Since database are usually designed in development environments, migrating changes over to other environments (e.g. QA and production) is not a trivial task. This is because SQL Server does not have any built-in tools to compare database schemas.
There are quite a few third-party tools that would make your life easier, most notably, Red Gate’s SQL Compare (reasonably priced around $300).
At times, buying a commercial tool is not really an option, so one must resort to googling for free tools. There are three such tools that I am aware of:
- SQLDBDiff by SQLDBTools
A very decent tool that comes in both freeware and shareware versions. Freeware version is not badly crippled; only advanced features such as multi-database comparison, data content comparison, etc. are disabled.
- Database Schema Comparison Utility
This is a Code Project article that comes with C# source code of a schema comparison utility. The utility itself is pretty bare-bone, but gets the job done.
- StarInix Free Database Compare 2.0
I have not used this tool, but from the advertised feature list, it looks pretty good. Most notably, in addition to SQL Server, this tool works with Access and MySQL databases.
A coworker introduced me to Anthem.NET, which is an AJAX library for the ASP.NET platform. Within the last year or so, quite a few AJAX libraries have surfaced, including Microsoft’s ASP.NET AJAX (formerly known as ATLAS), and other free and commercial products. Some of these are pretty decent, while others are not even worth investigating. Anthem.NET, with it’s impressive functionality, belongs to the former group.
Some of the features of Anthem.NET include:
- Free and open source
- Support for .NET 1.x and 2.0
- Seamless integration with Visual Studio 2005
- Broad browser support (IE, Firefox, and Safari)
- Support for Mono
- Familiar ASP.NET postback style functionality
- Support for ASP.NET ViewState
- Support for web user controls
You can download Anthem.NET from SourceForge.
Microsoft recently released v1.4 of SyncToy with Windows Vista compatibility. SyncToy is an intuitive GUI tool for synchronizing files between folders and devices that can be downloaded from Microsoft for free. It can be used on Windows Vista or Windows XP, and the latest version requires .NET Framework 2.0 to be installed. In addition to Vista compatibility, Version 1.4 of SyncToy fixes some bugs and updates some documentation from the previous version 1.2 that was released back in March.
There are some other tools that allow file synchronization, e.g. AllWay Sync which works beautifully, and my favorite command-line tool called Robocopy, which is part of the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit. Both of these programs are also free, and are part of my essential tools list.
Up until Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0, the actual build process of solution or project files was pretty much a black-box phenomenon for developers. With .NET Framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft unveiled its new build platform called MSBuild. MSBuild essentially provides a transparent build process through Visual Studio IDE, as well as allows developers to build projects and solutions from the command line. This allows us to fully customize our builds and create builds on machines where Visual Studio is not even installed.
On a recent team project I was using continuous integration or CI (an Agile practice) via CruiseControl.NET. It was a breeze to automatically build projects and solutions using MSBuild on our build server (a run-of-the-mill Dell workstation running Windows XP without Visual Studio 2005 installed) whenever someone checked-in any files to source control. This allowed us to be confident at all times that various pieces our distributed project integrate well. Moreover, since MSBuild can build projects and solutions from command line, I had some batch files setup that would build release versions of our projects, create setup files (using NSIS), archive older versions of setup files, and move new setup files to a network share where MIS / Operations folks could install the new version on the production server from.
In Visual Studio 2005, project and solution files are nothing more than MSBuild XML build scripts. This allows us full control over the build process. For example, in a web project, Visual Studio 2005 does not provide any user interface to modify pre and post build actions. However, since solution file is simply an MSBuild script, we can modify such actions manually by opening up the solution file in any text/XML editor.
MSBuild can perform several key tasks out of the box. Each task is essentially a unit of work (UOW) that contributes to the entire build process, e.g. copy files and folders, compile files, etc. If we ever require tasks that do not ship with MSBuild, we can always create custom tasks in any .NET language by simply implementing the ITask interface or deriving from the Task class.
In conclusion, MSBuild allows developers full control of the build process so that builds can be fully customized. This may not be so crucial in smaller projects, but for enterprise solutions that typically comprise of several projects and many dependencies, MSBuild is definitely a God-send!
