Earlier today I was doing a little work using datadude/DBPro/Visual Studio Database Tools/pick your name and had a need to write a Powershell script that I think might be useful to other folks so I’m sharing it here. Often when you’re putting together database projects you will have a need for multiple .sqlcmdvars files – one for each environment ...

Earlier today I had a need to get some information out of a Visual Studio project file and in this blog post I’m going to share a couple of ways of going about that because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only person that ever wants to do this. The specific problem I was trying to solve was finding out how many objects in my database project (i.e. ...

I have written a few blogs lately explaining how my current project is employing the use of datadude (aka the database development tools in Visual Studio 2010) in order to manage our database code, deployment of that code and also testing of it. In this blog post I’m going to share a little technique that we use in order to store a version history ...

My naming convention obsession Anyone that has ever worked with me will tell you that I am a stickler for naming conventions. I have a somewhat obsessive reputation for it; I can’t help it – I seem to have a deep seated uncontrollable desire to ensure that every object in my database(s) is/are named consistently (is there anyone else out there ...

Its now been a month since I introduced sp_CascadingDataViewer and I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about a couple of my experiences while writing it.   SQL Server needs packages Version 1 of sp_CascadingDataViewer is an 899 line stored procedure (view the code at changeset 58999), that’s a lot of code and much of it is repeated. I ...

Over the past few weeks I have been making heavy use of the Database tools in Visual Studio 2010 (formerly known as datadude, DBPro, VSTS for Database Professionals or one of a plethora of other names that it has gone by over the past few years) and one of the features that has most impressed me has been database references.   Database ...

Three days ago I wrote a blog post entitled Setting up database unit testing as part of a Continuous Integration build process [VS2010 DB Tools - Datadude] which goes through some of the intracasies of using Visual Studio 2010 Database projects (aka datadude projects) and database unit testing as part of a continuous integration build. ...

[This blog post assumes a familiarity with the terms Continuous Integration (CI), MSBuild & MSTest. If you don’t have a good appreciation of those terms then this blog post probably isn’t for you anyway so don’t worry about it!] Over the past few days I have been working to get database unit tests executing as part of our Continuous ...

Intro Of late I have been getting down and dirty with the Database Development tools in Visual Studio 2010. You may know this feature set by one of the plethora of other names it has had over recent years such as: Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals DBPro Datadude For the rest of this post I’ll stick with the colloquial ...

Introduction I recently gained access to SQL Azure, the hosted database part of Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering. I don’t currently have a reason to use SQL Azure in my day-to-day work so I set myself a small project that would enable me to prod and poke at the service and hopefully learn a bit about it. I decided to implement a RESTful service ...