Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Release 1 Is Here

Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Release 1 has been Released

Overview
This service release addresses the top issues that were found through feedback from customers and partners. This release includes the following features:

• Cross-database references

Support is improved to enable you to reference objects in different databases by using database project references or referencing a database metafile (.dbmeta). This support will reduce or eliminate the cross database reference warnings within a database project.

• Improved file support within SQL Server file groups

You may define files within file groups as database project properties instead of having to create files and file groups within the pre-deployment storage script.

• Variables

A Variables page is added to the database properties. This new page enables you to define setvar variables for use in the deployment scripts. Additionally, SR1 supports the latest service pack release from Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (SP2). The SR1 also supports the Windows Vista operating system.



The knowledge base (KB) article describing this service release is here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936612/

The actual download is here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9810808c-9248-41a5-bdc1-d8210a06ed87&displaylang=en

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - March 2007 Community Technology Preview (CTP) Available For Download

Get it here and start messing around with LINQ:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b533619a-0008-4dd6-9ed1-47d482683c78&DisplayLang=en

From the site:

Visual Studio code name “Orcas” delivers on Microsoft’s
vision of smart client applications by enabling developers to rapidly create
connected applications that deliver the highest quality rich user experiences.
This new version enables any size organization to rapidly create more secure,
manageable, and more reliable applications that take advantage of Windows Vista
and the 2007 Office System. By building these new types of applications,
organizations will find it easier than ever before to capture and analyze information
so that they can make effective business decisions.



This download is the March 2007 Community Technology Preview of Microsoft
Visual Studio Code-Named “Orcas”. This CTP is available in English only.



Note: This CTP is available as a Virtual
PC image or as a self-extracting install. If you wish to use the Virtual PC
image you will need Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run this image. If you wish
to use the self extracting install, we advise that you do not install this on a
production machine. Depending on your hardware the download files make take
between 30-60 minutes to decompress.



This CTP targets early adopters of the Microsoft technology, platform, and
tools offerings. It enables developers to experience the upcoming toolset and
underlying platform improvements. We designed this release to enable developers
to try out new technology and product changes, but not to build production
systems. This limitation is fully covered in the EULA that accompanies this
CTP.



The highlights of this CTP include:

• LINQ
  
  The LINQ Project: this CTP represents a major milestone in the LINQ
  project. For more information about LINQ click here.
  
• VB 9.0 Language
  Support: This CTP contains the following language features:
• Query Expressions:
  Basic querying, filtering, and ordering support
• Object Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Local Variable Type
  Inference
• Anonymous Types
• XML literals
• XML properties
• New Line and
  Expression IntelliSense
• C# 3.0 Language
  Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the
  May LINQ CTP including:
• Query Expressions
• Object and Collection
  Initializers
• Extension Methods
• Local Variable Type
  Inference and Anonymous Types
• Lambdas bound to
  Delegates and Expression trees
• Complete design-time
  support: Intellisense, Formatting, Colorization
• LINQ to ADO.NET
• ADO.NET is fully
  integrated with LINQ and offers many options for using LINQ in various
  scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access to database tables from
  the programming environment, LINQ to Entities enables developers to use
  LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet allows the full expressivity
  of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
• LINQ to Entities
  enables developers to program against a relational database using a view
  of the data that is appropriate for the application they are building,
  independent of the structure of the underlying database. The use of the
  Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow
  the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them
  to constructs available in relational stores. LINQ to Entities is built
  on the ADO.NET Provider model and will support working against different
  back end relational stores in addition to Microsoft SQL Server. This CTP
  includes a LINQ to Entities provider for SQL Server and SQL Server
  Compact Edition.
• LINQ to SQL (previous
  name DLinq) has enhanced the functionality from the May 2006 LINQ CTP.
  You can find it in System.Data.Linq namespace in System.Data.Linq.dll.
  New in this release is that DataContext provides optimized modes for
  read-only use and serialization . Also new is that DataShape streamlines
  eager loading capabilities and adds the ability to set queries on
  relationships
• LINQ To SQL Designer
• Methods can be created
  from stored procedures and functions within the designer.
• Better handling of
  database schemas.
• Improved inheritance
  support in the designer.
• LINQ over XML (XLinq)
• System.Xml Bridge
  Classes added – There is a set of extension methods allowing XPath /
  XSLT to be used over LINQ to XML trees, allow XSLT transformations to
  produce an LINQ to XML tree, and to validate an XElement tree against an
  XML Schema.
• Event Model - This
  allows LINQ to XML trees to be efficiently synchronized with a GUI, e.g.
  a Windows Presentation Foundation application
• Class hierarchy
  changes - XObject class added, XStreamingElement class (temporarily)
  removed
• Various
  understandability / usability improvements – There have been a number of
  relatively minor changes done in response to internal reviews, usability
  studies, and external feedback to make the API more clean and
  consistent.
• LINQ to Objects API
• The LINQ to Objects
  API supports queries over any .NET collection, such as arrays and
  Generic Lists. This API is defined in the System.Linq namespaces inside
  System.Core.dll.

