Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals
Microsoft officially announced the newest flavor of the Visual Studio Team Edition Suite. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals. I have not seen the product yet, but a CTP will be released on June 11th at Tech-Ed according to the Developer Center for newest version. You can fine the official press release HERE.
Soma and Rob Caron have some good posts on the product along with some of the main features of the product. I am really excited about this given that I spend a good portion of my time doing DB development and having all these extra features right in Visual Studio is going to be a huge plus. One feature I am really interested to see how it works is the Data Generator and how this can be used to easily create data generation plans for test data.
I think that this will be a welcome addition and bring in the database developers into the VSTS family. Even better is that this will be integrated into Team Suite so the value of having that Team Suite license has just increased dramatically. I think for a Software Developer it is becoming almost a no brainer to upgrade to the Suite. It seems like there would be few developers who would not benefit from having access to the tools in one of the other three editions. You may not need all the tools, but having the need for one tool from each edition, to me, would make a case for upgrading.
One thing I will be curious to see is whether or not DB professionals determine this is worth the price tag for them. The reason being is that a lot of DB shops already have some flavor of these products in house via third party products. Will these tools integrated into one environment be enough to spend the money for the product? Especially, since according to the FAQ the product will only be supporting SQL 2000 and SQL 2005. There are a lot of organizations that have mixed environments and most of the third party products support multiple database products. It will be interesting to see if the DB support is extensible. Maybe allowing someone to write a provider for Oracle or Informix and use the VS tools to connect to all the DBs in their environment.
Looking forward to getting my hands on the bits and taking it for a spin! More on the product then.