DatabaseBuildTool

DatabaseBuildTool v2

The DatabaseBuildTool v2 is a companion to the Visual Studio Premium 2010 IDE for .NET development. The IDE offers support for developing and deploying databases, but two features are missing:

• Synchronizing database diagrams with the Database Project (to bring the diagrams under version control) 
• Deployment of unit test databases to test projects (other that database projects), e.g., projects that are built using the entity framework.

 The  DatabaseBuildTool v2 product offers a database diagram synchronization tool and a library for unit test database deployment with entity framework support. Check the README for an explanation.

DatabaseBuildTool v1.x 

The DatabaseBuildTool v1.x is a companion to the Visual Studio Professional 200x IDE for .NET development. Unfortunately the support for developing databases in sync with other code is very limited in the Professional version. It's probably better in the Team Edition for databases, but that comes at too high a price.

DatabaseBuildTool offers:

• A MSBuild task that combines the SQL scripts from a Visual Studio Database Project and builds or updates a database from it.
• A Windows application that does the same. It can also install a modified version of the Tool_ScriptDiagrams2005/2008 into a database used for design purposes, and it can deploy the build results to a database (e.g., in a hosted environment).
• A code library to be used in unit tests to set up a copy of the database.

Check the README for an explanation how to work with the tools.