• ADO.NET
• Extended, more powerful
  data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework
• With the ADO.NET
  Entity Framework developers will be able to model the view of the data
  that is appropriate for each one of the applications they are building,
  independently of the structure of the data in the underlying database.
  The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design
  models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of
  having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. Once
  the model is in place, the powerful ADO.NET Entity Framework API is used
  to access and manipulate the data as .NET classes or as rows and
  columns, whatever is appropriate for each application.
• Added paging and stored
  procedures for update (“update customization”) for ADO.NET Entity
  Framework:
• Paging: the paging
  support in the ADO.NET Entity Framework allows developers to “page” over
  data in a database by indicating the start row and number of rows to be
  included in the result. Paging is available through Entity SQL (using
  the LIMIT AND SKIP keywords) and through the query-builder methods in
  the ObjectQuery &ltT> class (Top and Skip). In a future CTP the
  feature will also be enabled to be used in LINQ queries by means of the
  standard Take and Skip LINQ operators.
• Stored-procedures for
  update customization: the Entity Framework by default automatically
  generates SQL statements for insert, update and delete operations when
  processing changes to entities in memory to be sent to the database.
  With the stored-procedures update customization feature developers have
  the option to override the automatic SQL generation and instead provide
  stored-procedures that will perform the insert, update and delete
  operations, which the system will call during entity change processing.
  Among other things, this enables scenarios where direct access to tables
  is restricted in the database and the only way to make changes to the
  data is through stored-procedures.
• Microsoft
  Synchronization Services for ADO.NET
• Provides an
  application programming interface (API) to synchronize data between data
  services and a local store. The Synchronization Services API is modeled
  after the ADO.NET data access APIs and gives you an intuitive way to
  synchronize data. It makes building applications for occasionally
  connected environments a logical extension of building applications
  where you can depend on a consistent network connection. For details
  please visit http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=80742
  .

• Web
• Improvements for web
  development in this CTP include:
• New ASP.NET WebForms
  design-surface with advanced XHTML and CSS features
• JScript intellisense
  for ASP.NET AJAX and browser DOM
• Multi-targetting for
  .NET Framework 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5 in websites and web applications
• LINQ to SQL designer
  integration in websites and web applications

• Client App-Level Services
• Enable client
  application developers to use the same user profile and login services as
  your Web applications. This enables customers to utilize on set of
  backend storage for user personalization and authentication regardless of
  the applications type.

• C# Workflow Rules
• Workflow Rules allows
  users to enter rules (and conditions) in a code-like manner
• Support the use of the
  new C# Extension methods features in their rules
• Enable operator
  overloading and the new operators in their rules

• XML
• XML Tools: XSLT
  Debugger
• Enables Input Data
  Breakpoints allowing the user to break the execution of the style-sheet
  whenever a certain node in input document is hit.
• XML Editor Performance
  Improvements
• Performance in the Xml
  Editor for Intellisense, schema validation etc is improved by
  implementing incremental parsing of the XML Document.
• Seamless transition
  between XML Editor and XSD Designer
• Improves the
  experience a user has when working with an XML Schema in textual and
  graphical mode at the same time.

• MSBuild
• Parallel/Multi-Processor
  Builds
• Building multiple
  projects in parallel, as much as possible based on the use of dependency
  information in projects to parallelize
• Allowing the
  developer/builder to control the parallelism by providing them the
  ability to specify the number of processors to use for build.

• UAC Manifests in the Managed Build Process
• Support for manifests
  that are embedded into the final executable via the Build process.

