Visual Studio 2008 Contribution Award

Today I just received my Visual Studio 2008 Contribution Award for the lasting contribution made to Microsoft Visual Studio :)

I'd like to thank Dina Lasheen, Program Manager - Developer Division - Microsoft for the Nomination.

To show our appreciation, please accept our thank you gift. Thank you again for helping us deliver an amazing Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5
S.Somasegar

VSTS 2008 Database Edition Power Tools now available

VSTS 2008 Database Edition Power Tools is a set of enhancements and tools that complement and improve the user experience of VSTS Database Edition 2008

This release updates the Power Tools for the Database Edition to work with Visual Studio 2008 and provides several new features. The new features include two custom unit test conditions, a new Data Generation Wizard, and new MSBuild tasks to support running TSQL Static Code Analysis from the command line. The updated features include 5 refactoring types, a dependency viewer, additional data generators and editors, 2 MSBuild tasks for Schema and Data Compare and the TSQL Static Code Analysis feature

New Test Conditions for Database Unit Tests

• ChecksumCondition – You can use this test condition to verify that the checksum of the data set returned by a database unit test matches the checksum of an expected data set.
• ExpectedSchemaTestCondition – You can use this test condition to verify that the column names and data types of the returned data set match expected values.

Data Generator Improvements

• New Data Generator Wizard – This new wizard creates a data generation plan that is configured to copy data from a source database. You can use this wizard when you need to copy most of your data from a live source, but need to make small changes to ensure privacy.

MSBuild Task Improvements

• SqlAnalysis Task – You can use this build task to run T-SQL Static Code Analysis from MSBuild.

TSQL Static 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

Dependency Tool Window

• Dependency Tree - Show the dependencies ( incoming / outgoing ) for selected schema objects in a new tool window

Miscellaneous Tools

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

The power tool is available on MS Download Center

Free Download: Hot-Fixes for Visual Studio 2008 (Web Development)

Microsoft has released a Hot-Fix Roll-up for Visual Studio 2008 available on Connect.

The hot-fixes address the following issues:

HTML Source view performance

• Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
• “View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
• Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
• Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
• The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

• Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

• Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
• Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

• When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
• JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

• Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.
  

Installation Notes
For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please check the webdevtools blog post here. In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581).

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581 under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".

Team Foundation Build Recipes

Grant Holiday, Team System MVP has came out with a wonderful site, Team Foundation Build Recipes.

As a Build Master you've been put in charge of coming up with a central build system for your team. It can be quite daunting at first and you wonder "Where do I start?".

The purpose of this site is to create and share build recipes with other build masters so that we can all learn and benefit from each other's experience.

Since the site is called TFSBuild.com, there is a particular focus on MSBuild and Team Foundation Build scripts. But if you have a NAnt script or similar that you think others might find useful post it up.

The site is published as a wiki and the idea is that anybody can register to add & update content.

Thanks Grant for the great addition.