• Unique Regular Expression generator; this adds the ability to generator unique values using the RegEx String generator.
• Refactoring Command Generator has been made available as a MSBuild task for better project build integration so it can be made part of the pre-build and pre-deployment stages in the project. This allows users to automated the results of refactoring to some degree in to the project.
• We added two new test conditions for Database Unit Tests
  ChecksumCondition – Which you can use to verify that the checksum of the data set returned by a database unit test matches the checksum of an expected data set.
  ExpectedSchemaTestCondition – Which you use to verify that the column names and data types of the returned data set match expected values.

Download is available here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=73ba5038-8e37-4c8e-812b-db14ede2c354&displaylang=en