• IDE
• Windows Presentation
  Foundation (WPF) Designer (“Cider”) & Application Tools to deliver
  the ability to:
• Create, edit, build,
  run and debug WPF projects
• Use the WPF Designer
  to:
• Preview any XAML in
  the designer including user defined controls and types
• Design Windows, Pages
  and UserControls
• Do basic layout tasks
  in a Grid
• Do basic property
  editing using the new property browser
• Easily understand and
  navigate “document structure” using the Document Outli
• See changes in the
  designer immediately in the XAML
• Use the XAML Editor
  to:
• Edit XAML with
  intellisense
• See changes in the
  XAML immediately in the designer
• Build design time for
  WPF controls
• UAC manifests in the
  IDE for Windows Vista applications
• Enable developers on
  Windows Vista to easily include the UAC manifest as an embedded
  resource.

• CLR
• Add IRI support (RFC
  3987) to URI related classes
• This allows resource
  identifiers to be specified using a character set that supports all
  languages.
• New Async model on
  Socket class
• A new Async model is
  reduces the per I/O overhead compared to the current I/O model
• Peer Networking Classes
  
• Delivers a set of
  peer-to-peer network APIs that allow a developer to easily extend an
  application with compelling collaboration functionality.
• WMI.NET Provider
  Extension 2.0
• WMI.NET Provider
  Extension 2.0 simplifies and enhances the development of WMI providers
  in the .Net framework to enable the management of the .NET applications
  while minimizing the impact on the development time.
• Delivers equivalent
  access to WMI features and functions available to native code
  providers.
• Exposes property
  updates and methods to managed code.
• Improved scalability
  for large collections of WMI entities.

• Office
• Enable ClickOnce deployment
  for Microsoft Office applications
• Developers now have an
  easy to use and version resilient security model for their applications
  that will exist for future versions of Visual Studio and Office. With
  full support for ClickOnce deployment of all Office 2007 customizations
  and applications, developers and administrators now have the right tools
  and framework for easy deployment and maintenance of their Office
  solutions.

• Team Architect
• Top-down service design
  
• Top-down system design
  allows an application architect/lead developer to perform the design of
  a business solution without having to be confronted with technology
  decisions. It enables the user to progressively refine a high-level
  system design, designing new sub-systems and applications in the context
  of the system in which they are to be used.
• Architectural Roles on
  System, Applications and Endpoints
• Enables an architect,
  while working on the high-level design of a system’s architecture using
  the System Designer, to introduce elements into the design that play a
  specific pre-defined architectural role(s) within architectural
  patterns.

• Team Developer
• Profiler Support for
  WCF Applications
• Enable profiling of
  WCF based applications to improve application performance
• Customize and extend
  code correctness policies
• Code Analysis Check-in
  Policy improvements to communicate to a developer why the check-in
  policy failed and to provide guidance on how to pass the policy
  requirements.
• Customize and extend
  code correctness policies
• Code Analysis Check-in
  Policy improvements to communicate to a developer why the check-in
  policy failed and to provide guidance on how to pass the policy
  requirements.
• Performance tune an
  enterprise application
• Enables developers to
  run profiling during load and test procedures for a system, to see how
  it behaves, and use integrated tools to profile, debug and tune. This
  also enables performance base-lining, so that users can save a baseline
  profile and then, if the performance degrades, compare up-to-date traces
  to identify the source of the regression

• Team Test
• Unit Test Generation
  Improvements
• Improvements to unit
  test generation provide an easy way for the user to specify what methods
  to test, and generate test methods and helper code to do unit testing,
  as well as providing unit test support for generics.
• Web Test Validation
  Rule Improvements
• Web Test rules
  improvements enable testers to create more comprehensive validation
  rules for the application being tested. These improvements include the
  following functions:
• Stop test on error
• Search request and
  response
• Add validation rule
  for title
• Redirect validation
• Provide test level
  validation rules
• Expected HTTP code
• Warning level for
  errors on dependents
• Better Web Test Data
  Binding
• This feature allows
  users to data bind .CSV and XML files, as well as databases to a web
  test, using a simple databinding wizard.
• Improved Load Test
  Results Management
• With this feature user
  can open or remove an existing load test result from the load test
  repository. User can also import and export load test results files.

