Thursday, November 02, 2006

VSTS for Database Professionals Final CTP

CTP7, the final CTP version is currently in the final testing phases, think of it as the RC, it'll be out early next week.

Things to know about the upcoming release are:

CTP7 Installation Requirements

In order to get ready for RTM, CTP7 will now require a retail version of  VSTS or the trial version of VSTS (found here). That is how the evaluation process will work once released. If a customer is looking to evaluate VSTS or any role based product in the suite, they are required to download the VSTS trial bits. The product is very close to be released, so they are essentially providing access to CTP7 in evaluation mode.

New Features

There are a few small (but important!) features that have been put into CTP7 (along with continued bug fixing and performance improvements of course). The first one is the ability to control how many warnings / errors you want to see at one time in your error and warnings tool window. If you select Tools->Options... and then select Database Tools->Design-time Validation Database, you'll see this dialog:

Max Errors Option

Fill in whatever number you'd like. The default is 200.

Along the same lines, the ability to suppress warnings via a text box on the Build tab of your database project was put as well. Just type in a comma separated list of warning you do not want to see in your Error List window (don't include the "TSD" prefix in the text box, just the numbers).

Suppress Warnings

Another feature was squeezed in is the ability to assign different properties to individual objects in your project that differ from the default properties specified in the database project properties tab (right click on the database project node and select "Properties"). Specifically, CTP7 allows you to override the project settings that control the ANSI Nulls and Quoted Identifiers settings. See the image below.

Object level property overrides

The great team are committed to preserving compatibility between projects created in CTP6 on up, all the way through RTM. Great Work!!

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