Professional Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio® 2010

Chapter 10. Database Development, Testing, and Deployment

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• The need to bring database development lifecycle management alongside application lifecycle management

• Using Visual Studio 2010 to work with databases in an "offline" manner

• Making changes to your database schema

• Testing a database schema, including the automatic generation of pseudo-random test data

• Deploying updates to your database schema

Until now, this book has dealt with tools and techniques that can be used to help you build and test software applications. But databases are a critical component utilized by many (if not most) software applications. And yet, they are traditionally underserved by tools that can facilitate development, testing, and deployment. Database developers are usually left to cobble together disconnected tools for developing and deploying database changes. Furthermore, database developers often follow a process that is disconnected from the process followed by the application development team, resulting in an error-prone and labor-intensive system of collaboration. With Visual Studio 2010, you can finally bring the process of managing changes to your database into the same toolset and process framework used by the other members of your software development team.

In this chapter, you will see how Visual Studio allows you to track and manage changes to database schemas using source control, generate test data, create database unit tests, utilize static analysis for database code, ...