• Team Foundation Server
• Team Build
• Support multi-threaded
  builds with the new MSBuild.
• Continuous Integration
  – There are many components to this, including build queuing and queue management,
  drop management (so that users can set policies for when builds should
  be automatically deleted), and build triggers that allows configuration
  of exactly how when CI builds should be triggered, for example – every
  checkin, rolling build (completion of one build starts the next), etc.
• Improved ability to
  specify what source, versions of source, etc to include in a build.
• Improved ability to
  manage multiple build machines.
• Simplified ability to
  specify what tests get run as part of a build
• Version Control support
  
• Destroy- The version
  control destroy operation provides administrators with the ability to
  remove files and folders from the version control system. The destroyed
  files and folders cannot be recovered once they are destroyed. Destroy
  allows administrators to achieve SQL server disk space usage goals
  without constantly needing to add more disks to the data tier machine.
  Destroy also facilitates removing versioned file contents that must be
  permanently removed from the system for any other reason.
• Annotate - Annotate is
  a feature that allows developers to inspect a source code file and see
  at line-by-line level of detail who last changed each section of code.
  It brings together changeset data with difference technology to enable
  developers to quickly learn change history inside a source file.
• Folder Diff - Team
  Foundation Server now supports compare operations on folders, whereby
  the contents of the folder are recursively compared to identify files
  that differ. Folder diff can compare local folders to local folders,
  local folders to server folders, and server folders to server folders.
  It’s a great way of identifying differences between branches, files that
  you’ve changed locally, and files that have changed between two points
  in time.
• Get Latest on Checkout
  - As an optional setting on a team project or on an individual basis,
  you can have Team Foundation Server always download the latest version
  of a file when you check it out. This helps ensure that you don’t have
  to merge your changes with somebody else’s when you check the file back
  in.
• Performance and Scale
• This release includes
  numerous improvements in performance and scalability of Team Foundation
  Server.

• Visual C++
• Easily add the Windows
  Vista “Look and Feel” to native C++ applications
• Developers can use
  Visual Studio to build ISV applications that exhibit the Windows Vista
  “look & feel”. A number of the Windows Vista “look & feel”
  features are available simply by recompiling an MFC application. Deeper
  integration that requires more coding or design work on the part of the
  developer is also simplified with Visual Studio’s integrated support for
  the Windows Vista native APIs.

Existing CTPs: As Visual Studio code name “Orcas” CTPs are released on a predefined cadence, existing CTPs (such as the LINQ May 2006 CTP) may not yet have been integrated into a given “Orcas” CTP release (This should not be taken as a change in commitment to any existing technology that has been made available as a CTP but instead is just a real world example of how large applications, with many technology areas, are built. We will be integrating this existing functionality into future CTP builds.

Developers using a VPC image can run the CTP on a machine without impacting any existing software installations. The CTP can be removed by deleting the folder and using the Virtual PC application to remove the configuration information.

This image ships with networking set to “local”. This setting enables the virtual machine to think it is connected to a network without actually connecting and exposing the machine to the Internet. We recommend that customers do not modify the networking settings. Customers who wish to turn networking “on” to connect the image to a physical network are advised that they will need to ensure the security of the virtual machine as well as apply any security updates that may have become available since the release of this image.

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - January Community Technology Preview (CTP) Released

Visual Studio Code Name "Orcas" - January Community Technology Preview (CTP) has been released.
This CTP is available as a Virtual PC image or as a self-extracting install. If you wish to use the Virtual PC image you will need Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run this image. If you wish to use the self extracting install, we advise that you do not install this on a production machine. Depending on your hardware the download files make take between 30-60 minutes to decompress.



The highlights of this CTP include:

• Extended, more powerful data APIs with the ADO.NET Entity Framework and LINQ to ADO.NET
  
  • With the ADO.NET Entity Framework developers will be able to model the view of the data that is appropriate for each one of the applications they are building, independently of the structure of the data in the underlying database. The use of the Entity Data Model (EDM) enables developers to design models that follow the concepts built into the application, instead of having to map them to constructs available in relational stores. Once the model is in place, the powerful ADO.NET Entity Framework API is used to access and manipulate the data as .NET classes or as rows and columns, whatever is appropriate for each application.
    
  
  
  • ADO.NET is fully integrated with LINQ and offers many options for using LINQ in various scenarios: LINQ to SQL provides direct access to database tables from the programming environment, LINQ to Entities enables developers to use LINQ over EDM models, and LINQ to DataSet allows the full expressivity of LINQ to be used over DataSets.
    
  
  

• C# 3.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the C#3.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
  
  • Query Expressions
  
  
  • Object and Collection Initializers
  
  
  • Extension Methods
  
  
  • Local Variable Type Inference and Anonymous Types
  
  
  • Lambdas bound to Delegates and Expression trees
  
  

• VB 9.0 Language Support: This CTP implements all of the VB 9.0 language features from the May LINQ CTP including:
  
  • Query Expressions
  
  
  • Object Initializers
  
  
  • Extension Methods
  
  
  • Local Variable Type Inference
  
  
  • Anonymous Types
  
  

• LINQ to Objects API
  
  • The LINQ to Objects API supports queries over any .NET collection, such as arrays and Generic Lists. This API is defined in the System.Linq namespaces inside System.Core.dll. Click here for more details about LINQ.
    
  
  

• ClickOnce improvements
  
  • This CTP delivers ClickOnce improvements for the deployment of Windows Presentation Foundation applications, alternative browser support and ISV rebranding.
    
  
  

• Managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm cryptographic functionality
  
  • With the addition of these classes, cryptographic developers now have managed classes for Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman secret agreement and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm signing. These classes are built on the new CNG cryptographic libraries in Windows Vista, but still follow the familiar patterns of the cryptographic classes in .NET Framework 2.0.
    
  
  

• Runtime and design-time support for Office 2007 (including Outlook 2007)
  
  • Customers can build managed code add-ins with a consistent development experience, regardless of which version of Office they target, which Office application(s) they target, and which programming language they choose. Managed code add-ins enable developers to use strongly-typed class members, with the help of modern development tools, including intellisense and auto-complete. Additionally add-ins can potentially run in multiple versions of Office, enabled by abstracting version-specific code and supported by a version-resilient infrastructure.
    
  
  

• Support for advanced lifetime management of add-ins and their AppDomains
  
  • We’ve added the helper classes that manage the lifetime of add-ins, the objects passed between the host and add-ins, and even of the AppDomains the add-ins live in. By using the ContractBase and LifetimeToken handle, pipeline developer can let the hosts and add-ins act as if everything, including the AppDomain the add-in was activated in, was controlled by the garbage collector even though .Net Remoting would normally make that impossible.
    
  
  

• Client service support for Login/Logout, Role management and Profiles
  
  • ASP.NET 2.0 shipped with new application services for authentication, authorization and personalization. Most of these services are not tied to ASP.NET and can work in non-web applications. This CTP enables the use of these services in smart client applications for Logon/Logoff, Role management and profiles.
    
  
  

• A trace listener that logs event to ETW, event tracing for Windows in Vista
  
  • Event tracing for windows is greatly improved in Vista and the most performant loggings facility available in Windows. The System.Diagnostics.EventProviderTraceListener allows managed tracing to provide events to the Vista’s ETW infrastructure. This is a highly performant, thread-safe listener.
    
  
  

• Jscript Intellisense support
  
  • Jscript code formatting and Intellisense support provide developers with a richer editing experience. These improvements enable the IDE to provide statement completion, color syntax highlighting and in-place documentation to Jscript and associated script models such as ASP.NET AJAX.
    
  
  

• A new numeric type that provides support for very large numbers (Beyond the range of In64)
  
  • All existing numeric types in the Framework have a limited range. This is the first type that supports arbitrary range and will extend to accommodate any large number as needed. This type lives in the new System.Numeric namespace where all new numeric and arithmetic features are going to reside. It supports all the basic arithmetic operations including things like Pow, DivRem and GreatestCommonDivisor. It implements the following interfaces: IFormattable, IComparable, IComparable<BigInteger> and IEquatable<BigInteger>. It is serliazable and immutable. It has implicit casts from all basic integral types and explicit casts to/from all numeric type. To learn more about this type – please visit the BCL team blog.
    
  
  

• LINQ over XML (XLinq)
  
  • Enable further LINQ over XML feature support (in addition to the functionality available in the Oct 2006 CTP) such as the ability to apply XLST to transform into and out of XLinq trees, support for System.XML reader/writer interfaces for improved XML sharing with DOM applications and System.XML schema validation for XLinq nodes.
    
  
  

• SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE)
  
  • SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) provides a local relational data store for occasionally connected client applications from desktops to devices. SSCE is light weight, embeddable and is easy to deploy with your client applications without requiring complex administration work from users. Timestamp (row version id) data type, improved table designer, Query processor enhancements and support for local transaction scope are some of the new features you find in this version of SSCE.
    
  
  

Thi CTP is available both as a regular install, and on a virtual machine.

Have fun